Over the years, many new features have been implemented and that had probably unintended effects of making expansion much more difficult. It is now almost impossible to do a friendly takeover and then maintain the high sympathy in realms where lords are elected.
For example, ox carts used to produce no or little waste from my memory, and brigands have been made to steal a bunch of these transfers to favor caravans use instead. However, new regions without lords cannot set purchase orders, and as such caravans are completely useless in them. Bankers have also lost their options to move food around, and have much less power over warehouse settings in regions. As such, since most regions TOed tend to lack food, starvation always hits as soon as the TO completes, there is then no effective way to feed the new region, and sympathy drops to 1% within a day or two. And since control is often at occupied when the region is taken, ox carts aren't an alternative. Out of 100 bushels sent to a new region captured, 96 or so were stolen by brigands. Who can afford such a ratio to feed new regions? Even if people had caravans they couldn't sell directly to the region until a lord is elected.
Furthermore, the maintenance modifiers by duchy just aggravate the situation. It was desired to disfavor imperial regions in order to give incentives to lords to align themselves to a duchy... But all new regions are necessarily imperial. Maintenance efforts and therefore much less effective than they used to be. And to make matters worse: even when a lord is finally elected, it takes a full seven days before he can actually switch allegiance to a duchy. So that can easily mean about 12 days where all efforts show no gains.
And how is subsistence-level farming supposed to work? The other day, our new region was starving. Then it returned to subsistence level farming. Then this morning it starved again and all stats reset to 1%.
Also, without any knights, the region suffers a control penalty on top of the lack of estate penalties. But how could it recruit a knight when it has 0% production? And because of this, production suffers and a vicious circle tends to be created, one that takes disproportionate amounts of work to break out of.
On top of that are control issues due to the size of your realm that have a nasty centralizing effect. How can we honestly prone ducal independence and large-realm penalties at the same time? These harsh penalties force ducal cooperation, as expanding your duchy without the aid of everyone else in the realm is starting to get pretty damn hard.
All of these new features aimed at modifying how people act with a bunch of penalties are stacking up with what I believe was an unintended effect: expanding is now a hell of a lot harder than it was when I joined the game. This, imo, is a problem. Even if most these features affect those who elect their lords a lot more, they all affect everyone. And everyone switching to appointment is not a valid solution, as it only reduces the negative impact of new behavior-control mechanics and would reduce the gameplay possibilities significantly.
It is becoming more and more frustrating to takeover new regions. And I've been seeing more and more people say, over the years, "No, we will no get into a conflict with our neighbor, because we do not have the means to sustain any more regions". It's suffocating the gameplay. Wars are significantly delayed because of maintenance issues, when they are not avoided completely. Players are spending more and more time and effort on region maintenance over the years, and less over actually fighting. By focusing on the duchies and regions so much, we increased overall maintenance needs and made in sort that instead of having a few bureaucrats maintaining a whole realm, you now need a few per duchy if you want to avoid maintenance problems and seek to maintain reasonable tax levels.
