wow! wow! wow! wow! wow!
This combat update is sounding fantastic!
I'm a huge fan of turn based events, be they commanding an army or just rpg fights, where you have to actually consider an ongoing set of factors and play a situation to your best advantage, rather than have everything effectively decided before hand by who has minimaxed the best equipment/units/powers.
For weapons, if there are so many other really dynamic events, had you considered simply adding weapons as basic flavour text, perhaps with minimal combat modifiers as you did in the wastes, similar to the way champions work now.
For example, you just get a description of an army and then a passage about them "wielding their dirty well made toxic bronze polearms!"
With each descriptor, bronze, toxic, well made, dirty, polearm, giving a slight plus or minus to battle score.
That way you wouldn't need to worry too much about really complex weapons in the game or major production chains, but could still have them in there as part of the over all flavour of things, and a way to make different forces more unique, especially if you had different armourers offering to rearm your troops with various weapons of their design, which could be better or worse than what your army already had.
With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)