General strategies when you have a rental trophy:
1) Calculate who you can beat after you lose the trophy, hit someone with a trophy that you can beat, always keep a trophy in hand. Top studios with big trophy loads tend to operate this way.
2) If a trophy is a one day rental, and you know that... try something new? DON'T DEFEND IT.
Dump it on the studio highest up that you can give it to, fast as you can. If you get your dump attack in before your friendly neighborhood robber gets their attack in... You lose the trophy disadvantage before you fight the prospective thief. At worst, you deny your robber the trophy they desire. But at best, maybe you can beat the thief with a lowered penalty! You lose minimal glory giving the trophy away, you potentially gain a ton of glory with a successful defense.
When my studio was coming up the ranks in the teens and low 20s, we were dumping trophies on the top couple of teams regularly. We lost almost no glory giving useless trophies away, so we steadily rose through the glory ranks because we ambushed EVERYBODY. Often we would take a trophy on the ambush. When we didn't, we were reset to zero percent penalty again, and we could always find a target with a sufficient trophy penalty for our next attack.
We would do the same thing in reverse, too. Sometimes a top studio will attack a studio without a trophy, because they want a free slot. We would take a trophy on a quick attack, and by instantly losing we would hand off an unexpected present. If particular, it is EVIL to give an unexpected courage trophy to a higher level studio that way. Just saying.
In short: If you can't defend that trophy, be unexpected in your tactics. Don't defend it uselessly - give it away for minimal glory loss, and try for an ambush, thus using that rental trophy as a weapon.
Regardless of anything else... Know who you can beat at various trophy disadvantages, and check to see if you have sufficient advantage every day. Sure, sometimes you might miscalculate, and bite off a little more than you can chew. Timing might not work out, you will lose fights you thought you had in the bag when you get stuck with a trophy unexpectedly. But you will be playing trophy chess as an actor, not just a pawn.
And you want to talk about a thrill? Beat a top 5 studio when they have some immense trophy load, and your team will be energized for weeks or months. It was a glorious day when my studio could beat the #1 team, them at full trophy load, us at zero percent... We made sure they were full, all the time, and every other day we took a boatload of glory from them.
You know what kind of recruiting edge it is, when you can claim to regularly beat the #1 studio?
(Moderator's Note: This was originally posted as a response to a comment in the discussion about the movie trophies. Upon reconsideration, I moved it here not to derail that other conversation.)
Edited by CaptC, 29 September 2017 - 15:19 PM.
Split off-topic note into a separate discussion