How to read a player's profile prior to attacking

When going out and attacking or scouting for others in your alliance reading a players profile can tell you a lot about a player. There are 4 items (Stronghold Level, Power, Troops Hospitalized, and Alliance Helps) that you can just spot check the player help you determine some key information.

Some of this information will allow you to know if you can hit the player without event scouting them. This is very helpful in catching players while they do not have their shields up. If you scout them you will give them a chance to shield. When I was smaller I was able to just use this information to determine if I was going to hit a players Stronghold or tile during Kingdom versus Kingdom Kill Events without scouting first. This is especially useful if tile hitting, as scouting will allow them to pull the troops before hitting them.

Stronghold Level

The Stronghold level will help to determine what types of troops they may have.

Strongholds of at least level 8 will have up to T2 Troops.  

Strongholds of at least level 15 will have up to T3 Troops.

Level 21 may have T4s but it will depend on their power level, if they are below 100 million they will most likely not have T4s.  

Power

This can help you know if you can solo hit the player or not.  If the power is below 40-50 million depending on your power this player should be able to be hit by yourself (depending on your strength).  Once you are looking to hit 40-50 million you need to start checking for trap accounts.  

If a player is over 100 million they will most likely have T4 troops so you will need to be careful with these.  

Troops Hospitalized

Another item to check is the number of troops they have had hospitalized.  If this number is very large and if they also have a large number of kills the account is most likely a trap account.  Traps accounts have high, low tier, troop counts and lots of hospitals. When you hit a trap you will only hospitalize their troops while they kill yours.  

Alliance Helps

This tracks how many times the player has hit help for their alliance members.  If you check the number, wait a bit, and check again and it hasn't increased there is a good chance the player is not online; if it has then they are online and will most likely be paying attention to what is going on. Be careful of trap accounts as a good trapper will hold of from hitting help to make it look like they are not online.

For more information on Traps Inside Game of War has a great write up on them.