1. Am I correct in noticing that province defense increases resolve BEFORE move orders? Cause that seems a bit cruel.
Eh... Not really. PD isn't amazingly effective, so barring a small raiding party it doesn't make much of a difference. Well, unless you're willing to dump tons of gold into PD that is. Which is definitely not the best idea.
2. If a province is cut off from the capital/main mass of a faction, does it suffer supply damage? One time an AI force advanced into my territory, only for me to cut off their gains into a two province bubble. In one turn, 30/50 of them died (without any fight I could see). This is with 3 cold mind you, and the attackers were those bat people vulnerable to cold.
Supply is not affected by being connected to a castle/fort, though I believe that they can project supplies out in a bubble around them. Additionally starvation usually takes a couple of turns to kick in. So what most likely happened is that the AI was dumb and was rampaging its zotzes through a bunch of low supply provinces and ignored the fact that they were starving. Then a bunch of bats concidently bit the bullet after you cut off their gains.
Alternatively scouting reports are extremely variable, so unless you actually saw them fight it could have just been your scouts messing around with you.
Alternatively alternatively, zotzes can fly. So they could have shuffled guys out and around. Or something.
3. Anyone know a mod, hotkey or option that makes stealthed scouts more visually obvious? I keep forgetting to move them. Warning on end turn sort of helps but not in finding the damn guys.
Use 'n' to cycle through commanders without orders, or something like that. Also mashing '?' on a screen usually produces a window that list all available hotkeys on that screen, so maybe you'll find exactly what you're looking for that way.
4. I used my pretender to help expand rapidly... and now she has a limp. Any way to deal with that?
The obvious ones are Gift of Health and the Chalice of something or other. Can't remember the name off the top of my head. But both require high nature magic, which may not be an option. Alternatively you can look for commanders with the HEALER tag, which heal a set amount of afflictions a month. But only certain nations get to recruit/summon commanders with that tag. So if you're one of the many nations without them, then your only option is to suck it up and just deal with it.
5. This is less of a minor question, but if I wanted to make a "suicide squad" that could go up against a huge enemy force and still inflict reasonable casualties, how would I go about doing that? I've heard talk in this thread of mages who curse the whole army before they die and such, but there don't seem to be many AoE spells and all of them are restricted to higher levels.
Well... Yeah. You've hit the nail on the head. The kind of spells you're looking for are all in the upper tiers, and generally are hard to cast. Unless you get freespawn from somewhere, my advice would be to look for something else to damage your enemies. Though with that being said... If you want a good suicide squad, you need two things: A way to damage the enemy, and a way to keep the suicide squad alive until they can do their job.
The most obvious/classic suicide squad would be Pan's Maenids backed up by Iron Bane and Rising Fury. Maenids are berserkers, so Rising Fury causes them to go instantly berserk and thus will never flee. So your commanders/mages can safely back out of battle after their job is done. Iron Bane causes all armour to rust, so they'll break in a single hit. Maenids have no armour themselves, but dual wield fists. So the idea is that they'll break the enemy's armour with one attack, and then bludgeon them to death afterwards.
Rain of Stones is another good suicide squad tactic, if hard to pull off cheaply for many nations. It attacks every single unit on the battlefield, so it can deal some good damage and kill squishy mages. Plus if you give the caster good armour they can usually survive, which means you can cast it again. Or retreat to harass the enemy another day. You might have to give the mage some chaff to live long enough to cast Rain of Stones, but still. It's a good tactic and something to dread when fighting enemies who can utilize it.
You could probably do something similar with undead, who never flee but need undead leadership to keep them together and have blind vision too. So something like solar eclipse + scores of undead could deal damage before being wiped out themselves.