I’ve been in the same boat. Team of super high levels with 4k-ish TP defense teams, beats us by 500-1000 points or more. Sometimes twice in a row. Then, third war comes around, opponent team is mostly high levels again, and we think, “oh ****, we’re gonna lose again”. Except that we don’t. We actually beat the higher level team.
Every time you lose a war, your score goes down; every time you win, it goes up. You don’t know if the team you’re fighting was matched against you because they lost their last battle against a really strong team, or because they won their last battle against a weaker team. Maybe one of their members was on vacation in the last battle and that’s why they lost, and now that member is back and they’re now matched up against you, in which case you’re going to be a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or maybe it’s the opposite.
Weekend wars tend to have higher participation rates, and are therefore more difficult. Your opponent might have lost their midweek war because their members were busy, and now they have free time and can easily beat yours. There are so many factors to take into consideration in every war. Player levels, defense TP, flag usage, war history, activity levels, time zone differences, how long have their members been in the alliance, are they long established co-leaders who are devoted to using all of their flags or fly-by-night members who just joined 2 days ago and might leave in the middle of the war? It’s all unpredictable, and my alliance has beat several teams with higher TPs than our own. Some of the teams who gave us the toughest fights were teams who didn’t even have the strongest defense teams, but they used their attacks effectively.
The reality is that you’re not going to win every single war. The more you win, the harder your next fight is going to be, until you eventually lose. And if you use good strategies, you can actually take down 4k+ teams with smaller teams. I’ve had the great privilege of watching as several of my smaller alliance members teamed up like a pack of vultures to pick away at a level 50-ish 4k team. Sure they used several flags in the process, but in the end, they took him down. I don’t even remember if we won that war or not (I don’t think we did). But I do remember the tenacity and teamwork, and the joy we all felt when they finally took him down.
It was worth the flags. It was worth the loss. We celebrated anyway.