If you're reading this it's likely that you're one of the good ones...
OR one of the bad ones.
Either you're the kind of player who proactively reads tutorials to gain new skills and sharpen old ones, OR you've bled like a stuck pig in the last war or wars and somebody directed you to read this tutorial specifically. If that's you, don't take it the wrong way. This introduction is necessary because defense is, at its heart, the responsibility of the individual. You should be using one of the three methods below to ensure that you cannot be farmed for points. YOU should take responsibility to make sure you meet this bare minimum. If you have an IRL reason why you can't meet this responsibility for this war or that war, you should at least take responsibility for communicating that to your faction leadership. If you regularly can't participate in ranked war, you probably shouldn't be in a ranked war faction.
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PREPARATION
If you can't already use bloodbags, you should immediately take the Intravenous Therapy education course (and the required prerequisite Introduction class). https://www.torn.com/page.php?sid=education&category=4&course=127
These two classes should absolutely be completed before completing the sports science classes. Maybe you'll want to snag a couple of the optimal sports science classes first, but you'd be a fool to wait around months and complete the bachelors before learning how to use blood bags.
Blood bags are by far the most effective medical item and being able to use them is one of those bare minimums you should be meeting.
Buy empty blood bags from the pharmacy and fill them regularly to make sure you've got a plentiful stash in your inventory for ranked wars. Buy some blood bags of the wrong blood type from the item market or bazaar and also buy lots of ipecac. You should have at least 20 of each before a war. Preferably more.
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METHOD 1 - SELF HOSPITALIZATION
This is simple, but requires frequent maintenance to stay safe. Using an ipecac or blood bag of the wrong type will put you in the hospital for 60 to 90 minutes, but THEY DO NOT STACK, so you need to be active every hour or so to refresh your hospital timer. You can use another one while you're still in the hospital, but they will never take your hospital timer higher than 90 minutes, so let your hospital timer tick down to 5 minutes, then drink another ipecac and your hospital timer will safely increase to 60+ minutes. You can also access the faction armory from the hospital, so you can use faction blood bags or ipecac if they're available and you don't have your own.
Other self-hospitalization options include buying a small explosive device and putting it in an empty box to create a parcel that explodes when opened and hospitalizes you for around 5 hours. But the small explosive device is very expensive (around $5 million as of this writing), so its use case is fringe at best.
You can also intentionally injure yourself in an arson crime by repeatedly stoking a fire with gasoline, which is inexpensive and makes a long hospital timer, but it burns nerve and crime experience and is also significantly slower than any other method so it's not useful under pressure.
METHOD 2 - BOUNTIES
Since self hospitalization requires maintenance every hour or so, it's not a solution when you're AFK for hours for sleep or work or whatever. Bounties are an easy solution. Players with under a million battlestats will get hit pretty much instantly with just a $200,000 bounty or even less. With the bounty fee you can put three bounties on a mid to low level player for $500,000 to $1,000,000. Three bounties will reliably get you 9 to 12 hours in the hospital. You can't place bounties on yourself, but it is your responsibility to ask for someone in the faction to place the bounties on you. It is also good etiquette to pay for your own bounties or at least offer to pay, but if you're new or broke, your faction may be able to shoulder the cost. It's imminently worth the money. Defense wins wars and WINNING ranked wars is by far the most profitable activity in Torn.
METHOD 3 - FLYING (Forbidden Technique)
There is considerably more depth to the use of travel as a defensive method than there is to methods 1 and 2. Travelling is free and allows long periods of safety, but comes with significant risks. One of the important factors of advanced overseas defense is that it is nested together with advanced overseas offensive techniques. This tutorial is intended to focus on the BASICS of DEFENSE so I won't go into too much depth on advanced or offensive techniques, but suffice to say that the better you are at the game (through high stats, timer discipline, and competence with battle techniques), the more powerful travelling is in war for both offense and defense.
HOWEVER, if you're the kind of player who needed a tutorial on basic ranked war defense to begin with, you're more likely to fall victim to the dangers of travel as defense than you are to reap the benefits. If you're a noob or a bleeder, try to get the instructor types in your faction to give you some one on one attention with regards to war travel. The intermediate and advanced techniques rely on teamwork and coordination anyway, and you could use the practice (you disgusting noob/bleeder).
THE RISKS: The enemy team gets bonus points for hitting you overseas, and you're also at a huge disadvantage against an attacker trying to chain hit you the second you come out of the foreign hospital. Unlike in the hospital in Torn you can't use blood bags or med kits to get out of the hospital, so your opponent knows exactly when you'll be able to be hit again, and if he has his shit together, he just has to spam the start fight button when you're about to heal out and he'll almost always already be attacking you faster than you can do the two clicks to fly home.
THE BENEFITS: You can't be attacked while in transit between locations, and you have 15 seconds of immunity from attacks as soon as you land, allowing you to safely get back on the plane and fly away. Flight times to distant locations get as long as 3.5 hours, so if you can reliably set an alarm to notify you when you're about to land, you can fly back and forth between distant destinations indefinitely. Plenty of bounty hunters hit overseas too, and because they get the same countdown your ranked war opponents do if you're in a foreign hospital, they can collect your bounty the second you come out of hospital and potentially break a chain of you getting farmed. Additionally, when bounty hunters or other people outside the ranked war hit you, you can get early discharge from the hospital, jumping out at will no matter how long your hospital timer, negating the attacker's advantage and allowing you to fly away, save a chain, hit a weaker enemy target, or a combination of the above.
If you're slow, weak, stupid, incompetent or ugly, you should be careful about sitting overseas during war. Big players on the other team may use a business class ticket to fly out to get you, making the enemy's flight times unpredictable, and flying overseas and just sitting there is an incomplete defensive strategy. They may come for you eventually and you might not be handsome enough to get away.
(There are MANY scripts and websites that make ranked war MUCH easier to manage mechanically. If you're getting farmed by opponents with seemingly inhuman speed and omnipotence, their script game is almost certainly stronger than yours. There are so many options for improving your performance through scripts and external websites that they're outside the scope of this basic tutorial, but if you're not already using them, you should learn them sooner rather than later.)
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That's it. End of tutorial. Get the hell out of my office.
