When you are under seige by wave after wave, you must find ways to keep up your loyalty and population. Here’s why slow relief is better than fast relief.
In this situation, to inexperienced defenders, it would seem the best thing to do is to apply praying as often as possible. With slightly more experience comes the idea of alternating praying and comforting, given that keeping Public Grievance (PG) low is in the long run just as important as keeping loyalty (LOY) high. These ideas are not incorrect. But under heavy heavy assault, averaging more than 4o waves every fifteen minutes, you won’t be able to keep loyalty above 15; eventually, because PG is so high, your population will leave you, resulting in riots and revolts. In times like these, you don’t want the fast relief that comes with Tums or Rolaids. Rather, you want slow relief.
It’s actually smarter to wait until your city loyalty drops to 10 or even 9 before applying disaster relief (DR). Why? Because that way, your loyalty hangs at 15 no matter how many nor how big the next attacks. You then can leisurely wait another 30 minutes (when loyalty again drops to 10) before comforting again. Further, with each DR, you will reduce PG by 15 while it will only increase again by one for each attack. If instead you were to impatiently raise loyalty from 11 to 16, the next attack might lower it by as much as 4 and raise public grievance also by 4. Applying praying would be similarly counterproductive, as your PG will continue to rise to 100 even though LOY loiters in the thirties and can be reduced again to 12 with just six attack waves.
Now, you might ask “where do I get the food for all this.” With a simple warehouse and a couple of farms, you can keep generating enough food for DR as long as your population remains sufficient. When your population dips, you’ll also need to: (1) adjust the tax rate (TR), (2) reduce production of non-food resources, (3) apply population raising (PR) periodically. Preventing revolts (that is, losing your heroes) is another chapter, because retaining and generating gold when you have no income and little population can indeed be very tricky. Doing all of the above simultaneously is indeed a very difficult balancing act. So having 30 minutes between disaster reliefs can definitely give you the time to concentrate on other aspects of disaster management.
In sum, while under siege, use DR for optimal effect, use when your LOY reaches 9, and given enough food, keep your population up using PR. Eventually, you will either get reinforced or the attacker will tire and find a softer target.
