Slitherine

quote:

ORIGINAL: morvael

Do not mix elements with units. Elements make up units (for example an infantry division unit will have several hundred rifle squad elements, dozens of gun elements etc).

1. Yes, pool are elements stored in home area, ready to be dispatched to units (that requires pairing them with enough men from manpower pool).
2. Yes, elements that are ready (not damaged) in units.
3. Usually you lack enough manpower to send all elements to units (remember, pairing), so that is the most limiting factor. Of course bad supply situation affects replacements too, but not as much as lack of manpower. Some items may be present in pool because no units want them (or not yet). Remember unit has only 32 slots in which it can place 32 different elements. There is no option to have, for example, multiple variants of Panzer IV (old, new, newest) in a single Panzer IV slot, so the replacement code is made in such a way to work around this problem. If a slot is critically low on elements it will consider swapping or upgrading to different element. It cannot just add a few of the new to all the older elements, they have to be sent back first.
4. BUILT elements are immediately added to units (these are usually auto-produced items like squads and guns), only elements built in factories (AFV) are added to pool, because they are built before replacement phase (and there will be 0 BUILT of those elements during replacement phase itself). Sent back elements are added to pool. That's why you'll see some of the auto-produced elements in the pool as well.