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Yes, the flaw (or depending on your view, feature) of vanilla M2TW that made blitzing so effective was the very high amount of money gained through sacking cities, especially large ones. In essence, the average amount gained per city was large enough by itself to pay to raise enough militia/mercenaries to sack the next city with some left over, so long as you didn't take too long between cities. Thus a "blitz" campaign could essentially be sustained indefinitely until you ran out of provinces to conquer, there was no need at any point to slow down in order to consolidate and tech up or indeed to spend any money on anything other than troop production, hence my comment about missing out on 2/3 of the content of the game.

Most mods for M2TW tone down the sacking income substantially, making it a less viable strategy. Although opportunistic raiding (taking an under-defended, well developed city, sacking it, demolishing all buildings, and abandoning it) is always an effective tactic, and it's certainly still possible to expand fast, I've yet to see anyone manage one of the insane 20-odd turn blitzes on these.

Hence why I draw the distinction between blitzing (referring to a campaign characterized by the fact that the income made from plunder is sufficient by itself to sustain the campaign) and simply expanding quickly (where it is still necessary to develop the captured lands economically).

Pretty much my thoughts, actually; in M2TW blitzing represented the path of least resistance, teching up at all was essentially putting yourself at a disadvantage. It would be nice if in Empire life would get harder the longer you put off consolidating your gains.

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