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Attacking strategies, Defending strategies, City build-up strategies.

Once you build a Castle, your city can be conquered by others!
Attacking Strategies

When using the “Send Army” button or the “Command Menu”, several options are presented to the player as to what action should be taken on the coordinates in question.

Actions: Requires Castle: Target Appropriate Units:

Scout Yes Any City Scouts*
Siege Yes Castle Army, Rams* and/or Catapults*, Baron**
Plunder Yes Any City Army
Raid No Dungeon Army
Assault Yes Castle Army
Support No Any City Army
Settle No Empty Field Baron, etc.

*Can be alone or in an army. **Baron is optional, used if attempting to conquer city
Army refers to any collection of units.

When besieging a castle, any additional units sent from the same city as the original force castle will join the original troops in following siege waves.

Spy
Actions: Requires Castle: Target Appropriate Units:
Scout Yes Any City Scout(s)

Note: Scouts sent with troops for Plunder, Assault, and Siege actions will also conform to the following description.

Basic Tooltip Description:
bq. Only spy on the chosen city with scouts, and only fight defending scouts (or city guards positioned in lookout towers).

This is a Spy vs. Spy scenario.
Attacker’s Scouts vs. Defender’s Scouts + Defender’s Lookout Towers
If the attacker has enough scouts, then a message will be added to the Reports menu showing an extensive account of the resources of the city as well as a summary of the buildings in that city.

Example:
49 Scouts (who were part of an army on a plundering mission) returned the following information:
Resources spied
Wood 18948
Stone 34031
Iron 89654
Food 16318

Note: it appears that scouts can no longer “spy” resources as of October 2010
Buildings spied
Building Sum of all Levels
Woodcutter’s Hut 44
Quarry 61
Farm 12
… …
more more
… …
Moonglow Tower 3
Trinsic Tower 3

Note: Full information was given for 25 building types; the list above was shortened. By omission, it was clear that the defender did not have a castle, harbor, or shipyard. This information could also be gathered by noting that the defender’s city was not located by water and did not have the castle icon in the region map view.

Building Details:
In the Buildings spied report in this example was also a full report of the allocation of these buildings. In particular, when hovering over the value below the spied building, a tooltip pops up and shows the viewer more information.
Woodcutter’s Hut
Woodcutter´s Hut
Sum: 44
Details:
2 of Level 3
8 of Level 4
1 of Level 6

Siege
Actions: Requires Castle: Target Appropriate Units:
Siege Yes Castle Ram* or Catapult* with Baron

Basic Tooltip Description:
bq: Begin besieging a city with a Castle.

Your troops surround the city and seige attack it hourly unless you withdraw. The goal is to conquer and control the city. This is acheived by your baron claiming 100% power of the city. After 10 AM Eastern Standard time on US servers, and 10 AM Greenwich on European ones, the maximum your baron can gain in each hourly attack is 10%. After 10 PM, that amount reduces until it reaches just 6%. Also, the town enters “night protection”, which increases the target town’s defenses.

Opponent’s city can not trade at this time, but can receive support troops to counter the seige attack. This will aid the town’s morale in addition to build up the city’s defensive strength.

Best to combine this with multiple assults. Also, battering rams can destroy the enemy town’s defenses, allowing your army to do more damage while taking less losses.

Additional Barons do not speed up the conquering effort since the max claim per hour is 10%. However, there is a chance that your baron will die during the siege, even when you have overwhelming forces. That may be a good reason to bring a spare; if the baron dies, the siege goes back down to 0% and you have to send another baron and start over.
City Build-up Strategies

The key to surviving and thriving in Lord Of Ultima is a high construction speed.

When you begin your city, Lady Lyanna will walk you through the basics. After this point, you must balance increasing your construction speed with your resource production. If you do not build cottages to increase your construction speed, you will not be able to upgrade your production buildings in a reasonable amount of time, and you will be constantly out of resources. Your resource buildings are more productive as their levels increase. (Buildings Wiki)

You should strive toward a construction speed in excess of 2000%. This increase in speed allows you to enjoy the game, as all of your time is not spent waiting for the next building to finish construction. A good example of this is the upgrade to a level 8 town hall (required to build a castle). At 100% construction speed, upgrading from level 7 to level 8 would take 16hr,40min. At 2000% construction speed, this will take 50min. To upgrade a moonglow tower from level 9 to level 10 (required to purify resources to recruit a baron and research upgrades) at 100% takes 60.5 hours. At 2000% it takes 3 hours.

As your construction speed increases, you should also strive to increase the level of your resource buildings. A good example of this is the farm. The basic production of a level 5 farm is 30. The basic production of a level 7 farm is 90. The basic production of a level 9 farm is 260, and a level 10 farm is 400. You need over 13 level 5 farms to match the production of a level 10 farm. These are 12 buildings you could be using for something else.

A second concept is the use of production bonuses and placement. A level 10 farm, with eight surrounding farms (i.e., no buildings, no resource fields present other than grain fields) yields 1290 food/hr. If you place a farm beside a lake, one of those grain fields is replaced by the lake and the production increases to 1755 food/hr (a net increase of 36% production bonus). (Keep in mind that even though a lake has a 50% bonus, you are sacrificing one of your grain fields to do it.) If you are lucky, and have two lakes close enough together that the farm touches both, the production increases again, to 2100 (a total increase of 63%). Mills (max of one per farm) and cottages will also increase the production.

The maximum a single farm can produce is 3864 food/hr, attained by having two adjacent lakes, a mill and two cottages next to the farm. Keep in mind that you don’t necessarily want the maximum output. Eliminating one of those cottages only drops the output to 3686 (less than a 5% drop), while that building spot might be better used somewhere else: maybe by another cottage at another farm or other resource building, maybe by a warehouse or hideout to hold or hide your extra production, or a myriad of other options).

If you’re not quite so lucky, and you have only one lake, the maximum production drops to 3441, with three cottages. However, that last cottage is not even close to being worth it, giving only a 1% increase over two cottages. Even the second farm is only marginally acceptable, giving a 7% increase over one cottage. In general, realize that each improvement of a resource building is less effective than the previous improvement (of the same type, e.g., 2 cottages vs. 1 cottage).