When you send an army, it does not blink instantly onto the enemy's doorstep. Your soldiers march, across real geography, and they take real time to arrive. This lesson covers the journey: how far your troops must travel, how long that takes, what it costs you in gold to set them marching, and the iron rule that once they leave, they are never coming back. The march is where a lot of the strategy of war actually lives, so let us give it the attention it deserves.
Distances are real
The distance your troops travel is the genuine, real-world distance between your country and the target's country. Send an army from Romania to neighbouring Hungary and it covers a few hundred kilometres; send one from Romania to Brazil and it must cross an ocean and half the planet. The game measures the true distance between the two countries and your troops march every kilometre of it. This means geography is now part of your strategy: a rival next door is a quick strike, while a rival on the far side of the world is a serious expedition that will keep your soldiers on the road for a long time.
A force moves at its slowest soldier
Speed decides how fast that distance is covered, but here is the crucial rule: a mixed force travels at the speed of its slowest unit. An army is only as fast as the men at the back, so if you send quick Spec Ops alongside plodding Assault troops, the whole force crawls at the Assault pace. The soldiers march together and fight together, so they must arrive together, which means the slowpokes set the timetable for everyone. If speed matters to you - if you need to hit a distant target before the owner can react - then you must send only fast troops, and accept that a pure sprinter force may hit less hard than a mixed one.
The speed-versus-power trade-off
This is one of the war system's deepest choices. A big mixed army hits hard but marches at a crawl, giving a distant enemy days of warning. A small, all-fast force arrives quickly but carries less punch. Against a close target you can afford slow, heavy troops; against a faraway one, speed may matter more than muscle. The attack planner shows the arrival time for whatever mix you pick, so experiment before you commit.
The deploy fee
Sending troops is not free. You pay a deploy fee of 0.0001 gold for every single soldier in the force, and that gold goes to the game fund, not to your enemy. A raid of a thousand soldiers therefore costs 0.1 gold just to set marching, on top of the troops themselves. It is a modest price per head, but it scales with the size of your army, so a truly enormous invasion carries a real gold cost before a single blow is struck. The planner totals the fee for you as you build the force, so you always see the bill before you confirm. Think of it as the cost of moving an army: soldiers do not march for nothing.
There is no recall - troops you send are gone
This is the most important rule in the entire chapter, so let me say it as plainly as I can. Once you send troops to a town, you cannot call them back. Ever. There is no retreat button, no changing your mind, no bringing them home if you spot a better target. They march, they fight, and they either die or occupy. Every attack is a permanent, one-way commitment of soldiers you spent time and materials to train. Plan accordingly - never send an army you are not fully prepared to lose.
Put those rules together and you can see why a campaign takes planning rather than impulse. You pick a target and the distance is fixed by geography. You choose your troops, and their slowest member sets the arrival time. You pay a gold fee per soldier to set them marching. And from that moment they are beyond your reach - committed, irretrievable, on their way. While they travel you can watch them on your My army page under On the march, counting down to arrival, but you cannot touch them. All you can do is wait for the battle to resolve when they land. Next we learn what happens when a winning army arrives and settles in: occupation, and the tax that makes the whole bloody business worthwhile.