I'm not QQing, so hear me out :) If the game is too difficult for casual players, then the user base will never grow beyond a certain amount. That means less money for the devs, and a stagnant game. Not something I want to see in a game with a lot of potential such as this one.

There are a couple mechanics that I question:

1. The raiding loot cap is very high.

I'm not sure exactly what the calculation on this is, but from my experience in the Classical age, it is more than 80,000 resources of each type can be stolen from your storages alone (not talking about farm/caravans here).

Lets do some math. Fully upgraded caravans/farms at this level make 870 per hour and you get five of them. This is 104k daily income. If you are attempting to save for a large upgrade (say one of the 400k or 600k library techs or the 500k age upgrade), then you will be raided heavily and will be losing at least 160k per day (possibly more depending on what kind of treaties you get and how high the cap actually goes). Your passive income will not make up for the amount that you are losing to raids even if you are leaving nothing in your collectors.

The only way to progress through these areas is to be in the game, raiding continuously until you reach the amount of resources for your upgrade. Now this is most effecient way to play these games (same holds true in Clash of Clans), but in this game, it is basically the ONLY way to progress past a certain point in the game which I think will result in a huge amount of more casual players simply abandoning the game at some point in the Classical age.

IMO the loot raiding cap (or resource collection) needs to be set so that you can more than replace lost resources through passive resource collection. This allows casual players to slowly progress through even the later stages of the game (and keeps them from uninstalling due to frustration).

2. Double win condition raiding.

The mechanic that I am talking about here is when you raid someone and destroy all their defensive buildings, then your surviving army goes back to their camps and can be re-used. This seems like a spectacularly bad mechanic to me. It encourages you as an attacker to choose the most mismatched raid you can find even if it nets you very few resources because there is little to no resource cost to you and no down time. Contrast this to something like Clash of Clans where you lose all your troops after a raid. In CoC you have to make a cost analysis decision since you have to replace the cost of your troops and spend time retraining them. It usually not beneficial to raid lower level players even though you could win easily. In DN, its almost always beneficial, which is going to make it more and more difficult for new players in the game as they will constantly get steam-rolled by more progressed players.

Double win conditions like this are good mechanics if they speed up something that already has a forgone conclusion. In a game like this though, it just encourages un-competitive play. Which is extremely bad for lower level or more casual players. But I'd also argue that it is bad for the hardcore players as well because after the novelty of non-stop steam rolling raids wears off, it basically just results in boring gameplay.

IMO this mechanic needs to be removed completely. You should have to rebuild your army after each raid. This may result in a need to rebalance the troop costs and training times.