Why Turtle

[part_time_player]

How much you can blitz certainly depends on the MOD you play (if any).
Personally, it's a few simple house rules that stop me from blitzing that I use out of personal preference for a more immersive game experience. My main "rule" is to roleplay the faction leader's overall direction of his forces and management of the empire and I roleplay it as a nice guy on a mission to make his people succesfull.

[Grog]

The simple answer is that both turtling and blitzing are different game styles. Chalk and cheese.

I have never really played a turtle game, but have played long campaigns before with max rep/max chivalry objectives and had a lot of fun in doing so (ie: taking down the hordes with HRE infantry based armies after diplomaticly relocating the pope to Asia minor was fun)

I can see why people turtle(or moderately expand) as it does have a more historical aspect to the game than the 'take 45 provinces + city x/y' of the vanilla long campaign. ie: you can micro-manage an empire for a few hundred years and nurture alliances, all good fun.

However, uberschnelling blitzkrieg provides you with the greatest opponent known to man...TIME! Far more devastating than any AI*

(* - I realise that by posting this, I may attract the attention of an AI-driven hegemonising swarm in a far off galaxy, who will subsequently abandon their galactic blitzing and proceed to Sol at 233 kilolights to teach the dumb apes a lesson; in which case it's all ATPG's fault )

Also, for record speed blitzing it's not a simple matter of overwhelming the PLAI with outrageous stacks of unwashed peasants and militia, as this is a sign of using too many troops in too few places at once.

The reality is you have to fight a lot of offensive battles with threadbare armies against tough odds, as opposed to the Turtle defending castles/cities/terrain against the AI with a well armoured and upgraded garrison of elite troops, and generally advance warning of enemy incursions via spies/watchtowers etc so giving time to train extra men and recruit mercs/reinforce areas before the AI siege stack trundles into view.

So in all, two very different playstyles for different objectives.