Is blitzing still an optimal tactic?

In the RTW engine, and thus in EB too, blitzing was an optimal strategy. Move your armies fast and snap up whatever you could get, as quickly as possible. Scrape up some mercs to replace your losses and do the same again in the next province along. The AI was often too slow to respond to a blitzkrieg, and thus it was an easy way to defeat them. For some factions, it was the only viable strategy because they were in regions which were quite poor, and so slowly developing your empire was a downward spiral to bankruptcy and eventual domination.

I personally find blitzing tedious and uninteresting. "Beating" the game fast isn't a goal of mine, I want to be able to play out more than 50 turns before it's effectively over. Growing too fast is no real challenge and invalidates playing a historical mod when that sort of growth was rarely possible. Besides which, it gets you into the province-management phase of the middle game, where you spend most of your turn doing administration, that much faster.

Are things any different in the M2:TW engine? Are you still left in a situation where if you don't expand, you'll simply go deep into the red unless you happen to have some rich provinces with good ports and mines?

With recruitment even more restricted than EBI, it should be harder to build and rebuild armies - that should slow expansion.

Historically, though, empires did expand very quickly; some were built during the reign of a single ruler. Building an empire shouldn't be that difficult - holding it together should be the real challenge. I'm more worried about how public order/character loyalty functions.

Less than a century before the start of EB, some Macedonian upstart managed to conquer a little bit of land in a short span of time. One would imagine that not every faction on the map of EB has the same goal, or outlook towards expansion. To some extent EB has to cater for both possibilities. If you have full-blown Diadochi wars, a realistic possibility would be for one of the Diadochi to collapse, and the victorious one to quickly usurp the lands held by the fallen rival.

As Rex noted, growth and shrink of an empire or or state is often not piecemeal. A lot of it depends on how the expansion is achieved, and to what purpose. If you are trying to expand a trading empire, you'd be less inclined to slaughter the local population for instance. If you achieve the expansion after massive wars, in terms of population involved, then more rapid expansion is on the cards. But also increased instability in all likelihood.

The engine cannot adequately model population and governance dynamics. For that it is simply too limited. I am not even sure how far scripts can go on this engine to impede blitzing for factions for which it would not have been historical. Even that is stretching it a bit. The Romans for example did not have the same attitude towards expansion throughout the time frame in the mod.

The only hope we have is that scripting / settlement mechanics can stop the unhistorical kind of blitzing. And remember: one of the key reasons why overexpansion by human players is not punished is that the AI is often too poor to actually exploit it. Against a human player blitzing will be punished. Here is to hoping that EB2 can be played in multiplayer mode (better than what was possible on EB1).

Blitzkrieg is not a problem in itself. The problem lies in what happens afterwards. It shouldn't be easy to hold all of this newly conquered territory, but it *was* easy in RTW (even if a bit tedious at times), unfortunately.

Are you talking about blitzing at least 1 or 2 towns as quickly as possible after the start as a necessary prerequisite to balancing the economy, or blitzing later in the campaign?

The first I don't have a problem with - the latter I do.

In EB1, the Eleutheroi became less effective after 50-60 years because their generals died off and weren't replaced. So blitzing the Eleutheroi in the early years was my first priority for most factions (except those neighbouring the Selecids, who needed to blitz them instead to avoid the AS predatory superpower scenario.)

Another factor with my Eleutheroi blitzing was that, except for Casse, you couldn't be at peace with the Eleutheroi, so if they were your neighbours you had greatly reduced trade income from them. So that was another big incentive for me to attack Eleutheroi relentlessly early in the campaign. If I could have made peace with them, I would have happily let them live, but being in a state of endless war with a neighbouring territory was something I couldn't bring myself to tolerate.