Offline Protection

Troop protection

If you are at war, you want to conserve your troops. You want heroes with troops when you are ready to play. You don't want to come back to the game to see that your hero is in hospital and your troops in injury barracks.

1. Sheltering
You can shelter your troops. Unlink your troops from your heroes and put the troops in shelter. This is probably the easiest way until your troops exceeds the capacity of your shelter.

2. Protection Rune
This is a rather expensive way, but it is easy for those who are donating to the game. Throw on protection runes for the duration that you are going to be away. It may be cheaper if you put all your heroes into a single city so that you only need to rune one city.

3. Dodging
When you are online and you see an incoming attack that you want to avoid, you send your heroes on devil hunt just as the incoming attack is arriving. A similar technique can be applied when you are going offline. If you are going away for say 8 hrs, send your troops on a devil that is 4 hrs away. That way, your troops are not in city and cannot be wiped out when you are away. When you get back in 8 hrs, your troops would have just returned from a small victory.

If your hero has troop speed of 200, the longest dodge you can apply is about 14 hrs. So if you are going to be away for longer time, slow down your troops.

• Unequip your mount
• Group a fast hero with a slower one
• Equip the hero with a troop that is NOT his specialty.
  

4. Aiding
If you have a strong neighbor in your union, talk to him/her. Send your troops to his/her city and you can remand them when you get back. Ideally, you don't want this neighbor to be more than half an hour away, so that you don't have to wait too long when you are ready to play.

5. Hiding
This is a risky technique. You can send your heros to hide in mines, or crystal mines. If someone is out to get you, he'll probably be spying the mines near you, so you may have to send them to somewhere a little further. It takes effort to scan mines, but if discovered, those heroes will be fighting at a disadvantage, without walls, towers and mayor bonus. Use this sparingly and only when you need to take the chance. Of course, the further you hide, the longer you will have to wait when you are ready to play.

There is an option to recall troops faster, by the use of diamond tickets.



Resource protection

Resources are probably secondary, troops being much more important than resources. If you have heroes with troops, you can raid nearby cities for resources. But there are some ways you can protect your resources.

1. Storage
This is probably the easiest. You can set use storage to protect your resources, and you even get a storage bonus when you reach Nobility rank of Sir.

2. Protection Rune
Like protecting the troops, the protection rune can also be used. Again, you may want to send all resources to a single city, so that you only need to put the rune on one city.

3. Market
You can try to 'sell' your resources, and probably won't mind if they do get sold. And even if they are not sold, they are safely 'stored' in the market for 24 hours. When you need them, you can simply cancel the trade. At market level 30, you can have 16 trades. Each sale can be a maximum of 20k, so you can protect up to 320k of resources this way.

4. Sending resources
Also using the market, you can send resources between cities. This in some way depends on how far apart your cities are and how long you are going to be away. Each 'trade' allow you to send up to 100k of resources, 5 times more than selling, but once you send, you don't have access to the resources until it arrives. You cannot cancel a send.

5. Friendly raids
If you have friends nearby, you can ask them to raid you with 1 soldier, 4 times. The first raid will yield 20x troop count of each resource. The second raid yields 10x, the third yields 5x, and the forth yields 2x. Subsequently, each raid only yields 1x. This way, if even if an enemy sends in 3 x level 80 heroes (and each level 80 hero have 2850 troops), they can raid at most 8550 of each resource. This is far better than losing 171k of each resource.
This raid count is per player, so the friendly raid can be on any city, not necessarily on the city you want to protect. The raid count resets 8 hrs after the first raid, so this method applies only for a maximum of 8 hrs.