[rdonj]

Being severely undervalued here:
1. Winged boots. Winged boots open a lot of possibilities on both the strategic and tactical levels. Strategic has already been pointed out, but aside from hitting cavalry or archers (especially if you have fear), boots of flying can be invaluable against self-buffing SCs, and they are basically awesome. They also make it MUCH easier to escape a battlefield alive if things start going to hell.

2. Wall shakers. Some nations practically *need* these, and some nations practically require their use against them. The panic is nice, but the siege bonus is THE reason to buy them. Sieging a fort and having the ability to storm it instantly vastly reduces the amount of time the enemy has to get organized and prepare defenses, and lets you attack with much smaller armies than would be otherwise possible, or SCs, and the time saved storming the fort frees up the sieging units to go attack other provinces much more quickly. Tempo is a very powerful weapon.

And yeah encumbrance only matters for rounds of attacks, number of attacks doesn't hurt your fatigue.

Also under cbm 1.92 that barbarian loadout would be insane, you'd be much better off summoning a sleeper and just handing him a bow. In vanilla or cbm+hammers it's probably fineish though. But that's a lot of gear for just one man.