Quote Originally Posted by snevets
About the provinces, my point is you could make it nearly impossible to conquer the other two cities. That way the territory would not be easily grabbed. Besides, The major task for the unlikely Cretian Empire would've been: unite Crete, this would be well reflected in the mod through impossible odds at conquering the other territories (ignore realism for a moment and make Crete larger, than divide it into 4 or 5 really crappy provinces. This accomplishes the goal of simulating a war to unite Crete, while avoiding the downside of creating an easy empire base). Consider also starting them at war, giving them loads more men than you etc.
I like your ideas a lot, but I see some problems with implementing them.

Let's say we'll start with a Kydonian faction at war with Knossus and Gortyn. If we want to make the other two cities strong enough to resist Kydonia, they really need to be part of a full faction rather than controlled by rebels. This would encourage the AI to build in those cities effectively. So the problem becomes; to which faction should these cities belong? The player's faction is then going to be drawn into war with this (mainland) AI faction from the start of the campaign, removing some of the player's freedom to decide on their own initial invasion plan.

Ideally, the opposing cities would belong to another new small faction, also restricted to Crete, but this is impossible due to the limited number of faction slots available.

If I felt it was feasable to have them controlled by rebels and still put up a decent fight, then the idea would be workable. But, for example, I have never had a rebel city raise an army and lay seige to one of my own cities nearby. I don't think rebels are capable of this level of resistance?