Battles that require you to suicide 50 times to get access to gear suck. So here are a couple ideas to lessen the QQ and increase the PEWPEW.....
Option 1:
While under siege:
-Defender can sell broken gear (-1,-2,-3,-4).
and/or
-Defender can sell up to a certain percentage of the total value of his/her gear. (IE: 15%)
Either way would allow the defenders to get under the 200 item limit fairly easily. Obviously this would have to be fine-tuned as crappy gear en mass can be valuable loot. Perhaps a combination of the two rules could be implemented allowing for the selling of broken gear only up to a certain percentage of total gear cost.
Option 2:
A more general solution would be for both commanders to select a "roster" of gear that has 200 slots for item types. This gear would be the only gear available during the battle and the gear not placed on the roster would be looted by the victor. Since some armies use a lot of gear in small stacks perhaps a secondary roster could be implemented where the gear becomes available as the original roster depletes. The key to this is that the commanders decide which gear will be available for use not some bug.
Option 3:
Fix the bug involving more than 200 item types.
Thoughts?