We absolutely should fill out our professional and semi-professional slots, yes, but its not the immediate priority that hunting down Arnold Vincennes and killing him dead is.
EDIT: Changing my vote back, I agree, having Arnold alive any longer than the shortest we can create is bad news.
Respectfully, this just looks like fear mongering to me. I have addressed your point upthread and have yet to see a rebuttal to it.
What, precisely, do you fear from Arnold Vincennes that mandates killing him immediately -and- why do you believe that sending assassins to do it is significantly more likely to succeed than putting a bounty on his head?
I have asserted that he has been a traitor for a nontrivial amount of time and as such will have already leaked sufficient damaging information and at this point will have been debriefed of presumably most of anything else valuable on his arrival in Teuv. At this point I don't actually think there's much more that you can stop unless the debrief is taking an unusual amount of time or he is dragging the process out--in which case he is paradoxically much more likely to be protected from assassination or bounty hunters anyway so you're just throwing the Influence point and the assassins away.
Raising that number of troops, most of which are militia, is both incredibly expensive and counts us out of being able to go after Arnold Vincennes. If you think that raising more troops, which will be a constant drain on our already overtaxed treasury, is worth letting a noted Teuvian agent who worked at the heart of our nation for years go free then you're welcome to vote that way. I happen to believe its not.
We absolutely should fill out our professional and semi-professional slots, yes, but its not the immediate priority that hunting down Arnold Vincennes and killing him dead is. It can, simply, wait a turn or two until we have an influence going spare because, simply, if our vassals were going to revolt they would have done it last turn when we were new in office and hadn't pacified some of them yet. We're healing even more issues this turn with Sonissimmo and Capo aren't in any fit state to rebel against our rule given what they're dealing with in terms of Teuvian infestation.
Not to mention I'd rather do all the recruiting in one action for purposes of influence efficiency. And having us purchase militia regiments for our minor houses is a huge waste of money, instead we should just instruct them to do it themselves whilst creating the infrastructure improvements to allow them to pay for it themselves.
We can't afford to do all of the recruiting in one action and we basically won't be able to without strict econing for multiple turns yet. If we were capable of strict econing, then there's nothing stopping my plan as is. That said, your position here is hyperbole either for the sake of argument or because you haven't looked at the numbers closely enough. All of the militia recruitments combined give 5 regiments for the cost of one professional one at something like 1/3rd of the upkeep. And outside of special modifiers or there being too many of them to fight together, they should probably utterly smash that one single one if it came down to a straight fight. If anything there is a compelling case for spamming Militia for a rainy day after we get our logistics situation more straightened out but I'll leave that one alone. Either way, they're dirt cheap if we don't need to use them--and since you're arguing that we don't, I don't see the problem here. (And if we did, obviously we'd be glad to have them.)
I'm also unsure if you looked at the actual minor house economic numbers here but I will tell you that they're not good and they're not going to magically get better within any reasonable time table such that telling them to recruit on their own won't bankrupt them. Having to recruit a Longbow Militia unit right now on their own would literally bankrupt them. Yes, they will see economic improvements down the line, no it's still not going to be enough to really let them do it on their own. I refuse to compromise by saying that we're just going to do recruitment multiple turns down the line, that is a classic and often fatal error. You do not have the luxury to sit around and solely tech or econ and not build units, you deserve and will get hit in the face for doing that. As an example, the dock facilities will take 5 turns to complete, a time period that you apparently propose to not have them build units at all?
Beyond that, I remind you of the instructions given for regiment recruitment:
[You can also force recruitment on your six Minor Houses by paying 50% of the cost, with the other 50% being picked up by the Minor Houses]
It was never even mentioned as a valid action to tell minor houses to recruit solely on their own, nor is it likely to be one without some kind of Reputation hit.
Lastly, if we spend in the Influence now on this, since I'm also arguing against the assassination anyway, and it saves the Influence point next turn on this recruitment *anyway*, when we'll certainly run into more things to expend Influence on.
As for our vassals, Vincennes certainly isn't pleased with us. All it takes is Carlisle not being sufficiently happy with us and the two of them have a good shot at rolling over Raleigh and Tellar together, or at least making it a close thing. That's unacceptable. Soft power is useful for keeping them in line to make them not inclined to want to do it but it's inferior to hard power making it so even if they decide to, they lose anyway. And hell, even Raleigh isn't all that happy with us after the losses they took skirmishing with Sonissimmo.
