Steps to keeping a massive army

Large armies it require daily work

1. Build Farms:build lots of farms, once you stop building replece ALL quarries with farms.Keep only sawmills and iron mines enough for you to keep producing troops. Make all other resource fields farms. Forget about market.

2.Max Research:research agriculture as high as you can, you will also want to max horse riding and locistics

3. Optimize Valleys: capture high level valleys that give you food bonus, look for the best you can manage.Remember, valleys can change their level during the server maintenance. Just wait before taking them over, and they’ll become higher.

4.Politices Hero:make a super politics hero in your city spam attack high level NPCs with your politics hero in order to boost his/her level. This, obviously, works best on Lv. 10’s. Just be sure to send more ballista then usual to compensate for the hero’s lower attack score. Once he/she is at an uber level, make them the mayor again. You might want a backup politics hero to use as a temporary mayor until this step is done.

5. NPC Farming:farming npc's gives you lots of food, your overall production will be in the red, but if are farming properly and often,you will have a stockpile of millions, to feed your army.Start farming NPCs on a rotating basis, i.e. attack the closest, then the next closest, and then the next. Having horseback riding and logistics at max level will speed this process up. Simply make a list of what cities you have attacked today, and ignore them until they recharge. If you want to mass your army in just one city, then just transfer the farmed resources to your main city. Taking over high level flats, and turning them into NPCs will help this.
NPCs now regenerate the following per hour

Level 1: 4.1k
Level 2: 8.2k
Level 3: 37.5k
Level 4: 67k
Level 5: 125k
Level 6: 167k
Level 7: 187.5k
Level 8: 334k
Level 9: 584k
Level 10: 792k

6.Spacing Cities; If you have more than one village/city You don’t want to have all your villages clustered together; as then, you will be competing for resources with yourself. Space them out and destroy one of your barracks and replace it with a max level relief station. That way, you can shift your troops around very quickly even though they aren’t close together. One barracks is a small price to pay to keep your troops alive.

That’s it. Depending on what you build, and how good you get at this, you should be able to get around 500k in each city. Sure, this takes some effort, but at least no one can complain that you’re getting something for nothing now.

Troop Upkeep https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_xj4elRFco&feature=related