Crafted Equipment Usage

again another area of the game that is click click click...it takes alot of time and boring clicks to use crafted items...it takes away from player interaction making the player spend time interacting with game functions to achieve equip...the devs must make this part of the game easier to achieve and use, why would a player want to spend hours doing this style of playing?

I only utilized crafted equipment to help with my sov claiming spree (150 in one city and then 500 overall).  Otherwise - not at all.  

DeathDealer89 wrote: Only thing I see crafted items worth it for is affecting speeds.  Draught horse obviously.  But other than that from time to time to slow down an army so you can send 8pm instead of 3AM.   All the time spent gathering, then making sure all the right res are all in the right spot then waiting an absurdly high wait time for a single item.   Then you get to send the item back to the appropriate city, and finally equip.  Then you have to figure out the terrain, and type of enemy your likely to be fighting.  Then go through your list of equipment to find out whats best, and instead of just being a simple +x%, or a simple +x% in biome, ect.  All equipment have like 5 modifiers.  So you have to do a ton of mental math to figure out which equipment is most likely the best.   Finally you get to equip and engage.  And you get maybe +6% woot!!!!, also if you did some of that mental math wrong or end up fighting a different unit that you thought you would well it turns out its gonna be -18% So yea 99% of the equipment can be ignored.  Honestly I love the idea just not the implementation.  They have already increased build times for equipment once, I wouldn't mind seeing build times be closer to gather times, in its current state you need like 9 crafting cites for every 1 gatherer.   hen change the stats to be more useful.  Think +100%, and instead of all the +x%, -y%, -z%.  Just be simple such as 'better spear' +100%.  There are weapons out there that have 15 modifiers over half of them negative.  Or weapons with 2 positive and 8 negative.  And there aren't just a few of them, there are tons of these weapons where you have to spend 5mins just to figure out if the equipment will help or hurt your army.  Once you figure that out you get to try and decide if spending the last 2 hrs going through all that stuff I just listed was worth it to get +2% bonus.   I say no, but who knows maybe one day someone with a bunch of elite divisions will destroy my armies.

No, that won't happen.
And, yes the Draught Horse is pretty much the only "indispensable" craft item.

I use crafted items for city defense, and for commanders.

I already know the terrain and biome of my city, and there are only a few weapons and armors that are worth producing in the thousands. I only rotate defensive army gear once in a great while, usually when I equip freshly built troops. I keep some blocks of gear for countering less typical attacks like bows, to be used if I get a scout report prior to the enemy's arrival.

There isn't much to change for commanders. When hunting animals, my axe commanders use a war axe, riding horse and terrain armor. My cav commanders use a boar spear, terrain armor, and either a heavy warhorse or dwarven battle mule. Hunting elementals is done with a reinforced sword or dragon spear, and spiked platemail or plainsman's platemail. You already know the terrain type of your target square, so you know in advance which gear to use. It takes a minute or two to properly equip your commanders.

Crafting the gear takes more work, but some people enjoy it. I find that specializing in a few low cost, high value items makes production go much faster. Specialization is really the only way to produce useful volumes of goods. I produce Dwarven Battle Mules, Reinforced Chainmail (from Iceheart I mine myself), Marksman's Bows and Tridents. I will occasionally run a batch of Desert Platemail for my desert town.

I produce lots of other items in tiny volumes for commanders. But if you're going to use crafted gear for an army, the items must be available in the thousands, including the rare materials. The materials must also be available at reasonable prices. Those two criteria rule out most crafted items. The remainder are worth using.