Hello,
It seems I got the honour of being a target to a stronger player in my area. It all started with an attack quite a whike ago and about 55k of each of the basic resources stolen. I didn't pay much attention back then but decided to ask for advice on the chat and there were even some helpful players who offered to reimburse me the resources I lost.
Second time it happened a week or two later and this time I made the perhaps uninspired decision to message the guy and ask to stop attacking me because I am active and will do my best to overcome him in the future. Ok, it sounded threattening and it was lame, I do realise, but I thought he wasn't gonna bother with me anymore.
Well... Since then, I've had a number of thieves or saboteurs sent to my town on a daily basis. Knowing that relatively new players don't really have many problems I ignored most of my defense up to that point but then I started developing some sort of diplomancy countermeasures (some 100 units of each and a defensive spell).
Well, not sure if those defensive efforts mattered for him but next day I woke up with a spell on my town. The frost one reducing my crop output by 6%. And it seems I'd need about 1+ million mana to displell it or detect the caster which is a bit much with my current output of 170 mana per hour.
At any rate, yesterday I got a new official visit from his saboteurs, thieves and army. I wasn't even sure if it was the same guy, but since the army and spies came about at the same time, I guess it's been the same person all the while.
So with that in mind, I realise I can't really compete with him at the moment. I have about 1.2k population in my two cities, he's at about 15k over 4 towns. But I am a really competitive player and really really want to stand up to him on my own. Not sure I can get as active as I used to be 10 years ago in the ages of Travian but still I'm not one to bow my head.
So my question is what exactly would be your advice moving forward. How can I pose enough of a problem to him defensively so he will consider that attacking me is not worth it anymore? And do I stand any chance to overcome him in the foreseeable future? Does him being part of an alliance matter, can I expect that his buddies will crush me if sometime in the future I will strike back? Should I try to join an alliance as well at this point?
Also, before I joined this game I remember reading that attacking smaller players is frowned upon, which is why I didn't even bother until now to develop my army or my diplomancy units. But I'm not sure if this is a golden rule or just something players do out of habbit. So my question is, could I also profit from smaller or inactive players around me in order to accelerate my development? I remember that in Travian all was fair game and that was good for me back then because I enjoyed the "predator" life. Here I avoided that at all costs but I'm not sure if it really was a good idea. After all, my guy is stealing resources not only from me but from others as well so I cannont be expected to close the gap this way.
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