Don't attack small towns - you will lose money and time

I want to save you the mistake I made in my first week with the war module. I found a little town sitting on a pile of resources, marched an army over, won the battle, and felt like a genius. Ten days later my whole army was dead, the town was free again, and when I actually added everything up I had lost gold, not made it. Here is the math nobody shows you before your first attack. Start with the thing that surprised me most: when you occupy a town, your soldiers do not live forever. They live for as many days as the town is happy. That is the literal rule - the game sets their death clock to the town's happiness. A big, developed city can be happy enough to keep your troops alive for fifty, sixty, even seventy days. A small town is the exact opposite. Small towns sit right at the bottom of the happiness scale. The vast majority of them are stuck around ten happiness, which means the soldiers you send there will die in about ten days. Maybe eleven or twelve if you are lucky. That is the entire occupation. Ten days and they are gone for good. Now look at what you actually earn in those ten days. While you hold a town you take ten percent of everything it produces. That sounds great until you remember it is a SMALL town. Ten percent of almost nothing is almost nothing. A tiny town barely produces anything, so your cut is a thin trickle - and the trickle stops the second your last soldier dies and the town frees itself. So you lose from two directions at the same time. Your army dies fast because the town is unhappy, AND the reward is tiny because the town is small. Being small hurts you twice over. Then add the costs, because this is where it really turns red. Every soldier you send out costs a deploy fee of 0.0001 gold, paid straight to the game fund the moment they march. It is a tiny amount per soldier, but you pay it on every single soldier in the army, on every attack, and you never see it again. Here is the part that hurt the most to learn: troops you send to attack another town do not come home. There is no recall button. They march one way. If you win, the survivors stay and garrison that town until their happiness clock runs out, and then they die there. If you lose, they are wiped out on the spot. Either way that army is spent. You are not lending them to a raid, you are spending them permanently. And those soldiers were never free in the first place. You train them at your academy and you equip them, and both the training and the gear cost materials. If you want troops that feel free to field, you have to produce those materials yourself, which means building a whole vertical industry behind your academy - raw resources feeding into finished equipment, step by step. Most people never build that, so they buy troops or their inputs off the market at a real gold price. Send that expensive army at a ten-happiness town and you are setting money on fire for a ten-day trickle. So do the math before every attack. Add up the deploy fee for the whole force, plus what those soldiers cost you to make or to buy. Then look honestly at the target: how much does it really produce, and how many days will my troops even survive there? For a small town the answers are almost always "not much" and "not long." Attack big, happy, productive towns, where your soldiers live for months and where ten percent is genuinely worth taking. Leave the small towns alone. They are a trap that costs you both money and time - I paid for that lesson so that you would not have to.