Surprise that someone whose village was just ransacked by goons would suggest making villages more defensible.
I'm sure you've thought about this if it hasn't been mentioned here before but the inability to defend your livelihood while offline is a serious game flaw. I think the easiest solution would be to make different varieties of traps.
Traps could only be built in village claim to prevent their misuse outside of village defense.
Traps would need to cover large distances. Simply placing a trap on one or two tiles of a 2,000 tile perimeter won't cut it. they would need to be able to protect stretches of land.
Traps could be detected like scents only using PER and Stealth rather than exploration. And their traces could be better disguised with higher psyche and perhaps Survival.
Traps would need to be highly effective at deterring invading parties, such that it would take an incredible amount of resources to successfully infiltrate a trap-protected village.