I was there for the fight last night at BK's village. We had absolutely no gear, weapons or construction material. The only construction materials we had were stolen from your stockpile when we swarmed your spawn and died mercilessly.
This is not the first gear bugged battle HCE has been the attacker of so people suspect HCE of gear bugging villages to prevent peasant gear from spawning. ITs highly suspicious when there's been more than 1 battle in which this has occurred with HCE being the attackers. To ignore that is being intellectually dishonest.
However the ban poll and kick polls done at the BK village defense.. was not defensible either. But tension was high and people thought HCE gear bugged the village and wanted to get back at them. Dont blame them for thinking that but ban polling a player to get their weapon is against the rules and against the idea of fair play.
I think HCE needs to clear this up to try and dismiss the rumors of gear bugging they have against them and to proceed from here as best they can. Sorry to hear Louie lost his army and gear. A high loss and if there's anyone in HCE I don't think would intentionally gear bug, it'd be Louie/Behemoth. But we'll see if anything can be done to figure out why this is occurring.
If anyone can answer Anders' questions, that might be the one of the best ways to figure this out and to understand if this was intentional gear bugging or mismanagement of fiefs (leaving goods in which seems like it could prevent fiefs from spawning peasant gear). Its not looking good for HCE with multiple defenses lacking gear. If it was just BK or just HoC at that castle siege, that's one thing but its both as well as Kalmar. To try and dismiss it as anti acre propaganda is not understanding the gravity of how that looks to the rest of the community. So let's try and clear it up and see if mismanagement, raiding fiefs (if the raiding mechanic doesn't take goods), or if intentional sabotage was the reason. Or perhaps mismanagement at some and sabotage at others.
Hopefully some admins can chime in on what they can do (if they haven't already).