Nobody told me soldiers need houses

I want to share one small thing that cost me two days of confusion, because I am sure other beginners will hit the same wall now that the war part is open. Here it is: your soldiers need houses. Yes, houses, the same as your normal population. When I built my Military Academy and started training soldiers, I expected them to just sit in the academy like items in a storage. That is not how it works. In this game a soldier is a resident of your town, a person. And every person, worker or soldier, must live in a room in a house. So when my houses were already full with workers, the academy simply could not give me new soldiers. I kept clicking and nothing happened and I thought it was a bug. It was not a bug, I just had no room for them. So the rule is simple but very important: one soldier takes one house room, exactly like one worker. If you want an army of ten soldiers, you need ten free rooms for them, on top of your workers. Big armies need a lot of housing. This is easy to forget because when you think army you think barracks, not houses, but here the houses are the barracks. Once I understood it, the fix was easy. I built one more house before training, kept some rooms empty on purpose, and then the soldiers appeared normally. Now I always keep a few free rooms if I plan to make troops. There is a nice side to this too. All the soldiers living in your town add up to your town defense. The game sums the defense value of every soldier standing at home, and that total is what an attacker has to beat. So housing your soldiers is not wasted space, those soldiers are literally your wall. The more defenders you can house, the harder you are to attack. But it also means there is a competition for rooms between your workers and your soldiers. Workers make you money and resources, soldiers protect you and can attack. In the early days you probably cannot house a huge amount of both, so you have to choose your balance. I keep mostly workers and just a small defense force for now, because I am still building my economy, but at least nobody can walk in and take my town for free. One more small warning. If you send soldiers to attack somebody, they leave your town, so their rooms become free again while they are gone. And soldiers that die are gone for good and free their room. So your housing for army is not fixed, it changes as you fight. Do not be surprised when rooms open up after a battle. Anyway, this is a tiny lesson but it blocked me completely for two days, so I hope writing it saves somebody else the headache. Before you train your first army, build room for it. Houses first, soldiers second. The war stuff is new and we are all figuring it out, so let us help each other. Good luck.