I'm not disagreeing with that. That was my point. I focus on goods, not troops. It's far more costly to me to fight. I can fight up to 25-30 attrition on auto-battle before I'm really paying dearly. I can keep going on manual for a bit, but that's time-consuming. Instead, I can negotiate and keep taking on attrition, even though the goods costs are significant at the point where I'm starting to do so... and increase from there. But it's much less painful to lose those goods because they are far more quick to replace. However, because I have spent so much time accumulating troops using my Alcatraz, I'm good... for now. The problem is, when I tech up to the next age, I'll have plenty of goods (from trading) that I'll be ready to negotiate... but I won't be ready to do much fighting until I've accumulated some troops (which may take a while if I don't race the tech tree to unlock the appropriate barracks) or continue fighting with now inferior ones. Once I've got enough troops, I'll be back to no problem mode. But for me and others like me, negotiating is the cheaper method... and it's worth double for a nice bonus!