I like your ideas Kuloth.

The hybrid where you have detailed I think would be best in my opinion.

There could be various options based on where the unit is located and any other units in area that could improve or slow healing:

Town improvements:

Temple - healers bonus to unit depleted strength per day they are in town

Training grounds - adds veteran units instead of green troops (City or village with no training grounds adds green troops)

Heroes and Commanders:

Perhaps a commander could be 'attached' to a unit. Can add a bonus to unit due to fame or ability (ie the hero is a healer so has similar effect as a temple). Also commanders could have some negative abilities. ie. not a good tactician (in battle unit gets negative to attacks) but is wealthy (unit costs 1/2 upkeep).

Heroes could have a zone they can effect with their powers (ie. a high level hero could give a bonus to multiple nearby units)

Unit mods could have +/- effect. Having a Demon horses cavalry is great, but training and recruiting soldiers to ride these demonspawn is very difficult (unless you are Fallen) - so this unit regains strength much slower than normal.

Spells and magic items could effect units as well. Perhaps there is a curse one could cast on an enemy town to poison the water for instance.

There's also another method, much better then these 2 mentioned; the Europa Universalis/Hearts of Iron method (Paradox entertainment). It has sliders for upkeep and reinforcements. It costs you gold and draws recruits from your manpower pool. It also takes time and depends on the territory; hostile or friendly, and supplylines.

(Why have I not been rewarded with any karma yet? )

To me, this sounds like a way of implementing the hybrid approach Kuloth described. Wouldn't tweaking upkeep and reinforcements sliders be just one UI option for "throwing money at the problem?" I definitely like the idea of recovery being dependent on supply lines, regardless.

I also like the idea of experience (or reputation, if that will be a stat) helping to recruit replacements.

Of course the whole thing needs to be automatic, with a setting to either not reinforce a troop or to prioritize it. But the costs need to be similar to troop production to balance reinforcing experienced troops with new troop creation.

Basically the proposed system would have an overview/slider or similar where you can set it up if and which troops get reinforced and everything would then be done by the pc for you. The basic setting should be that each troop gets reinforced and you should be able do activate or deactivate troop reinforcement on the fly (if you need the equipment for something else for example).

Personally I'm not very picky.  I don't care about realism if the system is simple to understand.   I felt that the Total War system, while realistic, has a steeper learning curve which frutrated me when I first started playing.   So if a dev is reading the forums trying to decide how to do it, I vote: "whatever works"

I like many of the ideas brought up; supply lines, sliders, the ability to set none/low/medium/high priority to specific squads, 'reputation' and building specific ways of increasing replenishment rates. I feel that a combination of these ideas would gracefully avoid micromanagement but at the same time add depth to the game and provide the player with an important set of decisions to make.

supply lines; i would see them working along the same lines as caravans (that's what they essentially would be). In order to replenish your plate-armour-wearing-mithril-bastard-sword-wielding heavy infantry squad, you'd need to ensure that you have enough composite materials (plate armour, mithril bastard swords and men) in the first place. Once you have access to the raw materials and your supply lines are safe (probably deserves another thread by itself) we then move to...

sliders; simple and effective. Once the raw materials are in place, the slider will ensure that whatever percentage you set is geared towards repleneshing your army. I personallyt think this mechanic would take out a lot of potentially annoying micromanagement.

Priority; as a previous poster has pointed out, do you really want to waste resources replenishing an outdated squad? Or should you invest more heavily in your up-to-date, elite squadron of bear riders? Obvious really.

Reputation; I like this idea because it can add character to the game. If you have an experienced officer who leads a squad that has taken his name (eg Riko's Roughnecks), it would only add flavour to have that squad attract recruits at a (slightly) higher rate than, say, "Pikemen".

Lastly, buildings (and researchable tech, eg 'logistics') that confer bonuses are always a plus.

However, i do have a question for anybody who reads this; should replenishment of you 'swordsmen' squads depend on how many swords you have in stock? What i mean is, say you are producing swrodsmen at maximum rate (ie you produce 10 swords per turn and are producing 10 swordsmen per turn, leaving you with 0 sword in stock). How do you see this affecting replenishment? Initially i was thinking that as long as you can produce swords, it doesn't matter if you have any in stock.

First, I'm in line with pretty much your whole post. Also the more I think about reputation affecting squad replenishment, the more I like it. Partially because it just gives an excuse for there being a reputation system. If we can name (or allow the computer to name) elite, battle-hardened squads of units once they reach a certain level of experience or fame it would add a lot to the immersion factor, imo. Wouldn't make a huge difference in terms of gameplay but at least for me, it would make me feel like I have a lot more invested in it.

Now onto your question. I think that squad replenishment should definitely require the availability of all the relevant resources (from people to swords and horses). Otherwise replenishing squads would be much more efficient than training new ones. Although if you go by realism then there could be a discount for replenishing troops because you can salvage some of the equipment from the dead. But I still think I favor equal costs for replenishing squads and training new ones. 

But that doesn't have anything to do with whether or not replenishing squads costs the same as training new ones. In your reservist system you still need to have the equipment available in order to use the reserves. There is a problem with training time and cost, though. A reserve system doesn't really make sense without implementing the whole shebang. In almost every case reservists are people who were trained and in the military, but left. They could be summoned to active duty if they are needed, but they weren't just shmucks from the street that were given a sword (unless you're talking about peasant militia and all). This can be solved by having the reserve systems require some sort of financial upkeep - and it could even reduce the number of working population by a small % based on the size of your army. It wouldn't exactly match up the costs of training a new squad compared to replenishing depleted ones, but it would be close enough for me. 
 

Well, you could like at it kind of like the army rangers or other special forces groups. They're famous for their capabilities and accomplishments, so lots of people want to get in, but only the best make it. So maybe instead of increasing the rate of replenishment, it could increase the quality. They still wouldn't be as experienced as the original members of the squad who have all the battle experience, but their better training and/or physical/mental capabilities would mean that the overall competence of the squad isn't diminished as much by the new recruits.

Pretty sure the stockpiling of different resources and such will be possible. If you read Brad's dev journal about rethinking the 4X economy, it's pretty much required to be able to stockpile things like swords and armor to have a system like the one he talks about. A recycling system for outdated stock would be nice to see, too.

Actually it does, I thought an upkeep cost to a reserve system would be obviously but this upkeep cost would replace your one time training cost for new recruits and shorten the time required to get fresh troops. Also with a decent reserve system equipment wouldn’t be a concern. Just like in real life the reserves might go for practice with their military unit at some base where their equipment would be kept while they weren’t using it. In the event they get activated they would get their equipment from the base and be ready to roll. The stockpiling of weapons and armor would come in handy when a nation needs to call up far more reserves than usual or is training more reserves than what they could equip if they were all activated. Getting into the fine details of a reserve system is really unnecessary but suffice to say it works and I believe it would be the best system to implement in Elemental.   

@ GW Swicord:

From my own personal experience humans (and fallen I guess?) will grow very attached and defensive over trivial things let alone where they make their home. So if some guy started a city, called himself the king, and provided some level of leadership (good or bad) a number of people will always rally around that idea by itself.  So I don't think professional militaries are to far fetched / out of place in Elemental. 

I don't really understand what you're saying here would you mind providing some clarification? 

Oh yea, I totally agree I didn't see that at all in your first post. I didn't mean to suggest that armor/weapons should come out of thin air just that based on the number of total reservers that you have a % above what you need in equipment is produced. I would have assumed this goes on behind the scenes without the player ever having to see it though. 

agreed, any reinforcement should cost gold and manpower, wether a slow natural flow (based upon distance from supplies), or immediate retraining in a city. either way, gold and manpower should be automatically deducted .... and perhaps have a slider in the Nation manager screen for how much resources you want to put into reinforcement, and how fast you want it.

For instance, you could place the slider at 100% after a large battle, and supply wagons could start transporting men and equipment towards your army (after they have been trained of course) ... although this would be very costly and your economy would be hurting. Or at 0% its all manual and your economy isn't hurt via distance/ect because you would have to return to cities and wait the full necessary time.