There are 3 ways to earn money: Through your basic salary. Every half an hour you get your salary, and pay the salary of your soldiers. What is left of your salary you can save for later. If you get to a higher rank, by gaining enough experience (XP), your salary will be increased.
The other way is through battle. If you capture enemy soldiers they can be ransomed by their officers. If you lose a battle, your soldiers may also be captured.
Apart from your own income, you are also rewarded for the merits of your country. Every day you will receive some amount of gold depending on the amount of cities your country has and how long they already occupy them. In each city you can see the value you will get each day in gold from this city. This value increases by 5 every turn it is occupied by your country and is reset to 0 when the city is taken. Next to that you also get your share of the tax paid to the country by merchants. You will receive these amounts at 06:00 game time.

Battles are fought in 3 stages:
ranged attack: This phase consists of 1 round of ranged attacks. All units of both sides which have a nonzero Rdmg (ranged damage) simultaneously fire 3 times at a random enemy unit, with a chance to hit equal to their Racc. Each time they hit, they do 1/3rd of their Ranged damage, adjusted by a random factor of 80% to 120%.
Cavalry charge: After the ranged, the cavalry charges in and does 2*R*[Str] damage to a random enemy soldier.
Melee fight: In this stage, every round every soldier of the largest army attacks a random enemy soldier and does R*[Str] damage. The enemy soldier then counterattacks and also does R*[Str] damage to the attacker.
Where R is a random factor between 80% and 120%.

After each round, soldiers with less than 50% of their HP become injured and are taken out of the battle. Soldiers who reach 0 HP die. Soldiers who are about to get injured get a chance to be cured by a Medic or Priest (if there are any in the army), the higher level soldiers first. A healer can heal at most one soldier per round. The officer (player) fights with his soldiers and has equal chances to get injured or even die (in which case your account is reset). So be careful who you attack.
This goes on until one side has only half of his initial number of soldiers left. If both sides lose half of their soldiers, the side with most soldiers left wins. The remaining soldiers of the losing army try to flee but have 1/6th chance to be captured. Captured soldiers will automatically be freed by paying ransom to the capturer. This way you can earn money from battles. If you capture an officer you get 50% of all his gold (this means you lose 50% if you get captured). If you kill an officer you get all his gold: he won't need it anymore anyway.

You can attack only the countries you are at war with. Only the HC of a country can declare war on a country they are not yet at war with.
A war is always 2 sided, so if someone attacks you, you can also attack him without having to declare war on them.  Wars timeout if the attacker takes no city of the other country for 24 hours.
Army and Navy are at war with the same countries.

When a war starts when two countries are allied, the war is considered 'friendly'. In this case you can't do PvP-fights.

• You can see the bonuses of countries by going to the country rankings and clicking on a country (you can also see which units the country has, and by clicking on the units, their bonuses).
• Another way to see the bonuses of units is in the reference guide; the bonuses of world and continent units are visible in the table, the bonuses for other units become visible when you click on them.
• You can see what terrain type each city has by going to the map page and clicking 'terrain maps' at the top. Also on the detailed continent maps with city names, the names are colour coded to show their terrain.