Advice for late game conquering the map?

I've finally gotten to the point where I have my own kingdom, maybe 5 cities and 4 castles or so, each one owned by a separate loyal vassal I promoted from companions. Have better loot mods so easily over 10m gold, best of everything I need, high stats, can field almost 380 troops myself (khans guards and darkhans) 1-2k with armies.

The main way I can make progress is to initiate a war, take a city or castle and immediately end the war to fortify it, paying tribute if I need to. It's sneaky but it works to a point, but the way the AI plays is they declare war basically at the same time until its a 1v3 or 1v4 war. It forces me to either lose everything I've gained or pay massive tribute to pay off some enemies and focus on 1v1 war. Paying so much tribute and having mods to help with money just feels like cheating though and ruins some of the fun, but so is feeling unfairly piled on by multiple kingdoms at the same time whenever war breaks out. Mods or not, it feels unbalanced somehow.

And even when I am just fighting 1 kingdom, if it spans across the map there's virtually no way to defend sieges in multiple places at once. There SHOULD be a way to give direct or complex orders to vassals to defend areas or prioritise responding defensively, maybe there is a way that I haven't seen? Instead a war starts and AI on both sides seem to just pick whatever's relatively closest to them and siege it, and it becomes a game of giving and taking castles over and over again. I hate this so much.

Even if I spend all my effort imprisoning enemy lords to lower their numbers, planning to win a war with actual strategy, by the time I have a bunch of them I've already lost some territory due to not just focusing entirely on offensive sieges. In my current play through I had 28 lords as prisoners, 28 in my party alone all from 1 kingdom! By the time I had that many, most of my vassals were already their prisoners and they could still muster up armies in the thousands, even though our kingdom powers were the same strength. It's like even when it ought to be balanced and says it is, and I do all the right things, even use mods to give myself an advantage, the AI still finds ways to be ahead or take advantage of being multiple places at once. As it should, I spose, I like the challenge but it's either an unfair challenge or I'm missing alot.

Please help! I'm committed to conquering the whole map but am losing my mind with the back and forths and paying to end multiple front wars. I guess I should learn more on how to pay lords and mercenaries to fight for me, but other than that I'm stumped on how to win when so outnumbered late game.

submitted by /u/34221133412213
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