Call for ideas: Defending your towns

It's not about defense strength. It's about complexities of defense. When you are online, you can defend because you can control your army and put full army against incoming attack. When you are offline you can't do that which makes you vulnurable and forces you to be online 24/7.

Bers what about my suggestion that domains cannot be attacked unless the player is online? A domain that is an alliance and is not at war I am not able to onslaught and is orange. A domain inside my alliance I am not able to attack at all and is blue. My domain is green. If somebody is offline and the domain cannot be attacked for this reason, (can be plundered) a color can be assigned. Is this not a viable suggestion?

I saw earlier in this thread the idea that catacombs will not be accessible until maybe our residence is lvl 10 or some other high qualification. One of the issues involving attacks while afk come from newer and greener players, who are just wanting to get used to the game before receiving onslaught from bigger and stronger neighbors. A catacomb as discussed will not address these new players that we would like to see grow and become active game players - but instead become frustrated and quit .

The problem of long holidays remains though. And I'm not talking about a 3 days holiday that can be managed with a truce flag. Could it be possible to have an option for 2 or 3 weeks ? Like a button that would make your town like under a special flag for a certain amount of days. Of course, the flag would fall immediatly if you connect during those days ! Because I know I would be disheartened if I went on holiday for two weeks and come back to find that most of my towns have been totally destroyed while I was away ;).

I have to agree with Arachnea and I would imagine if you did a quick poll most people would.  I definitely think that a one week truce flag should be made available but at a much dearer price and with the 12 hours prep time remaining.  I know that this has been discussed before and we have the proxy option but not everyone interacts with other players and may not have or want to have proxy.

The holidays issue will be solved by assigning proxy players to manage your account, but this is offtopic to this thread.

No because same could be said for every nights since people from the whole planet play totem tribe. While actually a lot of people take their holidays at the same time so proxy may be in fact easier to fix this one topic, than this.

My other problem with catacombs is that you have to put army in them. I usually will send army off to attack and then either go to bed or off to work. Rarely are they home when I am done for the evening

It will be effective as long as the troops in the catacombs are not destroyed. When there are multiple attacks and troops from catacombs managed to defeat one of the attacks - they will teleport into different town and continue there. About plague rumor - hard to tell. We can make it both ways but need to test how big of an impact it would be.

Just a thought .... a while ago there was an issue with a player that had her troops in shelter .. but during attack shelter was destroyed. What if the catacomb is destroyed? Troops will no longer be able to transfer to other towns? I know there is at least one warrior among us who will make that a goal :)

I forgot you said Autoloader feature. So bringing them out will be like shelter and take awhile? In the morning I have 10 minutes before work to send army off to war. Game takes 5 minutes to load so I end up with 5 minutes to play. Guess that would mean no more morning forays for me :(

You can use it only when you are expecting to be attacked. In that case you will sacrifice morning forays for calm night sleep. Can't suit everyone, you know.

Of course :)

If the defending army is limited by the food supply available, then is the attacking army also limited by the food supply available to them? A giant army can be created with negative food. The defense cannot be greater than the food supply. The catacomb idea is a good one, but the food, and army size needs work. It would seem that no city can have an army with negative food supply to be fair. 

That is good. Limit the army size to food 'supply' in the storehouse, not on the 'food' production income. Makes sense. If you have food, the army can stay and fight. No food, no fight. 

Hey Bers, what was the ultimate outcome of this thread? Are the catacombs implemented in alpha 4?