Keeping a large army fed and watered is problematic. One or two small units can "live of the land", requisitioning food from local farmers where necessary. But large armies wandering across the landscape need a supply chain from a source of food.

I understand WoK will have farms and villages - these can act as supply points, providing a certain amount of food supply. The raw terrain can also provided a limited amount of food (depending on the terrain type). A unit can draw its supply wither from the 7 hexes under or surrounding it, or from a limited distance from a supply point. (say 5 hexes?).

Units not in supply at the beginning of their turn have 1 turns grace to get back in supply, by destroying the enemy units blocking their supply line, spreading out to live off the land or moving back close to a supply source.

At the beginning of the second turn being out of supply, units start to take damage, and lose 2 movement points.

Commandeers could build roads. In addition to allowing your army to move faster, an unbroken line of roads leading to s supply point themselves act as supply sources, supplying armies within 5 hexes. An enemy unit with a ZoC on a road breaks that line, potentially cutting your supply lines feeding your army.

Optionally, to enable large armies to operate behind enemy lines, there could be a new unit type, baggage train. This would be slow moving and require filling at a farm or village. It would only provide a limited amount of food before being exhausted.

This change would require you to be more careful if you are going to operate a large army in enemy territory. Small scout units would be unaffected, provided you space them out on good terrain (crossing deserts would be tricky).

This will increase the strategic importance of farms and villages and add an interesting extra dimension to war of kings.

Discuss.

I am not quite sure how WoK works in the first place, since i came back after quite some time of being absent. But i think this would bring back the problem req wants to solve last time. Making people fight instead of just stay in the castle and be diplomatic. Since this will make attacking harder, it will make a lot of the players reluctant to. Counter-attack would be more beneficial in that sense. So...i don't think req would like this. Though, good idea otherwise...

It would change the way you would have to advance across the map, forcing you to take over supply sources as you go.

I think it is important to make various terrain elements important strategically - WoL suffers at the moment from only having castles and gold mines worth anything in real terms.

I know that Requiem has technical objections to programming supply into the game - designing SQL queries to determine supply could be tricky, depending on how the DB is structured. But it can be done - if you think the the map as a 2d array of hexes then a flood fill algorithm can determine supply. It only needs to be calculated once per turn so the computational expense is not excessive.