If at war and attacked and your troops drop below 20%, I understand the game recalls deployed troops for homeland defence. when this happens does this stop anarchy if you stay above 20%, or do you anarchy then the trigger causes recall?

if a nation Ground Attacks you and you have less than 5% chance of victory, all deployed forces come back for defense. if they attack again or even with deployed forces you are still under 5%, you get a defeat alert and go into anarchy

You are only anarchied when you are nuked or you get a defeat alert. A defeat alert is triggered if someone tries to attack you with >95% odds, however it recalls all your deployed troops first and they may prevent the defeat alert. You can't get a defeat alert after being nuked, although your troops will still be brought home if someone tries to attack you afterwards.

if a nation Ground Attacks you and you have less than 5% chance of victory, all deployed forces come back for defense. if they attack again or even with deployed forces you are still under 5%......you can still win the game.....just you have to see that the deployed forces which are at 5% should play safetly.....call anarchy at that time so they can fulfill the ground attack.....

This isn't true. Anarchy occurs if the defending troop levels drop below the acceptable amount. A defeat alert doesn't need to be sent, and anarchy can occur through attacks.

As for the other part of your question regarding recalled troops, I'm not sure. I believe that if a sufficient amount of troops are recalled, you avoid anarchy.

At first I thought your soldier efficiency had to drop below 20% to trigger anarchy, but I have seen many cases in the Karma war when this occurred but the nation was not anarchied. Anarchy is only triggered by a defeat alert, if your troop count drops below 20% because of an attack, you won't be anarchied, in fact your deployed forces won't even come home, you'll simply get a warning saying you have too few soldiers. The 20% figure is only important when you deploy/decom soldiers.

It's actually quite hard to single-handedly anarchy someone through conventional attacks, even with a quad, unless they don't have Guerrilla Camps and you do.

perhaps it's different for larger nations, but I have single-handedly sent 8 separate nations into anarchy since my nation's inception without sending a single defeat alert. I have not once bought a guerilla camp.

*edit: 8, not 9.

I have sent nations to abysmally low troop levels with no anarchy occurring.

Perhaps it's got something to do with the type of attack? I usually use aggressive....maybe cautious prevents anarchy?

No, attack type has nothing to do with it. I use aggressive or cautious.

Uh no. I anarchied a guy after the Karma War by dropping him below 20% efficiency without a defeat alert.

Remember it's the efficiency, i.e. the number in brackets, that matters to anarchy. If you've got 50,000 citizens, the number in brackets needs to drop below 10,000.

Also... You have to launch an attack while the target's soldier efficiency is below 20%. If you just drop him below 20% and then run out of GAs, he's not anarchied, which is why it's basically impossible to anarchy someone who's online and rebuying soldiers.

I've pushed peoples' soldier effiency below 20% a few times later on in the karma war, and they were not anarchied. I had the same thing happen to me after being hit by 6 consecutive ground attacks, but I was not anarchied despite having an effiency of 1200 when I had 9000 citizens or so. But, if I think back about my tech raiding days 2 years ago I was able to anarchy other nations pretty easily without defeat alerts. I think I even did it in single attacks when their troop count was only 20%.

It doesn't make sense.

1. Your soldiers return home to (possibly) prevent anarchy
2. The "forces returned home" message is only triggered if your battle odds are over 95%

So how does that work out if anarchy already occurs when your soldier efficiency drops below 20%?

This game's coding must be a mess.