Crusade army management

[Grim]

I need help figuring out how the player is supposed to pace the strategic layer of the game.
Currently, I am trying to move my armies as much as possible each day and fight as much as I can. However, opposing armies are always bigger and deadlier. If I play fair and accept losses, I cannot keep up the pace of the armement race.
Therefore, I feel I have to savescum and retry or avoid the fights untill I have 0 casualties or close.

Is this intented, or do I miss something?
Should I pass days/weeks/months waiting for (meager) reinforcements? Even after having built many recruiting facilities, I feel like the reinforcements will be too low to replace the losses AND augment my army to the level of the next enemy army.

About the number of armies. I don't see the point of having more than one, and other general than a caster. Enemy armes levels grow so fast, even a single army can't compete, stack sufficient troop and level the general. There are no low level armies to train a new army or general. My first general was a fighter, His abilities are really bad compared to a caster. Those can blast entire stacks of enemies in one cast, while the fighter has meaningless buffs.
Once again, am I missing something?

Thank you for any advice that would help me play this layer of the game smoothier.

[jlawleraz]

It is definitely something that gets easier as time passes and you get additional reinforcements and can buy more mercenaries. By the end of chapter 3 I had ridiculously large armies and full control over the entire accessible area of the map. I didn't personally pass days, but there is nothing wrong with doing that.

I did move my armies as much as possible to explore. But if there were only armies that were significantly stronger than mine, I avoided those and went to explore other areas of the map. For example, in chapter 2, I remember wandering around looking for beatable opponents - something like level 4 armies. Then I was strong enough to handle level 5 opponents and went around the map fighting those. And so on. There were only two reasons I would fight stronger opponents before I was "ready". The first was if my adventuring party had nothing else to do and needed my army to beat a demon army at a fort to go to a different area of the map. The second was if I needed to defend one of my own forts that was under attack by a moving demon army (related note - most demon armies do not move).

There are eventually a lot of decrees that help and events that help your armies - ones that help increase recruiting, ones that directly give you units, etc. Make sure to prioritize those when you get them. There are especially good choices that increase movement points for all generals and number of unit stacks for all armies.

You eventually end up with ridiculously large amounts of money from adventuring and selling loot. I would use anything extra to buy more resources to buy mercenaries for the army and to fully recruit every week. It is a long term strategy that pays off. I think by the end of Chapter 3, I had two armies, both level 12 or 13 with thousands of units in each.

Having two armies makes a few things easier like defending forts under attack because the armies can have "zones" that they are responsible for defending. But having a single army until you get more units than can fit in a single army is a good strategy, too. At lower levels, I agree that the caster general is the best because it works like an additional unit stack in directly damaging the enemy. At higher levels, casters are still good but I feel the rangers also start to come into their own because they typically get more useful feats/traits to pick from when they level up. Getting the ones that allow additional unit stacks and increase the infirmary size are very useful, especially early.

One tip unrelated to any of your questions. There is one specific area that your adventuring party will need to go through that has a big effect on the army. You'll get advice in-game to go as quickly as possible through this one specific area and not to be distracted by things in that area. The farther away your adventuring party is from taking that advice, the worse it will be for your army. So, following the in-game advice and going through that area as quickly as possible without getting distracted makes the later army battles much easier.