I had this fight earlier.
I saw it coming, and used the simulator to calculate the perfect counter. I sent out my ninja's, gunman, and all but 1 knifer and was going to reduce my loses from millions in resources lost to only like 10,000.
How? But removing troops from my army. (How does that make any sense????)
The problem is the attack never went through, and I didn't notice it and my troops stayed in place. The loses were massive.
But if it did work, look at how much different it would have went by having less troops defending. In what world does this make sense?
Would have gone from around 2 million in loses to about 10,000 just by effectively deleting troops from my army!
Would have completely wiped him out only losing 3 cheap troops. Since I had 236 ninja's, 135 gunman, and 20 knifers more troops, I lost them all instead. I had a follow up fight and I took 3x-5x the loses with more troops yet again.