The more expensive weapons are harder to sab though - there is a rough formula for working out what weapon you can sab with what spy rating which uses accumalated weapon strength rather than no of weapons, so I'm not sure buying warblades makes you safer overall
- but the precise formulas are not known so its trial and error really.
general observations:
You can stay an attacker or slayer (slayer = high SA, low army size, high spy for recon) but you have to keep your army size small, usually by training down (and never being too huge) a bit and concentrate on getting a really high SA so you can steal millions not thousands.
If you want to make real money from turn based gold then you need a large enough DA/small enough army (there is an inverse relationship here) to protect your TBG while you are away. To save up to buy stuff that is more expensive than the amount you can hold you need to either bank weapons or turns (so you can go on a pillage spree).
Quantity has a quality all of its own, I see 40k+ size armies around me - they are earning 500k every 1/2 hour!! Their DA's (when I am able to recon) are commonly 8mil+. I also see slayer accounts (<500 men, orc, high-spy, no DA - no sentry) with an SA of >8mil.
There are plenty of Banks too (boring to play....), accounts with lots of men and high DA with high sentry or SA (depending on whether they bank money in BPM's or not) and 1000's of turns saved. No doubt they plan to make good use of their turns in the last week - get some insane steals and shoot up the ranks.
It's easy enough to convert your army from SA to DA etc. by selling weapons/training men etc. you just need enough gold to do it. weapon reselling makes 75% return (not tools) - the only thing that wouldnt be instant would be growing an army, which is all about clicking of course.
And going from all spy to SA or DA is bad because tools are only 45% return sale, in that instance youd be better off keeping the tools/spies and just clicking up a few hundred/thousand men and buying weapons new imo.