Use diplomats/ambassadors/priests to improve loyalty at an astonishing rate. Your realm decided it could allow several faiths and has no hegemony? Tough luck.
Their efforts are useless when all stats reset to 1% at TC. I'm an ambassador with excellent oratory skill, and using those tools is a waste of time. I'm better off using my dozen or so men to do police raids, anything else before a lord is chosen is a waste of time.
I have in the past used traders and the black market to feed a region if it has no lord. I've never seen 96% of food stolen, generally I consider 20% loss on a ox cart to be bad. We have also never had a problem finding a knight willing to take up an estate in a ruined region, unless we already have a shortage of knights, in which case it is kind of mad to be trying to take a new region. Can always just offer to subsidise his/her share for a while, or promise to fast track their own advancement up the ranks for their service. Our biggest problem these days is the actual TO seems to take forever to complete. Could be something about the size of the realm.
Subsistence levels seem to be something not to rely on. Every full turn the region improves a little, which ends subsistence levels, only then they starve back to to them, or so it appears.
If you like to elect Lords, one way to solve it is to have an election before the region is TO'd and then appoint the winner, though I really don't love that option. Perhaps we need some code to reduce the negative effects in a region until a lord is elected? I would imagine the code would need to hold the region in an almost stable position to stop people using this to try and get a few days were they can really invest time to bring a regions stats up though.
Enweil is surrounded by rogue regions. But we can't really expand because we lack the nobles. But so does everyone else, so nobody is taking these regions. And since we can't increase our income by expanding to compensate for the loss of two cities during the invasion, we can't restore our economy, meaning a stalemate is the best we could wish of any war. It's rather stupid. And the region is question was taken in order to increase my duchy. It was taken by the western army for the western duchies, without the support of the main army and without the ruler being there to appoint anyone. How are dukes to gain greater independence if they suffer so many penalties from being part of a realm? And even if we had been sponsored and it was organized by the whole realm, I've seen enough times how even that is way more difficult than it should be. This particular case just made me realize how tired I was of how this issue evolved and how nobody was saying anything about it yet.
One thing that is clearly needed is for a way for bankers to control the markets of lordless regions and for new lords to be able to switch duchies immediately. One week of being imperial is just aggravating, when you consider that this first week is when it'd be most useful.
Yep. I agree. This really slows things down a LOT. Most realms fighting wars these days don't really try to take and hold land anymore. War has changed to a game of beating your enemy to a pulp, removing their ability to fight a war at all, and then dealing with the region TO issues in the post-war-peace-treaty period.
I've been heavily involved in military affairs on a different occasions, and this is *exactly* how I adapted my strategy. "Kill Riombara and DoA first, then we can slowly think about setting up friendly colonies there, when everything is rogue and no one is left to bother us and interrupt repair efforts".
I love looting, and was not the least sad to pick this as the general strategy, but as others have said, it sucked that no alternative was viable. Hell, we even tried a colony takeover in Rines, but they are so bloody difficult to pull off. Does anyone know why they are so frigging difficult? Colonies should be encouraged, if you ask me, but that's a different discussion altogether...
