Global Equipment Stock
The Global Equipment Stock (GES) is the empire-wide reserve that holds everything your settlements produce and your armies depend on. Rather than each army or settlement hoarding its own private stockpile, production from every city in the empire flows into one shared pool — and every army draws its resupply from that same pool, wherever in the empire it happens to be standing.
The GES holds eight things in total: three resources — Grain, Manpower, and Horses — plus Stone, and the four manufactured equipment types — Support Equipment, Armour, Melee Weapons, and Ranged Weapons. Iron, Leather, and Wood never enter the GES at all — they're consumed directly by workshops at the settlement level the moment they're produced, and never pooled empire-wide. See Resources and Production and Equipment for how each of these is generated in the first place.
Storage Capacity
Each type the GES holds has its own base capacity, reflecting how scarce or abundant that type is meant to be:
| Type | Base Capacity |
|---|---|
| Grain | 500 + 100 per settlement |
| Manpower | 250 + population scaled — see below |
| Horses | 50 + 50 per settlement |
| Stone | 250 + 50 per settlement |
| Support Equipment | 500 |
| Armour | 250 |
| Melee Weapons | 250 |
| Ranged Weapons | 250 |
Grain, Horses, and Stone all grow with the empire itself now, scaling per settlement rather than sitting at a single fixed ceiling regardless of how large the realm has become — a sprawling empire genuinely needs, and can hold, a bigger buffer of these three than a young one just starting out. The four manufactured equipment types deliberately don't scale this way — only the raw resource side of the GES grows with settlement count. Horses still sit deliberately low relative to the others — a reminder that cavalry recruitment and Support Equipment production are both competing for the same limited pool. Stone's capacity is also kept tighter than Grain or Support Equipment, in keeping with its role as the most deliberately scarce resource in the game. See Resources for why.
Manpower capacity is not a flat figure — unlike every other resource and equipment type in the GES, it scales with the empire's total population and the chosen recruit level:
Manpower Capacity = 250 + (Total Empire Population × Recruit Level Factor)
| Recruit Level | Reserve Capacity Factor |
|---|---|
| Volunteering | 3% of empire population |
| Conscription | 6% of empire population |
| Impressment | 9% of empire population |
Raising the recruit level increases this capacity immediately, but the manpower pool itself only fills toward that new ceiling through the normal monthly recruitment draw — it doesn't top up overnight. Lowering the level shrinks the capacity immediately, but any surplus citizens sitting in the pool above the new, lower ceiling are only returned to their settlements at the next monthly update, not the instant the setting changes.
Material Degradation
It's possible to store more than a type's listed capacity, but the surplus isn't managed well — a portion is simply lost. This loss, called material degradation, is applied whenever armies and garrisons are reinforced, and it worsens progressively the further a stockpile sits above its capacity, reaching its maximum at double capacity:
| Category | Loss Rate at Capacity | Loss Rate at 2× Capacity (Maximum) |
|---|---|---|
| Equipment (all four manufactured types) | 35% | 70% |
| Resources (Grain, Manpower, Horses, Stone) | 45% | 75% |
At exactly the storage cap, degradation sits at its lowest rate; the surplus above that cap is lost at a steadily climbing percentage as the stockpile grows, until it plateaus at the maximum rate once the pile reaches twice its listed capacity. In practice this means a modest overflow costs relatively little, but letting a stockpile balloon well past capacity is punished considerably harder than before — there's a real incentive to spend a growing surplus down rather than let it accumulate indefinitely.
Resources still degrade more harshly than equipment at every point on this curve — there's comparatively little point stockpiling raw grain or spare manpower well beyond what you can use, while a genuine equipment surplus remains somewhat more forgiving to hold onto.
Increasing Storage Capacity
Three outposts expand GES capacity, and each one specialises in something different:
| Outpost | Manpower | Horses | Stone | Grain | Support Equipment | Other Equipment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Barracks | +250 | +25 | +25 | +25 | +100 | +50 each |
| Stable | 0 | +250 | 0 | +25 | +100 | +25 each |
| Warehouse | 0 | 0 | +100 | +250 | +500 | +250 each |
The specialisation is unmistakable once laid out side by side. A Barracks is the generalist — the only one of the three that boosts Manpower at all, and the only source of a Stone bonus alongside Warehouse. A Stable exists almost entirely for Horses, doubling the GES's entire base Horse capacity in a single outpost — fitting, for a building literally about housing horses. A Warehouse is the heavyweight for everything else: it matches or exceeds a Barracks on every single category except Manpower and Horses, including a Support Equipment bonus equal to the GES's entire base capacity for that type on its own.
Notably, none of the three increase Manpower beyond what a Barracks already provides, and only a Barracks touches it at all — recruitment capacity scales with population and recruit level, not warehousing.
Distributing Equipment to Armies
When the GES replenishes armies each month, it doesn't simply serve whichever army happens to be processed first. If there's enough Support Equipment to fully resupply every army in the empire, all of them are topped up completely. If supply falls short, what's available is shared out proportionally based on need:
An army's share = (that army's need ÷ total need across all armies) × equipment available
A small army low on equipment and a large army equally low on equipment both receive a fair proportional share — neither is left empty purely because of the order armies happen to be processed in.
Reinforcement itself runs in steps, the first being to replenish Support Equipment already in active armies before anything else is addressed. (The remaining steps in this priority order aren't confirmed in the source material yet.)
Distributing Grain
Grain works through the same proportional logic as Support Equipment, but the consequences land somewhere different — on Combat Readiness for armies, and on birth rates, death rates, and loyalty for settlements. See Armies and Loyalty for what a poor supply percentage actually costs.
An army's share = (that army's need ÷ total need across all armies) × grain available
Just like equipment, if the GES holds enough to satisfy every army's need in full, all of them receive 100% supply. If it falls short, each army receives a proportional share rather than whichever army happens to be processed first getting everything.
There are two things about this worth knowing that aren't obvious from the formula alone:
Armies are served first, settlements second. Each month, the GES distributes grain to every army before anyone calculates how well-fed the civilian population is. Whatever grain remains in the GES after every army has taken its share is what determines settlement-level Grain Supply Percentage for that month — see Loyalty for how this feeds into base loyalty, and Population Growth for the birth and death rate effects. An empire fielding several large armies during a genuine grain shortage can find its own cities going hungry purely because the military claimed its share first, even while those same cities are the ones producing the grain in the first place.
The supply percentage is locked in for the month, regardless of what happens afterward. Grain is treated as consumed the instant it's distributed, and an army's resulting supply percentage holds steady even if that army then takes heavy losses in battle days later — its actual need just dropped, but the number doesn't recalculate until the next month's distribution runs. A costly battle won't retroactively fix a starving army's food situation.
Neutral factions skip this system entirely — Mevaro and Necromancer forces are always considered fully supplied, consistent with their unconventional approach to population covered in Population and Special Races.
Monthly Reinforcement Order
Everything above happens as part of a fixed sequence the GES runs through at the end of every month, and the order matters as much as any individual mechanic within it:
- Support Equipment is distributed proportionally to every army.
- Grain is distributed proportionally to every army — and only afterward is the civilian Grain Supply Percentage calculated from whatever's left.
- Troops and Garrisons are reinforced toward their target numbers, following a recruiting priority order. The default order is Infantry, Cavalry, Marksmen, Heavy Infantry, Heavy Cavalry, Siege Engines, Engineers, with Garrisons last — but this is a setting the player can change, shifting priority toward Garrisons, Cavalry, or Infantry first instead, depending on what the empire most urgently needs reinforced. An army currently engaged in combat receives no reinforcement at all that month, regardless of priority.
- Manpower is finally drawn from city populations to refill whatever space the GES has left, becoming the recruits available for next month's troop reinforcement.
This sequence is also exactly why a sudden famine hurts more than it might first appear — it doesn't just reduce one number, it cascades through four separate steps in a fixed order that always favours the military first.
