best solution for me would be to make a difference between destructive and farming attacks. so that you need to put some extra effort to destroy stuff. unfortunatelly rune system stands in a way here - runes are so much more important than resources and you cant steal runes without destroying buildings. so proposed solution was to maybe reduce cost of runes and make it harder to destroy buildings. as a result attacker might be happy with stealing resources which can be used to buy runes, instead of having to destroy villages of other players to get runes and grow while resources are overflowing in the warehouse.

it is possible to destroy other player, but it needs coordination, resources and time. here you just send couple of attacks and village is reduced by 25%. in case of large villages it may equal to weeks or months of work.

by saying "that's just like losing nothing...." you admit that resources have no meaning in dolumar. that makes resource buildings worthless too. what lakers tries to propose is making it harder to destroy players' buildings and increase value of resources. theres no balance between military and economy. economy is a waste of runes. you can get all the reources and runes you need from attacks. if you dont have enough military you will be ravaged by players who have. if you dont agree with and want to say that economy is important too then you will admit that losing resources only is not like losing nothing.

i can guarantee that even if destroying buildings in its current state was removed then stealing resources alone would still hurt. because:
- by attacking player and winning you destroy his military and steal resources.
- later he doesnt have troops to defend or resources to rebuild them
- he can evade attacks to save troops and farm others himself to get resources or maybe runes
   * if he gains runes then you can steal them before he turns them into buildings
   * if he gets only resources then you can steal those.

this way attacked player can continue to grow with very limited speed. surely from your attacks he may lose much or not so much if he plays smart.

add to it some harder mechanic to destroy buildings and you can even destroy this player if you want and can afford to.

But theres a diference between loosing "everything" in the curent form, or loosing only the resourses and keeping your village. Dont forget, in my suggestion theres NO free-trading of resourses or runes. Sender needs to receive something in return. Ofcourse in this kind of trades, resourses and runes need to have a basic value so "trades" like sending "100K food for 1 wood" would not exist.
You could even deviate from this, by allowinf rune stealing also, but put a limit on it like max10 runes stolen from 1 attack and change how buildings get destroyed. Buildings should be reduced in level not destroyed completely. Curently a lvl 20 building has same chance of beeing destroyed as a lvl 1 building, if its at the same distance from the Castle.

that's just like losing nothing....

what are those net and gross growths? over what period of time? time between attacks? please be more specific.

It was meant as a general equation, but it assumes time t would be some amount of time post-attack.

Lazarus, i'm not trying to change the game persay. If you'd have read all this topic you would have seen me saying  that people who dont like it should move on, people who do like it will stay. But this is a discusion on how to retain as many people as possible in the game. Some people would like it even more drastic, if you get attacked and loose, you should loose verything and have to start all over from scratch. It's kinda like "perma-death" in MMO games. But the people who support "perma-death" are just a very small part of the gaming community. They call themselfs "hardcore" players and want an enviroment thats as deadly as possible, but theese kinda players are very few. The question is if this game is meant for a big market, or a "niche" market. If the first then you need to come up with a diferent system, so that even if a player looses battles, he could still continue playing in someway or another. My proposition is for the first kind of player base, the players that dont think its fair that after "working" on your village for months and months, they can loose it over-night when they're sleeping.

i know what you are saying i have read this thread all i am saying i guess is that if you change this one thing you change the very essence of the game and i don't believe i would like it very much anymore...

besides doesnt increasing gross_growth in current situation mean that attacker steals more?

also keeping positive net growth isnt everything. imagine that every 30 days you are attacked and lose 80% of progress done within those 30 days. you are growing sure, but being set back by 24 days every month is quite annoying.

now, which player would quit sooner:
- player A builds 50 buildings within a month but then is attacked and loses 40 runes.
- player B builds 12 builsings within a month but is attacked and loses 2 runes.
- player C builds 10 buildings within a month but then is attacked and loses resources only.

There really are two solutions to the problem.  The general form of the equation is

net_growth = gross_growth - attack_loss.

if we want to keep a positive net growth, gross_growth must be greater than attack_loss. 

gross_growth > attack_loss

With that in mind the two ways to accomplish a total net growth is to increase gross_growth, or decrease attack_loss.  Your idea serves to push attack_loss to 0, by removing rune stealing.  However, I can guarantee you that will be met with much criticism as it is a core part of the game that many people like.  Essentially, your idea could be re-worked as disable building destruction but allow negative runes in the village.  So a loss would 'take' runes without destroying buildings.

I have always been more in favor of simply increasing gross_growth.  It would not need to change any core mechanics or add new rules.  Either a period after losing, or a total 'clumping' mechanism would be nearly transparent to the players while still alleviating or stopping a near 0 net_growth.