Ranked #6, due in part to ghosting.
How Never to be Raided: "Ghosting"
Raiding in The Walking Dead: Road to Survival can feel like you're rolling a boulder up a mountain. You spend all 6 of your raid energy to get maybe 36-50 reputation points, only to be raided for 50 points within the next two hours. Well, that's defeating...
But there is a method where you can prevent yourself from being raided, a strategy known as ghosting. If you keep your food and material stores low enough, then the programming that controls the pool of players who can be raided will ignore your account. Just how much food and materials you can have for ghosting to activate has varied, but through some testing, I can confidently say that having 50,000 or less in each, conservatively speaking, will do the trick.
At the time of this writing, developer Scopely believes that ghosting is a strategy and not an exploit. That may change in the future, but so far, they are not punishing players for ghosting.
Here, the food and materials are less than 10,000 each... just to be safe.
Having Low Food and Materials
Keeping your food and materials low isn't too difficult. Food can be used all sorts of ways, be it for levelling characters and creating items, but worse comes to shove, you can sap all of your food into creating Replenishes at the workshop without having to use any resources.
Materials, on the other hand, are a bit more difficult to handle since you'll likely need to use a lot of resources to convert them into items at the workshop. I suggest grinding stages like 13-3 to get the resources you need like stimulants, metalworking sets, and various powders so that you can craft higher-end items like smelling salts, muscle boosters, nitric oxide, and sharpshooters that can use up as many materials you've got stored.
At least you won't have to purchase these ceasefires...
Pros and Cons of Ghosting
+ Keeping reputation. By ghosting, you can raid other players in relative safety, thereby earning reputation points calmly as you climb the leaderboards. And you don't need to worry about having to check on shields (or purchasing any ceasefires) while you're at it.
- But reputation doesn't mean much. Reputation points are mainly cosmetic when you think about it. You don't earn any rewards or anything for having a high rep, and if you continue to ghost, your score might be inflated compared to other players.
+ Won't get raided. The other benefit of course is that no one will steal your food and materials while you're successfully ghosting. You don't have to worry about people depleting your stores.
- Difficult upgrades. Keeping your food and materials stores low can be an issue if you want to upgrade areas of your town. Levelling your town hall from 19 to 20 costs over 1.9 million materials, so keeping your materials at just around 50,000 or lower means that upgrading is nigh impossible... unless you have a lot of items to convert. You can do this by turning high-quality items like grenades and smelling salts into materials, but you'll need a very large amount of them.
Overall, I recommend ghosting at least as part of your strategy. In case you can't play the game for a while for some reason and wish to return to the game after your hiatus, ghosting is a good strategy in maintaining your reputation points without having to worry while you're away. That includes when you're sleeping.
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