Equipping allies?

[tromboneandrew]

I'm playing a fairly decent Orc Beoghite Priest, and I've noticed that my Orc allies occasionally pick up weapons while in a fight to upgrade their equipment. But what is the rhyme and reason behind this? I've tried toting along some good armor and tried dropping it and maneuvering them to be standing on my dropped armor while in a fight - and they don't seem to want to pick up what I want them to.

[Kate]

They probably are set to the default pickup behaviour, which is only to pick up equipment dropped by other allies. If you press ctrl+t, you can change it to allow them to pick up items dropped by you (then they'll swap to things you drop at their feet, if it's better than what they have), or anything.

To save the boring micromanagement I went through most of my last HOPr just allowing them to pick anything up, and hoping that if there was anything really good I'd get there first (or turn pickup off if I'm doing V:8 or somewhere with lots of loot). This works pretty well and lets you get some pretty awesomely equipped warlords, although I did find that one had nicked a wand of healing from somewhere, and that another was pointlessly carrying some scrolls of blinking and lots of gold. Be sure to give your orcs bows/crossbows when they start showing up everywhere. Unfortunately the AI is useless when it comes to prioritising these, sometimes they'll drop a stack of 200 arrows and replace it with 5 runed ones, or refuse to swap their darts for a crossbow.

[RangerC]

If you have your orcs on autopickup, they are biased towards picking up weapons with the most base damage (meaning you can't give them randarts so they would actually have resists - they will dump them for a bardiche or something like that). It would be nice if they used a more through selection method than just base damage (maybe shop value) to pick their weapons.

[MrMisterMonkey]

If they feel like using them, give your orcs any *Rage (berserkitis) weapons you manage to find, too.

[tromboneandrew]

Thanks, guys. That gives me some good information to work with. I've been concerned about my newly elevated orc knight walking around with a club and leather armor.