City Defense

As soon as you lift neutrality (required to start capturing resource tiles), you are vulnerable to attack.

If you are uncertain of whether you should collect taxes or not, check the Taxes page for more information

An occupying force gets 10% of the taxes you collect once every 24 hours. If they occupy you for 23 hours and then get kicked out, they get nothing.

Personally I don't keep any troops stationed in my city, but that's because I find it more profitable to not collect taxes.

All that aside, if you do find yourself defending a city (yours, or someone else's that you've captured previously) there are a few things to note.

Every city has a wall which has 15 defense and 2000 health. Reference Damage Calculation and/or Troop Comparison for details on the damage units can cause to walls.

Before any attacking armies can cause damage to defending troops they need to get past the walls.

The only (standard level) troops that have a chance of defeating a wall in a single hit are Armored Knights and Horus.

Before the walls come down, long-ranged troops behind the wall will do damage to the attackers while suffering none themselves. Non-long-ranged defenders behind the wall will do nothing (they won't advance and they won't do damage) until the wall is destroyed, but again, they won't suffer any damage themselves.

If the attacker does not destroy the walls within 5 rounds, the battle ends in a draw.

This is an ideal outcome for defenders, as a non-destroyed wall means the attackers didn't do any damage to troops, and the defenders (assuming they had long-range troops in defense) will have hopefully killed some of the attacking troops.

If/when the wall falls down, the mechanics of the battle revert to the same as any other resource tile battle.