How to attack and occupy any town

When I started I thought the war part of this game was locked, or only for the big players. It is not. If you own a town and you have joined a country, you can already march an army into another country and take a town from someone. Here is everything I wish somebody had told me before my first attack. First the rules that never change. You can only attack towns that are in a DIFFERENT country than yours. You will never see your own countrymen in the target lists, the game hides them on purpose. You also cannot attack your own town, and a few system accounts are simply invisible. So step one is easy: make sure you have joined a country and you own a town. Step two is an army. Soldiers are trained at the Military Academy, so build one and start training. Something that surprised me: your soldiers are real residents of your town. Each one lives in a house room, exactly like a normal citizen. If you have no free rooms, you cannot keep more troops. So build houses before you train a big army, otherwise you get stuck. Now the attack itself. Open the Army section and go to the attack page. The game hands you ready made target lists: top gold miners (the richest towns to tax), top resource miners, closest to you, weakest garrisons, and best targets. Click any player and a strike window opens, and there you choose how many of each troop type to send. A few numbers you MUST understand before you press send. The deploy fee is tiny, only 0.0001 gold per soldier, and it goes to the game fund, so forget about it. The real price is the soldiers, because troops you send never come back. Your whole force marches together at the speed of your slowest unit, and you cannot recall them once they leave. The distance is the real distance between your country and theirs, so a neighbour is a fast strike and the far side of the world is a long march. When your army arrives the battle is decided by points. Your total attack points hit the defender total defense points. If your attack is higher, the defenders are wiped out, you lose some of your own soldiers worth their defense, and the survivors stay and occupy the town. If your attack is lower, your whole army dies and you get nothing. Equal points, both sides are destroyed. So the golden rule is: send more attack than the defense you can see, with a margin. Occupying is the reward. While your soldiers sit in that town, the owner pays you 10% of everything they produce. It is passive income. But it is not forever, your occupying soldiers live about as many days as the town happiness (a happy town holds longer), and when your last soldier there dies the town frees itself. So to hold long term you have to keep sending reinforcements. Two special cases worth knowing. If the town is already occupied by another player, your army fights THAT occupier army, not the local defenders, and beating them takes the town from them. And if you already hold the town, extra troops you send do not fight, they just reinforce your garrison, which is exactly what you do before your soldiers die. My honest advice for a first attack: pick a weak garrison in a nearby country from the weakest garrisons list, send an assault force with clearly more attack than their defense, and watch it land. Once you see how the points work you can move up to the rich gold miners and start taxing them. Just always remember, the soldiers are the cost, not the fee. Good luck out there.