Managing your army | Army TW: Warhammer Guide
Your army is one of the most important aspects of the gameplay. It will allow you to conquer new lands that are controlled by other (enemy) factions, defend your own ground and prevent the enemies from seizing them from you, and to keep up high enough public order in the cities inside of a province before you construct the necessary buildings and the situation stabilizes.
General information
Despite the fact that the game allows you to solve some of the problems with a diplomatic approach (making alliances, trading, assimilating a country into your own, or making one of the other factions become your vassal), sooner or later you will be forced to recruit and keep a sizeable army. During the first several dozen of turns your main concern will be to fend of all the other factions, but afterwards armies of Chaos will flood the entire map. You won't be able to have friendly relations with this faction - the only solution here is to fight and defeat them.
Each army (aside from the ones located in the garrisons of settlements / cities) is controlled by a Lord. A Lord is what allows you to move your army across the map and perform various activities. Each faction starts with a single Lord, coupled with only a few units of troops. Aside from the Lord, an army can consists of up to 19 different units - regardless of their type, size, or numbers. A maximum amount of units in an army is 20 - the size of an army can be checked by looking at the vertical bar located right next to the banner of an army. The more filled the bar is, the larger the army accompanying the Lord is as well. Remember one thing - this bar represents the number of units in an army, not its strength or the condition of the troops. It's not a good indicator of the power of an army.
Recruiting units
Armies can be recruited by using two different methods - locally and globally. The former method is only available while the army you want to recruit the units for is located within a province with the required buildings (in any city - the only requirement is for the Lord to be within the province). If you leave a province and enter one that has no recruitment buildings, or when you enter an enemy ground you won't be able to use the local recruitment method.
The latter one, global method, means precisely what you think it means - your armies can be recruited anywhere on the map. There's only one condition - the army that you want to recruit units for must be set up in the appropriate marching mode (more on that can be found in the "Moving around the map" chapter), or be inside of one of the cities belonging to you.
There are two major differences between those recruitment methods - they affect the types of the units you can recruit, as well as their costs (and the time) needed to do so. Local recruitment allows you to recruit only those units that are available within the province that the Lord is currently located (buildings from the "Military" tree must be constructed in that province). On the other hand, global method allows you to recruit all the units that are available to you at the moment (from all the "Military" buildings in every province). However, the luxury of the second method comes with a price - recruiting units globally costs almost twice as much as locally, and takes twice as much time as well.
Given the differences of the two methods described above, you should use them during different stages of the game. Local recruitment will become handy during the first rounds, when you will one only a few settlements and you will lack the gold necessary for recruitment. Global method will be useful when there won't be time to get back to the main province (as the distance will grow exponentially) where most of your military buildings are located. By having several full provinces and developing them properly you should have enough income (and gold stacked in the treasury) to be able to recruit even the most expensive units.
Unit experience
Another important thing to remember about units is the possibility to gain experience by every single one of them. This does not work like in a typical RPG game where you gain experience points and spend it to unlock new abilities (it works like that for Lords and Heroes). Instead, units will gain successive chevrons ("belts" that appear right next to their icon).
Units gain experience points for their contribution in combat, and the exact amount they can gain is closely associated with their performance. Basically, the more units they are able to kill, the more experience points they will gain. Each unit can advance up to the 9th chevron. The levels are divided into three groups - 1-3 are brown, 4-6 are silver, and 7-9 are gold chevrons. Subsequent chevrons have a direct impact on the overall performance of the unit on the battlefield - melee units will perform better in close combat, missile units will reload faster and shoot more accurately, and so on.
Additionally, higher levels increase the Discipline of your units as well. Discipline is, in general, the morale of your units. The higher the Discipline value, the more resistant it will be to negative factors of the battlefield - flanking by enemy units, getting hit by artillery fire, being close to a unit causing terror, and so on. When the Discipline of the unit is broken, it will route, run away from the battlefield, and you will lose control over it.