I farm 10k cats EVERY DAY on Honor.
Once you hit King, your mana cap will hit 180. This will take 12 hours to fill, and will allow you to accelerate troops 6 times. So, twice a day, recruit the max number of cats (will be 5k+). Use your 6 accelerate troops to get that down to 200 hours (roughly 9 days).
You will need about 20 workshops to pull this off, and you will need to buy gold (its cheap though), but after 9 days you will get 5k cats every 12 hours.
So right now your goals should be BUILDING WORKSHOPS. Counties have lvl 12, metros have lvl 14, state caps have lvl 18 buildings, so scout before you conquer and take the ones with the most workshops. The higher the level, the quicker they recruit.