Have you considered the fundamental reason warring leads to extreme build setups is the very nature of how you determine if one kingdom successfully hits each other and how much damage it does. There are some strange things found in KAW not existing in other games. 1) If you are unable to successfully "attack" someone you still do damage. 2) If you can hit someone, the damage you do is independent of how much bigger you are than them. I suggest the discontinuous nature of your attack system is what leads to extreme build scenarios like gh and stacking. A more standard system involves a continuum for success and no damage for failure. i.e. if you can't hit you do no damage or almost zero damage. If you can hit, the amount of damage is determined by how much bigger you are than the opponent.
If I build all defense buildings, and my kingdom uses more troops to defend than yours does to attk, I loose troops but you loose the attk. You loose more troops for loosing the attk. The game mechanics are good. Your statement is invalid.
Actually, your example supports what I am saying. If you are full of defense buildings and I don't have enough attack to beat your defenses I should do little or no damage and not win any gold. In the current system, I do a fixed amount of damage regardless of how much smaller I am than you. It might be fair to alter my original suggestion to say if my attack equals your defense we do equal damage to each other. The point of what I was saying though is more that there needs to be a continuum in damage. Discontinuities in attack/damage lead to discontinuities within builds and within teams of builds.
Btw, obviously the game mechanice are not good when it comes to warring. That's why its taking several years for them to come up with a successful warring system. Something is awry.
Still not good enough. If I build a few towers, to go with my defense buildings, toss in a few attk, but keep most troops buildings to defense, I loose less troops. A fail attk cost the attacker more. If I loose the def buildings, i loose more troops, but not as many as you do for failing the attk.
It is the player base who has skewed the war mechanics, human nature dictates we search for all weakness, to attain the win. Strategy and study. And with that, I will move along. Nothing wrong with the game, many styles of play to choose from, if you don't like war, join one of the many EB only clans.
What I'm really suggesting is you employ a mathematician or math physicist to run simulations to determine, given your rules, what the optimal team build will look like. Choose what you think a good team should be and work backwards to find the rules that produce it. Y'all probably do that already. Hmm...