The Administration toolbar has two main uses: the first is to tell you how many replacements that you have on hand, second use is to change the connections between your head-quarters, other units and the supply hexes. The following image is what you can see when, during a planning stage, you decide to look at the Adminstration toolbar:
During a day turn there is not much that we can do with the toolbar other than check our replacements and look at the supply levels offered by supply hexes. In the image to the left I am attempting to look at a supply hex, so I first move the cursor over the hex that I'm curious about. Notice that supply hexes are marked with orange borders, and that I can only see supply hexes from which my side can draw supply.
Clicking the cursor over the supply hex will result in two things happening. The first is that the familar highlight will appear around the hex. The Administration toolbar is different from other toolbars in that we can now select hexes that don't contain units or battle reports.
The second change will occur to the left side of the toolbar under the three dimmed buttons. Under these buttons is a short string describing the supply level that the hex can provide. These strings will be one of the following: "Very Good", "Good", "Moderate", "Bad", or "Very Bad".
When we start a scenario we typically have no replacements. It is only after a few turns will replacements begin to appear and an example of what changes to the Administration toolbar is shown in the following picture:
What rate replacements will arrive during the play of a scenario will depend on what the scenario maker set and the difficulty setting that you selected. Easier settings will result in more replacements that arrive sooner, while harder settings will result in less replacements that take longer to arrive.
Action-wise the Administration toolbar doesn't really do anything until night-time when you are allowed to make changes to your order of battle. You can tell when you are allowed to change the order of battle when you look at the toolbar and you see the Select HQ button is no longer dimmed and hence is now selectable.
The first step that you must do if you want to change your order of battle is to first select the head-quarter that you want to be the center of the changes. This is the familar process of moving the cursor over the unit that you want selected.
Once you have the cursor over the head-quarter that you want selected, you click on it to select the hex that it is in. Notice that this is a subtle difference to the Unit Orders toolbar where you selected units - in the Administration toolbar you select hexes.
To tell the game to look for a head-quarter in the hex that you just selected you move the cursor to the toolbar and click on the Select HQ button.
Notice how after clicking the mouse, that if there was one of your head-quarters at the top of an unit stack in the selected hex, then the image of the head-quarter will appear in the toolbar under the Select HQ button. Also notice how two other buttons are now no longer dimmed and can be selected.
The first task that we'll try out is attaching an unit to our selected head-quarter. The first step is to move the cursor over the unit of interest.
You then click to select the hex that the unit is in.
You then move the cursor up to the toolbar and click on the Attach Unit button. The game will think for a moment and try to determine if a connection can be made. If a connection can be made then the unit will now be attached to the selected head-quarter and will start to draw supply from that head-quarter. Notice that instead of infantry you could have attached other head-quarter units.
Other than attaching units so that they can draw supply from our selected head-quarter, we can tell our head-quarter to draw supply from a supply hex of our chosing. The first step to doing this is to move the cursor over the supply hex to which we wish to attach our head-quarter.
With the cursor over the supply hex of choice, we click the mouse and select that hex.
If this is a supply hex from which we can draw supply then you'll see in the Administration toolbar the short string describing the level of supply that's available. You then can click on the Attach To Hex button and the game will try to make a connection between the selected head-quarter unit and the selected supply hex.
After making a number of changes to your order of battle you can switch to the Unit Orders toolbar and have a look at the head-quarter connection information. If the changes that you requested were possible then you'll see the changes, but if something prevented the changes (maybe enemy units had gotten in the way of a possible supply path) then you will see that no changes have taken place.
Supply is a tricky business. If an unit moves too far from the head-quarters to which it is attached then it could find that its supply level starts dropping. To keep units up to the maximal level of supply you have to be very careful in organising a network of head-quarters that link through each other to a supply hex.
Supply levels drop by 1 supply level if the unit is more than 15 hexes away from its supply head-quarter. Every 10 hexes of further distance will result in an extra level of supply being dropped. The lowest level that this dropping can occur to is down to "Very Bad".
Sometimes an unit can altogether lose its supply path and become disconnected from its order of battle. Such an unit won't lose all of it supply straight away, instead taking a few turns to drop through each supply level until it reaches a supply level of "None". Once it gets to or near the supply level of "None" then this unit will become prone to surrending to neighbouring enemy units.
Units that have their immediate supply paths broken will display this by printing their supply level in red. If a unit is connected then the supply level shall be printed in white.