supply?

[Kjeld]

To cover the basis :


* Supply :

- Supply is value linked to each province (with large farmland, river provinces having high supply values, small wasteland or mountain provinces have a low base supply value). It is, of course, modified by your dominion : if you have a growth dominion and your dominion is poweful enough (the white candle) in the province, you'll have a large supply bonus.

- Fortresses help tremendously with supplies : a fortress in a province give a big supply bonus, and this bonus radiates from 4 provinces away (though it decreases for each province away from a friendly fortress) : bottom line, to help with supplies on a conquest wars, build fortresses the closest possible to the frontlines. Note : it is quite misleading, but the fortress "supply" value has nothing to do with this bonus : it is the amount of supplies available during sieges. The fortress "admin" value is used to compute the supply bonus.

- If you have nature mages in your army, they will automatically provide bonus supplies (the more mages, the more levels in nature, the better).

- There are two relatively simple items that can be forged by nature mages : one at level 2 construction (cauldron of broth) and at level 4 construction (bag of wine). The cauldron of broth give more supplies, but require a higher level of nature magic to forge. Anyone with 1 nature magic and level 4 construction can forge a bag of endless wine for a measly 5 nature gem.
Equip one or several of your leaders with those kind of items, and your supply woes are gone (note that one leader can only benefit from the bonuses of ONE bag or wine or ONE cauldron).
(Higher level and more complex items give supply bonuses too)

* Weaponry : Other posters have explained the details, I'll just give general guidelines

- generally speaking, swords (broad, long, two handed, falchions ...) are better weapons (high overall balance between damage, attack and defense) - you can usualy go with those blindly if you don't know what to choose. Note however than they have one weakness : they generally lack length

- "Crude" weapons are generally less effective than more "modern" weaponry. A maul is worse than a battleaxe. An axe (highly damaging but low accuracy and defense) is worse than a great sword.

- long weapons (spear and larger : glaives, halberds, long spears, pikes ...) ae useful, because if an attacker use a shorter weapon than the defender, the defender has chance to keep him at bay and counterattack (it is called "repel"), the chance to repel beeing largely based on the attacker morale's.
Bottom line : if morale is an issue for either side, long weapons might prove useful. Shabby morale phalanxes or pikemens will generally fare better.

- Then there are quite a lot of special weapons available to some of the nations ... Flails are very effective against low armor opponents, Flails and Morningstars against shielded opponents, poisonous weapons, etc ...