Production and Equipment
Production and Equipment covers how raw resources become the armour, weapons, and support gear that actually arm your soldiers. Workshops are the engine of this conversion — built in settlements, staffed by your own population, and producing equipment that flows into the Global Equipment Stock for use anywhere in the empire.
Equipment Types and Recipes
There are four kinds of equipment, each built from a different mix of Horses, Iron, Leather, and Wood:
| Equipment | Horses | Iron | Leather | Wood | Workshop Capacity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Armour | 0 | 4 | 8 | 2 | 4 |
| Melee Weapons | 0 | 7 | 2 | 3 | 5 |
| Ranged Weapons | 0 | 2 | 2 | 6 | 3 |
| Support Equipment | 1 | 2 | 4 | 8 | 3 |
Each type leans hard on a particular resource, and it shows in how an empire needs to be built to sustain it:
- Armour is overwhelmingly a Leather product — 8 units of it per piece, the largest single ingredient in its own recipe by a wide margin. An empire planning to field heavily armoured troops needs forest and broken ground territory, not just iron mines.
- Melee Weapons are the most Iron-intensive equipment type — 7 units per weapon. Hills and Broken Ground territory feed melee-focused armies directly.
- Ranged Weapons lean on Wood above everything else — 6 units per weapon, three times any other ingredient in its recipe. Forest territory isn't just for Armour's leather; it's just as vital to keeping archers supplied with bows.
- Support Equipment is the only type that needs Horses at all, though only a single unit — its real weight sits in Wood, at double the demand of Leather and four times that of Iron or Horses. It's a broad, miscellaneous mix of tools, rations, and harness, but far from an evenly balanced one.
Workshop Output
The Workshop Capacity column above is a cost, not a quantity — it's how much effort one unit of that equipment demands from a workshop, and lower is faster. The actual number of items produced comes from weighing that cost against how much capacity a workshop actually has available that month.
Every workshop has a flat base capacity of 200 per month, scaled by the settlement's Province Development Level and how well-staffed it actually is — see Province Development for the PDL workshop capacity modifier, and Workshop Staffing below for the staffing modifier. The number of items a single workshop produces in a month is:
Items Produced = (200 × PDL Workshop Capacity Modifier × Staffing Modifier) ÷ that item's Workshop Capacity cost
Here's what one fully-staffed workshop at a baseline PDL 6 (modifier ×1.0) produces per month of each type:
| Equipment | Workshop Capacity Cost | Items per Workshop per Month (baseline) |
|---|---|---|
| Support Equipment | 3 | 66 |
| Ranged Weapons | 3 | 66 |
| Armour | 4 | 50 |
| Melee Weapons | 5 | 40 |
This confirms exactly why Melee Weapons, despite being the most resource-hungry recipe of the four, are also the slowest to actually manufacture — a single workshop turns out only 40 a month against 66 for Support Equipment or Ranged Weapons.
Worked example, at scale: a capital running 2 Support Equipment workshops and 1 Armour workshop at this same baseline produces 133 Support Equipment and 50 Armour that month — confirming the formula holds whether you're looking at a single workshop or several stacked on the same equipment type.
Development level changes this significantly. The same single Armour workshop produces only 35 a month at PDL 1 (×0.7 modifier) — `200 × 0.7 ÷ 4 = 35` — but 60 a month at PDL 10 (×1.2 modifier). A workshop in a thriving Imperial Hub is genuinely worth nearly double one sitting in raw, untamed territory, entirely separate from however many workshop slots that development level happens to unlock in the first place.
The Construction Process
Equipment isn't built all at once at the end of the month — it's constructed in rounds, one workshop per assigned equipment type per round, following a strict priority order: Support Equipment first, then Armour, then Melee Weapons, and Ranged Weapons last. Rounds continue until every workshop has had its turn, or the settlement runs out of resources to keep going.
Worked example: a settlement with 9 workshops, assigned as 2 Support Equipment, 2 Armour, 4 Melee Weapons, and 1 Ranged Weapons:
| Round | Workshops Active | Used This Round |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 Support, 1 Armour, 1 Melee, 1 Ranged | 4 |
| 2 | 1 Support, 1 Armour, 1 Melee | 3 |
| 3 | 1 Melee | 1 |
| 4 | 1 Melee | 1 |
All 9 workshops are exhausted after 4 rounds — Melee Weapons, with four workshops assigned to it, simply takes longer to fully cycle through than the other three types combined.
If a settlement doesn't have enough Horses on hand to cover Support Equipment production, the shortfall is drawn directly from the Global Equipment Stock rather than halting the workshop — equipment production doesn't grind to a halt just because the local stockpile of one ingredient briefly runs dry.
Workshop Staffing
A workshop is only as productive as the people available to run it. Each workshop demands civilian workers equal to:
Workers Required = Province Development Level × Staffing Factor × Number of Workshops
The Staffing Factor depends on race:
| Race | Staffing Factor |
|---|---|
| Standard races | 300 |
| Goblin, Krant | 600 |
Goblins and Krant need double the workers per workshop compared to every other race — a direct consequence of the same smaller-bodied nature that also halves their grain consumption and doubles how many of them fit in a given population cap. Twice as many citizens fit in the same space, but it correspondingly takes twice as many of them to staff a workshop.
Against this requirement, the settlement's actual available workforce is its total population minus whatever fraction is already earmarked for military recruitment — see Population Growth for the recruit fraction by recruit level. If the available workforce falls short of what's required, every workshop in the settlement runs at a reduced percentage of its potential, regardless of how skilled the Governor is or how loyal the city happens to be:
Staffing Modifier = minimum(1.0, Available Workers ÷ Workers Required)
Worked example: a standard-race settlement at PDL 3 running 3 workshops needs 3 × 300 × 3 = 2,700 available workers to hit full output. With only 1,800 actually available, every workshop in that city runs at just 67% of potential — a direct, unavoidable consequence of population size, not something a skilled administration can simply work around. A Goblin or Krant settlement at the same PDL and workshop count would need 5,400 workers for the same 100% output, reflecting the doubled Staffing Factor.
This is exactly why rushing a province to a high Province Development Level without the population to match leaves its new workshop capacity sitting idle — see Province Development for how PDL and workshop count scale together, and Migration for how a chronically understaffed city automatically starts attracting migrants once staffing falls below 90%.
The Four Equipment Types
Armour is issued to troops to increase their physical resilience in battle, feeding directly into a unit's Armour Value (AV) — well-armoured troops absorb more damage and survive longer on the physical axis of combat. See Combat System.
Melee Weapons are the primary armament for any close-combat troop type — infantry, heavy infantry, and cavalry alike all depend on a steady supply to actually fight at their stated Melee Value.
Ranged Weapons are issued to archers, marksmen, and other ranged troop types. A unit's Ranged Value (RV) is only ever realised in battle if enough ranged weapons are actually available to issue — a powerful archer corps with empty quivers fights as poorly as one with none at all.
Support Equipment behaves differently from the other three entirely. Rather than being a one-time issue, it travels with the army once recruited, and is steadily worn down by ordinary use — moving, training, working on a project, even sitting idle, all consume it gradually. See Armies for how this directly affects Combat Readiness, and Global Equipment Stock for how it's replenished from the empire's shared reserve each month.
Equipment Maintenance
Armour, Melee Weapons, and Ranged Weapons were once a purely one-time issue — equip a troop and that equipment simply stayed with them indefinitely. That's no longer the case. Every army and garrison now pays a small monthly upkeep in all three, drawn directly from the Global Equipment Stock:
| Army Status That Month | Upkeep (% of Establishment) |
|---|---|
| Resting | ~2% |
| Active (marched, fought, or worked a project) | up to 5% |
This means a large standing army costs equipment to maintain even with no fresh recruitment at all — wear and tear, loss, and general attrition don't stop just because an army isn't actively campaigning. An idle garrison is the cheapest way to hold equipment in reserve, but even that comes with a real, ongoing cost rather than being free once issued. This sits alongside, not instead of, Support Equipment's own separate and considerably higher wear rate — the two mechanics apply to different equipment types entirely.
