Castles

Castles!
  This may be the most difficult part of the game. Every player wants to castle every city they have built. DON'T! The first mistake I made with my 1st castle was building from a resource city. Never build a castle from a resource city. You will lose it, or end up abandoning the city.


   As a general rule you need 3-4 resource cities, 1 hub, 4-5 military support cities, 1 gold city,  before you castle a military city. This is a general rule. As you start out it is a very good rule. But as a whole...It is actually quite weak.


I say this because there are 2 thoughts on when to castle a city. 


FIRST THOUGHT:
       When you have met the criteria listed in the general rule, then you may castle a military city. Expect to become a target many times over. Do this for 5-6 castles, then you can start focusing on castled cities, sieges, raids, plunders, and assaults. The castles should be 2-5 mix of offense/defense troops types. For every 2 Offensive castle you want to build 3-5 Defensive Castles.
 I don't care for this line of thought. But, I put it in to give you an opposing view.


SECOND THOUGHT:
      When you max out troop count in an all military city 50-60K troops, castle that city and begin raiding dungeons for resources. Build up troop count to 230-270K (ships and siege castles recruit far less) of a specific troop (1 type only per castle). If you build a castle on water, make it a ship castle with supporting magic troops. It will be attacked from the water as well as from land. 


Build hubs to send resources from 1 city to the next close by. Also, build Castles close by the others. Try not to have them spread out for the fact that it will take longer for reinforcements to arrive. There was a player on the opposing alliance who built 10 castles all besides each other. He tried to spy on us once, found out that he built his castles right next to each other solely for intimidation. 


     Since he had them clustered together, the only way to capture them was to have the entire alliance attack at one time with 4-5 sieges on each castle. and then we needed to search out his hub, to choke off his resources.We were finally able to defeat him by capturing 4 of his castles, and then reducing 2 of his other castles to level 1 TH and level 1 Castle (7pting a Castle).