The first question you should ask yourself when planning a military city is whether or not you intend to build war machines to accompany your army. Rams and the like are very slow, and if you are going to use rams, there is no point at all in building cavalry units, as their speed advantage will be useless. (Rams can be extremely useful in sieges if you have an adequate quantity of them and if you intend to expand by conquest, they could be a very smart investment.)
For an army that uses rams there are really only two troops to choose from; berserkers and mages. Berserkers are cheap to build, require no gold, they are easy to feed and really fast to produce if you build multiple training grounds. Mages use only a little iron but a 'lot' of gold, and gold is far harder to come by than iron. They are stronger than berserkers but they take a 'lot' longer to build. A fully fleshed out military city can easily crank out 10,000 beserkers a day given sufficient iron. An identically constructed city building mages would be building less than 3000 a day, and even that 3000 would kill most empire's gold revenue.
If your army is not meant to siege, only assault to support other people's attacks, then rams are far less useful. A supporting assault army is better off with speed, so they can assault repeatedly. For that, the choice is between knights and warlocks. And again the dichotomy is similar to that of beserkers and mages. Knights are a lot quicker to produce and use a lot less gold per troop than do warlocks. Due to the knight's build speed though, you may find yourself spending as much gold 'while they are building' as you would with warlocks. However you will have three times as many knights as you would warlocks for the time and expense. Warlocks have the advantage of having the highest attack of any unit in the game and if you can manage to build an adequate quantity of them, your friends might well hold you in awe. But you should ask yourself, what would awe them more, and army of 30,000 warlocks or an army of 100,000 knights?
Original author - Panpiper, official Lou Forums. Original thread link
For an army that uses rams there are really only two troops to choose from; berserkers and mages. Berserkers are cheap to build, require no gold, they are easy to feed and really fast to produce if you build multiple training grounds. Mages use only a little iron but a 'lot' of gold, and gold is far harder to come by than iron. They are stronger than berserkers but they take a 'lot' longer to build. A fully fleshed out military city can easily crank out 10,000 beserkers a day given sufficient iron. An identically constructed city building mages would be building less than 3000 a day, and even that 3000 would kill most empire's gold revenue.
If your army is not meant to siege, only assault to support other people's attacks, then rams are far less useful. A supporting assault army is better off with speed, so they can assault repeatedly. For that, the choice is between knights and warlocks. And again the dichotomy is similar to that of beserkers and mages. Knights are a lot quicker to produce and use a lot less gold per troop than do warlocks. Due to the knight's build speed though, you may find yourself spending as much gold 'while they are building' as you would with warlocks. However you will have three times as many knights as you would warlocks for the time and expense. Warlocks have the advantage of having the highest attack of any unit in the game and if you can manage to build an adequate quantity of them, your friends might well hold you in awe. But you should ask yourself, what would awe them more, and army of 30,000 warlocks or an army of 100,000 knights?
Original author - Panpiper, official Lou Forums. Original thread link