We finish the chapter with the two situations that involve a town already under occupation: freeing your own, and attacking one that belongs to somebody else's occupation. Both are variations on the combat you already know, but each has a twist worth understanding clearly. By the end you will know how to break an occupier - whether the boot on the ground is on your town or on a town you fancy taking from a rival. This is the satisfying end of the war story: the counterpunch.
Liberating your own town
When your town is occupied, you fight back with a liberation. You throw your home garrison - the troops you have trained and stationed at home - at the occupying force sitting in your town. It is an attack like any other in its maths: your troops' total attack points collide with the occupier's total defence points, and the three outcomes you learned apply exactly as before. Beat their defence and survive, and your soldiers drive the enemy out and your town is free. Fall short, and your garrison is lost and the occupier remains. So liberation is simply the combat engine pointed at the invader on your own soil.
Liberation is free - the defender pays nothing to fight on home ground
Remember the deploy fee attackers pay to send troops abroad? A liberation carries no such fee. You are fighting on your own ground, so there is no march, no distance, no gold cost per soldier - you simply commit your home troops and the battle is instant. Only attackers reaching into foreign towns pay to move an army. Defending and freeing your own town costs you nothing but the soldiers themselves.
You launch a liberation from your My town page, using the panel that appears while you are occupied. It shows the enemy garrison's strength and lets you choose how many of your home troops to send against them, doing the attack-versus-defence sum for you so you know before you commit whether your force is enough. The wise approach is the same as any attack: train until your attack total clearly beats their defence total, then strike. Rush in with too little and you simply feed your soldiers to the occupier and stay captive; wait until you are strong and the liberation is clean.
Attacking a town someone else occupies
Now the other case. Suppose you set out to attack a foreign town, but it is already occupied by some other player. Here is the twist that surprises newcomers: your troops fight the occupier's garrison, not the local town's own soldiers. The occupier is the one in possession, so the occupier is who you must beat. If your attack points overcome the occupying force's defence points and you survive, you drive them out and become the new occupier yourself - the town simply changes hands from one foreign holder to another, and now it pays its tax to you.
This opens up real tactics, and it is where war becomes a three-way game rather than a duel. You might liberate a friend by attacking the rival occupying their town - though note that if you win, you become the occupier, so true liberation of someone else's town means winning and then letting your garrison die off, or simply holding it yourself. You might muscle in on a rival's prize conquest, stealing a productive occupied town out from under them. Or you might avoid occupied towns entirely, preferring free targets whose local defence you can measure plainly. Because you always fight whoever currently holds the town, the state of a target - free or occupied, and by whom - is something to check before you march.
Always fight whoever holds the ground
The one rule that ties both cases together: a battle is always against whoever is currently in possession of the town. If a town is free, you fight its home garrison. If it is occupied, you fight the occupier's garrison instead - and this is true whether the town is yours (a liberation) or a stranger's (a takeover). Possession decides who defends, every time.
And with that, you have the whole war system in your hands. You know that soldiers are trained at an academy and need housing like any resident; that five troop types trade attack, defence and speed; that every battle sets attack total against defence total with three clean outcomes; that you may strike only at foreign towns, across real distances, at your slowest soldier's pace, for a gold fee per head and with no way to recall them; that holding a town taxes its owner a tenth of everything while your garrison survives on the town's happiness; and that when the boot is on your foot, you train up and liberate for free. War is the most permanent and unforgiving part of CoinRepublik - but it is also, for those who plan carefully, the most rewarding. March wisely.