You marched, you won, and at least one soldier survived to hold the ground. Congratulations - you are now an occupier, and the town you took is under your boot. This lesson is about the reward for all that effort: what occupation actually means, and the tax that flows to you for as long as you hold on. This is the whole economic point of war. You do not raid a town to loot it once; you take it and keep it, and it pays you a share of everything it produces, day after day, while your garrison remains.
What it means to occupy
A town is occupied for exactly as long as your foreign troops sit inside it. While they are there, the town is not free - it is yours to tax, and its owner cannot simply shrug you off. The occupation is a physical fact: your soldiers are present, and their presence is what holds the town. Remove them - by their deaths, one way or another - and the occupation ends the instant the last one is gone. So occupation is not a flag you plant and forget; it is a garrison you must keep alive, and the next lesson is all about keeping it alive. For now, understand that presence equals possession.
The occupier takes 10 percent of everything
This is the prize. While you occupy a town, its owner pays you a tax of 10 percent of everything they produce - gold, resources, goods, all of it. Every time that town makes something, a tenth of it flows to you, the occupier, automatically. Hold a productive town and it becomes a steady stream of income you did nothing to earn but conquer. This is why players go to war: a well-chosen occupation pays for itself many times over.
Seeing the towns you hold
Every town you currently occupy is listed on your My towns page. Each entry shows the town you hold and the garrison you left there - the specific soldiers standing guard. This is your little empire abroad, the collection of foreign towns paying you tribute. As you win more campaigns the list grows, and each line is another stream of taxed production trickling into your accounts. It is a satisfying page to watch fill up, and it is the clearest measure of how your war effort is actually paying off.
It is worth pausing on why a 10 percent tithe, rather than outright looting, is the clever design here. If war let you empty a town's vaults in one raid, conquest would be a smash-and-grab and the victim would be ruined in a day. Instead, the occupied town keeps producing - it has to, or there is nothing to tax - and you skim a tenth off the top for as long as you hold it. That makes a live, working town far more valuable to you than a wrecked one, and it means your victim, while poorer, is not destroyed. War here is about domination and tribute, not annihilation, and the ongoing tax is what expresses that. A wise occupier almost wants their victim to prosper, because a richer town pays a richer tithe.
So the reward for a successful campaign is not a one-time pile of loot but a lasting income: 10 percent of a foreign town's entire output, for as long as your garrison survives inside it. That word survives is doing a lot of work, though, because your troops abroad are not immortal - they garrison the town they hold, and that town's condition decides how long they last. Understanding that is the difference between an occupation that pays you for months and one that collapses in a week. That is exactly where we go next: what keeps your troops alive once they are dug in on foreign soil, and the happiness that decides how long they hold.