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.
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.
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...
We too are taking rogue regions. Athios was taken using only 1 TO attempt, had 1 police unit supporting it and took a little less then a week to reach the point where it was stable in stats. Most the heavy lifting was done by a priest and a diplomat. One of the things that might have made it easier, was we did a RTO, so we had a lord instantly.
