City Protection

Originally posted by BaronVonMark
Here's a link from the LoU wiki on how to protect your city's resources from plunderers. It's got some good info. And also if you reverse it, steps on how to successfully plunder someone else's city.

http://www.lordofultima.com/en/wiki/view/protection

tl;dr (but still pretty long) :

"The plunderer can hurt you, but he cannot kill you." - If you do not have a castle, the enemy cannot destroy anything, just your resources and defensive army. So invest in a good defense.

"Don't give up" - don't become inactive! I know we've all got real lives out there, but if you leave for too long and your resources build up without the proper protection, you're just asking for it. A defenseless city is the easiest for a plunderer. Never be a ghost town. Also, invest in a good structural defense. Build up your walls and towers.

"You want to be an unattractive target for the plunderer." - Become less attractive and unprofitable for the plunderer. To do this, build hideouts. Lots of them, around small forests where you don't really need woodcutters. Upgrade them all. If necessary, destroy some low level buildings to make room for hideouts, they will be more beneficial. Also, and most of you won't like this but, don't leave a large queue anymore. All resources in your storage AND in your queues can be plundered. Keep your stored resources low. If your resources pile up to full storage level, you are very attractive for a plunderer. Build military buildings like training grounds to increase the amount of iron (and wood) you can invest per hour into units. Ideally, you can keep the total amount of resources in your storage and queue low enough, that there is not much to plunder in your city at any time. Finally, you can use the marketplace to send resources somewhere else.

"Maximize losses for the plunderer" - Each killed attacker makes the plunder attack more ineffective not only because it reduces the amount of resources gained by the costs of the dead unit, but also because it takes time to rebuild and slows down the build process of the plunderers army, which he doesn’t like. To decide which unit to build, you need to take a look at the plunder report.

If the enemy is primarily Knights, you should counter with Guardians or Crossbowmen.
If the enemy is primarily Mages, you should counter with Templars or Paladins.
If the enemy is primarily Berserkers, you should counter with Rangers.
Check the production time of those units. If you can build city guards three times faster, or you don’t have those units available because you don't have the building, then it’s probably better to recruit plain city guards.

Plunder Report:

MaxLoot
Calculate or estimate the amount of resources the plunderer could have looted if all of his units got resources. Currently, Knights carry 20, Berserkers 10, Archmages 10 and Mages 5. You can check the other units by looking at their tooltip.

Example: Let’s assume he came with 1000 Knights, MaxLoot = 20,000 (20 per Knight).

Loot
Sum up the amount of resources the plunderer looted, and subtract all costs for his losses. Currently, a Knight costs 350, a Berserker 150, a Mage 200 and an Archmage 450. You can check other units by looking at their tooltip.

Example: Let’s assume he stole 15,000 resources and you killed 20 Knights (costs 350 each = 7000 total) means that he gained 8,000 resources overall.

If Loot/MaxLoot < 50% & Dungeons are currently about 60% to 80%. You will see that almost any plunderer will give up at this point and go for dungeons instead. There are better targets out there. In the example above, the plunderer gained 40% (8,000 / 20,000), he should turn away from you.

If “Loot” is negative, he lost not only travel time for his army and time to rebuild troops, but overall he lost resources too. He should definitely stop plundering you.

If multiple people try to plunder you, things are not much worse. Basically you will inflict less casualties on their side, but they have to share stolen resources which overall makes their trips less effective.
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If anyone else has some good tips on how to protect your city, let's here it!
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Originally posted by Xalara
I've been thinking about this as well, and really, I think you only need enough Hideouts to protect 50 000 resources. Why? If you ever start going much over 50 000 resources, just dump the resources into Moonstones. If you don't need to use Moonstones, send the resources to your war city or another city that can spend/protect them.

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Originally posted by Kraxus
So.. the plunderer "cannot destroy anything, just your resources and defensive army".

They can only destroy resources that aren't in hideouts? Can they destroy the resource nodes / woodcutter's / quarry's / etc?

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Originally posted by Xalara
They can only destroy defending army units, and plunder any resources not in a higeout. In other words, just build enough hideouts to cover 50k resources and keep spending on moonstones and you won't really have to worry too much about investing in defense for a non-castle city.

If you are attacked a lot, you may want to invest in enough hideouts to store 100k resources so you can found new cities more easily. In my case, for example, I will be doing that since I am right beside one of alphadogs leaders

(I'm going to steal Note's idea here and post it as my own, thus fortifying myself as a genus!)

Another option to resources in excess of hideouts is "hiding them on the market." If you have enough carts you can throw all your resources up for sale at ridiculous prices. The resources are no longer pillage-able and you don't need to spend reso/building slots on more hideouts in a pinch!

A good idea and a great strategy by throwing them up on the market. I was pretty curious about whether that would save them from plunder or not. And I absolutely agree on the building of Hideouts. Especially once you have maxed out everything you need, destroying less useful buildings in an effort to protect yourself is a good idea.

Related to this, I know there are some like myself who will likely not Castle until late into the game. Thus, I will be focusing primarily on defense of myself and the alliance. Should we set up teams for offense/defense in these situations?