Integrating Gullvalley yeah sure. Once we shut down Second Sons we could digest their stat points.
Freehills:
-Smaller, weaker actions compared to ours. Consider the scale, they should be at 1 Old Main, 2 Old Secondaries. Which is to say they have only 1 Main by our standards. Our Mercenary Company has more Martial than they do.
-No Navy. They don't even have grand docks to build warships with. They'd be reliant upon integrating Trell rapidly to use Trell
-Historical feud. Freehills was founded by the people in the world who hate the Trelli the most. Our warriors spent nearly as much time stopping them from lynching the Trelli civilians during the past war as actually fighting the Trelli.
-Geographically nearer, so its easier to get people in place.
-Government model uses direct democracy, which is a model of government that scales up poorly at Iron Age tech level.
Ymaryn:
-Stronger actions. Reminder that we didn't even put much effort into smooshing pirates. We sent a secondary war mission and forced the Pirate Hero to retreat.
-Has a Navy at all. This being an advanced stat, it's quite significant.
-Historical knowledge and options for dealing with vassals. We have the options to Support and Influence subordinates directly, of which the latter was obtained through a decision chain to give our subordinates lots of shit to flip them.
-Geographically further away, though administratively not that far away by Catamaran.
I believe that Freehills can hold Trell, but would be forced to do it the brutal way if they wanted to keep it.
A common pirate operating method is to raid and loot from one party, then turn around and trade with the other. When they raid Trelli shipping they sell to Ymaryn traders, and when they raid Ymaryn traders they sell to the Trelli. Selling Trelli loot to the Trelli or Ymaryn loot to the Ymaryn is not sustainable before someone catches on.
This is needed because pirates need docks to repair their ships as well. Ships are maintenance drama queens, and relying on boarding operations to capture enough ships to keep your fleet going is difficult.
This is why large pirate groups usually wind up founding their own ports...which isn't an option if the Ymaryn hold the entire Black Sea, because it becomes very simple to hunt down such a group. They'd be forced to operate past the straits in that case.
Yes, Salterns are very nice.
The raw wealth income however is secondary to Mediterranean access. For as long as we don't hold Trell our traders will persist in making us get access, which is pressure for war, or hideous fees or canal megaprojects etc to bypass, most of which you already oppose.
It also means Tinriver can launch Sailing and Trade missions again, since they can now reach Khemetri.
If Freehills control Trell, we wind up paying them for the privilege of using the straits, we don't get the income boost and this will last for all of 3-5 turns historically before the deal breaks down.
Functionally, we don't gain 3 Wealth of income(which offsets all current costs), we take 1 Wealth of further losses, and the whole arrangement is inherently transient.
Meanwhile, Freehills doesn't like Slavery, that is true, but they don't have organized religion to transfer the values.
It's a nice Catch-22. It'd be Right to do their contracted duty, but said duty is Wrong.
But what happens is they'd just do the massacre. Remember what happened after we rented the Red Banner to the HK and TS? They came back thinking it's not so bad after all.
Unfounded argument. Our subordinates are not breaking away, even the two subordinates stated to be at the highest risk for breaking away.
Lovely ad hominen argument there.
