Thanks, I appreciate it

You increase your troops power by building troops. However, if you're new, I wouldn't recommend building a ton of troops until you level up further. I will be doing a video soon on optimizing your gathering, so stay tuned.

You should get there if you keep winning. Usually when you start battlefield, you play a bunch of easier alliances (or farm alliances of old servers) so the points you get isn't very good compared to a lot of alliances (mostly building points). Evony also has said that signup power has something to do with the rankings. I think they are basically trying to prevent farm alliances from qualifying if they have easy matchups. But you should get there eventually if you keep working on it! It's not easy to get in the top 300/400 alliances (theres over a thousand servers after all)

Even when the original occupying player ports, your troops aren't sent back?

23k can be enough if your alliance is placing in the top. So if you won your battles, there's a good chance you placed. But honestly, congrats, who knows with evony math :p