Also View... Army For Beginners: Part 1 - Types of Troops, and Part 2 - Troops Strengths and Weaknesses.
Part 3- Importance of Food
Army is a very important aspect to the game. Your army allows you to: attack players, wildernesses, and barbarian camps; defend your cities and assets; transport goods to your cities and to alliance members cities; and also it allows you to reinforce either your cities or your fellow alliance members cities. Your army will also make up a very large part of your might.
If you ever run out of food or do not have enough food to feed your army, they will pack up and leave. When you lose army over lack of food it can really hit you hard. All of the troops that you could no longer afford to feed will have to be retrained. So it is always important that you keep a close eye on the amount of food you have in your cities and the food production rate for your cities.
Some ways you can get food in case of an emergency is attacking a barbarian camp, transporting food from another one of your cities, or asking an alliance member for some food (to be transported). There is also things you can do to improve your hourly food production rate like: build up your farms, make sure a knight is assigned as a "Steward" in your knights hall and assign all of his/her skill points to Resources, attack and conquer lakes and grasslands, you can also use production increasers (can be found under "My Items" tab, "Resources" tab).
For more information on Increasing Food and Other Resources please view my post... Increasing Your Resources.
