Though I had an idea of your situation, I had to look up 'Greifing.'

It sounds like you are in a new kingdom, and things can be quite frantic at the start anyway,but recent additions to the game have made the scramble for  points  as soon as possible in all aspects of the game that much more intense.

I have no idea what the retention rate of new players in new kingdoms is, but many soon realise how cut throat and time demanding the game is and from limited actual experience, but based on observation, the drop out rate seems to be quite high ,and many accounts are not used after the free 3day shield drops  and the cushion and cosiness and ease ends, and pretty much soon after that, by the end of one or two weeks its only the experienced and diehards who remain.

Though you will gain some benefit from attacking palace 1 or even up to palace  5 you wont see any rewards in the form of resources.

You may kill a few troops  but its up to you to decide if its worth the effort, you will soon exhaust those in short travelling distance, and then you will need to be able to port around the kingdom, which will cost you real money to buy relocations,  as you will soon run out of the free ones .

I think you hit the nail on the head with your last comment.

The solution to being continually farmed , is the shield, but having a shield means no attacks are possible, unless you aslo have a ready supply of shields to restore  one as soon as your attack leaves, otherwise you leave yourself open to a  counter attack from someone with stronger and faster troops .

I do expect to be attacked (that is the nature of the game), but I am disappointed that a player with influence of 2,000,000 or 10,000,000 can attack a player with influence of only 100,000 as often as they please. It is also annoying that my attacker was able to move their city after the attack. The result is that I have no mechanism to defend myself in the original attack (5000 level 1 resources against 100,000 or more higher level resources) and no mechanism to attempt to retaliate. Even if I join a clan in hope of having some bigger friends to return the attack, there is nothing they can do as there is no one "there" any more. 

It seems that there should be some risk to both players in attacks unless the game has other agendas. If the goal of allowing this is to provide a way for high-level cities to obtain the resources they need to grow, maybe the game needs to look at how this suppresses new players. Perhaps implementing a clan-based revenue sharing system (that is, a tax) would be better  as maybe I'm willing to pay for protection instead of being forced to pay it to the local thugs. If the goal of allowing players with millions of influence to walk all over any player they choose is the game's way of encouraging players to join clans, maybe players should be placed into a clan when they join and no player should be allowed to opt-out of being in some clan. And if allowing this kind of "player farming" is the game's way of saying "pay to play or you're just bait for the big fish", then they should just make that point up front when you sign up.

I cant argue with much that you have written and many other players think like you that it is problematic when some one who is far stronger than you and has access to the benefits I mentioned before  attacks and disappears only to rinse and repeat.

The one thing I would disagree on, is your tax suggestion.Unless they disabled attacks there would be nothing to stop them still attacking.