You can do some kind of control with the military units. In the game, when you open up the main selection window (by pressing M or the icon in the bottom), you'll see a soldier icon on one of the buttons. You can open the military control window from that icon.
Now you have some switches here. The first switch sets how easily soldiers are reqruited from the people you have. I've never had any use for this setting so you can ignore it.
Next you get an interesting setting: it sets the soldier's rank that are preferred to be sent to the military buildings. If you set it to the minimum, you never see better soldiers getting off from your headquarters if you have any privates in the HQ. So new buildings are occupied by the lowest soldiers first. It seems the midpoint is where the best soldiers are preferred over worse soldiers, although if you set it to the maximum, the best soldiers are sent from every storehouse there is before worst soldiers are sent anywhere.
The third switch sets how many defenders are sent out when an attack comes. The setting is at maximum by default, meaning only one soldier remains in the building to defend it.
The fourth switch sets the amount of attackers. It works similar to the defence setting: the higher the bar, the lower amount of soldiers remain in your buildings when you attack. If you set this to the maximum, you can do long attacks but you leave yourself vulnerable.
The last three settings set how much soldiers you have in your military buildings. First you see the inner land setting (white flag). If you set this to the maximum, all buildings in your inner lands get the maximum amount of soldiers (unless you run out of them). The next setting is for midpoint lands, military buildings that are close to a border but not near the edge (a line over the white flag). And then the last setting is for buildings that are in the border in almost direct contact with the enemy lands. It is wise to keep this setting at maximum most of the time.
With this information, you can do some tricks: you can use your inner lands to beef up your soldiers. Build a fortress and a mint together in a somewhat peaceful position, set maximum amount of soldiers to go to your inner land buildings and voilá! you can train your soldiers effectively within your own borders. Once you have four or five generals ready in the fortress, you can move the inner lands switch in the military window to the midpoint (and also make sure the second switch is set to the minimum!), then the best soldiers get out of the buildings. Once the soldiers get off the buildings, you can restore it to the maximum so the worst soldiers go to your inner land buildings for training. Once the buildings are again full of soldiers (or no more soldiers leave the HQ), you can restore the second switch to midpoint so the better soldiers go to the border areas.
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