Looting will be changed. It will be made significantly more effective in the short term, so that economic warfare becomes truly viable as an alternative to conquest. However, it will lost much of its long-term effectiveness, because the form that effectiveness takes is swaths of wasteland that no one wants, that take months or years to recover.
Right now, if you want to force a realm to surrender, you most generally have to do one of two things: Either take or loot rogue enough of their regions that they are utterly unable to produce an army, or serve them defeats for so long that they are utterly demoralized and no longer wish to fight.
Imagine, instead, a BattleMaster where you can win wars by actually winning battles in the field, combined with sabotaging your opponents' production, so that you can successfully march your army across their realm to their capital, where you can camp and, again, destroy their production to prevent them from recruiting. Their regions, while unproductive during the war, would recover relatively quickly once peace came, whether they held them or you did. This would allow the next war—for both realms—to start again sooner.
Wait, you're saying this WILL happen?
That's very good news. It's often bothered me how many battles happen in BM wars: RL armies are hard to rebuild. A few decisive battles can win a war.
