Preferred war strategy in Warband?

Both in native and Pendor I tend to go for a sort of Blitzkrieg strategy. As soon as war is declared I marshal my vassals and immediately siege the nearest city (only exception is if there are no close by easy-to-take cities but a very close and poorly garrisoned castle). Siege, autocalc the battle if my numbers are absolutely overwhelming (like triple or more) or play manually if they're not, choose to defer naming of a lord (so the fief gets automatically garrisoned, with about 30 troops in native or 80 in Pendor). Then rush the next nearest fief and do the same. I skip anything that requires a siege tower, and always have a fodder companion that maxes engineering.

The logic behind this strategy is that even though it weakens your marshalled force, the fact that the opposing lords are rapidly losing their fiefs will piss them off very quickly, and due to their unhappiness a lot of discontent will be sowed, and the enemy vassals will choose to meander off on their own and raid villages rather than answer the marshall's summons. Therefore, not only does my enemy lose a whole lot of territory, their marshalled force is often weakened even more than mine. Also, even if their force is stronger than mine in the field, I can often force a peace agreement through sheerly just bullrushing fiefs, and having the opposing monarch sue for peace because he's worried about being annihilated, even if my army is in fact on its last legs.

I've found it to be pretty high-risk-high-reward compared to the AI strategy of taking forever to marshall literally everyone before moving, then taking one fortress and usually sitting on their laurels while it's allocated rather than pressing the advantage. The only time I've seen the AI move even a little quickly is when they're against an enemy who's extremely weakened by fighting on multiple fronts. I will often move off with only a few vassals and take the first couple of fiefs while new vassals periodically join me.

My strat may well suck/be extremely basic. I've been playing this game a while but not multiplayer or anything and so open to any advice on how to improve, and what more experienced players do in terms of macro war strategy.

Submitted May 22, 2019 at 11:57AM by operationmeepo http://bit.ly/2QgKorD