Sending cities rogue is much easier than you think. Now, it's no easy thing to do, but it's not nearly as hard as you are making it out to be. Inactive nobles are there only if it's the capital. Otherwise, it may have militia and walls. 'Lots' is a hell of a subjective term.
That's actually just the problem. I didn't reap anything. I am the second King, I am building off of the job of the first. Also, I did not ravage the city, in fact, I explicitly asked them not to completely destroy the city while I was in Sirion. Obviously, that was to no avail. My realm was put at the mercy of military strategists who would not have to deal with these consequences later down the line. That, indeed is part of the problem.
1) Walls and militia... and your army? If you don't defend your cities, you deserve losing them.
2) Assuming that cities have walls, militia, and a mobile army defending them, you need a lot more troops and a lot of siege engines to penetrate their defenses. Unless your realm is many times the size of the other, this is usually quite difficult to achieve.
3) You reap what your predecessor sowed, then. You can't expect to have it all handed to you just because you weren't the one in charge back then. That's just not how politics work.
4) So your realm could have not destroyed it, but decided to anyways? Your collective fault. You failed to sway them into not doing this.
5) Bad strategists? Again, your collective fault for putting them there and listening to them.
Sure, a city is easy to cripple, if you leave it undefended, made no allies, have rulers that ruin relations with your neighbors, made sure to claim it in a bad state yourselves to begin with, and didn't plan on eventually wanting to hold it and profit from its economy.
But then again, if you do all of that wring, it SHOULD be easy to cripple. Otherwise, in normal circumstances, it would become impossible.
You guys did everything wrong. Population growth isn't the source of the problem here.
