The Tavern

I played a HOGl^Beogh lately and unexpectedly enjoyed it a great deal. I did win after an extended dry spell, and that helped, but I found myself actually liking the grooming and shepherding of my little army. I have a few questions, some prompted by finding various tavern articles widely separated in time, and others from my game experience.

1. Can you give armour to orcs, or just weapons? I would love to be able to give swamp dragon armor or scarves of cloud immunity etc. Or a large shield, since I noticed (sample size: one) that the orc Beogh gave a shield to lasted the whole game.
2. How does weapon base delay affect the friendly orc's attack speed? A warlord, for instance, hits for 32 + the weapon. Ought I interpret this as 32 slaying, and give a faster weapon? Beogh posts I've found suggest this is the case. Do higher HD orcs swing faster than lower HD orcs?
3. I settled on giving a polearm if the orc has a non-reaching melee weapon or a ranged weapon, give a ranged weapon if it's already carrying a polearm. But I'm thinking now that I would be willing to give a non-reaching weapon if it had {rPois}. Will that do what I want it to?
4. What can one do to encourage Beogh to name an orc? I had a warlord that surrendered to me at near-death stay nameless for a very long time, while random wizards and warriors got names.
5. I found that after I abandoned my army for an extended time, such as when I did Swamp:4 myself because most of my knights had bladed weapons, when I recalled them the chaff had disappeared. Is there an abandonment time-out for followers, and is it a function of follower HD? After noticing that I obsessively recalled my army so I wouldn't be abandoned by my core bodyguard.
6. What is the piety cost of smiting?

Thanks for your help.

1. Yes, but you can only give one item per follower per game. (so if you give an orc some armour, you can't give the same orc a weapon or anything else.)
2. I think it's based on the weapon's base delay, so your orc warlord should essentially have 32 slaying. Not 100% sure about this one, but HD is definitely irrelevant,
3. Yes. If you give an orc something with rPois, it will gain rPois.
4. It's random and you influence this can't at all, unless there's a really spoilery mechanic which i don't know of.
5. Not that i'm aware of. Maybe some hydras bumped into your orcs and killed the weaker ones, because i think neutral monsters attack stuff that's in their way.
6. 3 Piety, so relatively spammable.

5. If you abandoned them in Swamp they may have got confused and drowned at some point.

1:
Warlords after 15 runes:
viewtopic.php?f=12&t=17583&p=241607#p241607

Most of them have GDA and a few who got weapons (artifacts = resists).

actionable advice: give all warrior orcs polearms, only train a small amount of orcs at a time, preferably give orcs spears or tridents because they attack faster with them and beogh can gift them shields because those are one-handed

But let's say they already have a polearm, and you can gift them something else. Ought you gift a one-handed ranged weapon (HSling, Fustibalus, hand crossbow, maybe even a blowgun)? Or an randart that isn't polearm but has a useful resistance? Can you even give scarves or other aux armors?

In my experience, beogh usually ends up gifting ranged weaponry eventually, and either way them being able to actually use ranged weapons depends on beogh gifting them ammo.

So, my priority list is this:
1. 1H polearm*
2. shield
3. ranged weapon
4. anything else
*I think it's debatable whether or not it's better to give orc ranged weapon if they have 2H polearm, but if their weapon is not polearm always gift 1H polearm

high leveled orcs chew through basically all enemies if they can reach them, while raising their defenses doesn't help that much so your main goal is making sure your orcs can reach enemies. polearms make this much easier all of the time because they let them attack from farther away and they let you or other orcs attack over them, essentially multiplying the amount of orcs that can be attacking in a given turn in many situations. ranged weapons also help orcs reach things very well, but they won't have ammo all the time and they can't attack over each other with crossbows. your orcs are never going to be all that tanky, but getting shields gives them more survivability than getting somewhat better armor, and has the benefit of only working with 1H polearms which are better for monsters anyways(and so, once an orc has a shield, it will never "upgrade" to a worse kind of polearm.)

don't gift blowgun, don't bother with non polearm weapons. the utility of orcs attacking from 2 tiles away and over allies is unrivaled. let me put it this way: having 6 orcs hit something at once is better than having 3 orcs hit something slightly harder. also, when they don't need to walk right next to something to attack it, they naturally don't tend to put themselves in danger as much, or walk into entrances you wanted unoccupied, etc. it makes their movement much smarter by proxy.

you cannot gift orcs aux armor, rings, etc. Only body armor, weapons, shields.

That helps a great deal. In particular, learning that follower ammo comes only from Beogh.

Well, IIRC orcs also get like 20 ammo or something when you give them a ranged weapon, but that doesn't last long.

If you want to grow your army without losses, park them in the temple. The reason for doing this, is that it has no hostile spawns. If I recall correctly, the game simulates "what happened" on levels you return to, at the time you return. This can include allies getting killed.