My troops get annihilated at repositories, any advice to offer?
I can't seem to figure repositories out. They've always been a bad deal for me. Sometimes I send a fairly sizeable offensive attack, yet I can't kill one single one of the opponent's troops. Sometimes when that happens I don't even know what troops they defended with! The combat report just shows all my troops dead without a single one of the opponent's dead. If I send a lot of defence, another player crushes it without losing hardly any troops.
Yesterday I sent 36,500 defence points worth of Vectors to a repository. An enemy attacked it with 23,356 veteran AH-24s. All my troops dead, none of the enemy's dead. Shouldn't I have managed to kill at least a few of them, even if she had all attack bonuses activated? I'm simply losing so many troops at repositories, gaining very little points in the process, even though repositories should be a simple way of gaining PvP points without the enemy benefiting from base defence bonuses.
Last week I sent 8,360 defence points worth of Vectors to a repository, but all of them died when an enemy attacked with 478 Vindicators, while the enemy only lost one tank. Doesn't that mean that my 8,360 points was enough to defend against just one Vindicator, but not two? So the attack point value of my enemy's Vindictors was so high that just two of them were in total more than 8,360 points. (One would then be 4,180.) How is that possible? The Vindicator's starting attack points are just 720. For a Vindicator to attack with at least 4180 points, it would need an attack bonus of 481%! How do you reach that?
Another time I sent 5,900 defence points worth of Rhinos, but they all got killed by 202 AH-24s, while the enemy lost nothing. So 5,900 points was not enough to kill even one AH-24 when its starting attack points are 1,440. For an AH-24 to have over 5,900 attack points, and thereby destroy a defence of 5,900 points without losing, it would need bonuses of 310% or more.
One more example: an enemy lost just one Mohawk out of 1442 in an attack, while I lost 10 Maulers, 10 Creightons and 8 Vectors (total defence 17,930). I know the enemy did not have the Executive Status turned on, so that at least did not make his or her attack stronger.
What about this one?
600 Recon Operators to a combined attack point value of 72,612. (One of mine is 121.02.) And the enemy lost only one Mz-29? Not even two? Let's say the Mz-29's light infantry defence is 800. That would be a 100% defence bonus above its starting defence value of 400. Doesn't that mean 600 Recon Operators (to the value of 72,612) would manage to destroy 90 Mz-29s (to a value of 90x800 = 72,000)?
I know the forces I've sent to in these examples have by no means been massive. They've been fairly small. But in my mind they should have destroyed more of the opponents' troops, even if those opponents had all their troops' bonuses activated. I too have fairly high bonuses activated, and my league has its bonuses at max, so that should level the balance of strengths at least a little. The main reason I avoid sending a lot of troops to repositories is precisely because I risk losing all of them with only a few points in return.
What I'm asking is if someone has answers or even guesses to explain how some players do it; how do they manage to put together bonuses so high that their forces barely get a scratch at the repositories. This happened even before the Hero gear bonuses were added to the game. Or is this not about added troop bonuses at all? Have I just completely and utterly misunderstood the battle mechanics of this game despite playing it for a long time?