My protection runs out in a little over 30 hours, and I fully expect to be attacked, the vultures are already circling! Given that I can't afford to buy resource boosts until I get paid (too late!), so have little to no hope of beating them, these are my options as I see it

1) Build the best army I can and hope to take some of the bastards with me,

2) Forget wasting resources on military, offer no resistance, THEN build an army, or

3) build the army, send it out pre-attack, then recall.

I'd be interested in your opinions, dear players, and thanks!

join an alliance

If you can not join an alliance in time and you believe that you will stand no chance of survival it is best to focus your resources on structures so you can build up faster however we will need a little more info such as what tick it currently is.

It depends on your own goals for the era. My personal goal is usually to kill as many as I can in an era. Sometimes it's worth it to defend and take a bunch of units out with you, other times, it's more realistic to focus your efforts on dodging the first blow and save your army to do a better job of killing later on.

As the other's have stated though, joining an alliance would be the first means to protect yourself, however, even that may not deter other players.

If you have a decent army already built, I would suggest you save it to continue building after dodging the first incoming attack. Though, I will warn you to be careful of experience hunters (like me). They will do their best to hit your army in order to gain experience for their units in hopes of getting Range 4 or 5 units.

If you haven't built up to range and shield structure yet as well as at least a level 4 farm, metal and oil structure, I would suggest you focus on those things before making anymore units. Without those 4 items, you won't be producing a decent income and you won't be able to create units to deter future enemies anyways.

...or, of course, option 4) join an alliance.

Thanks for your input guys, happy hunting!