Hi. I wanted to share some of my experience of modding the campaign AI and things I found when trying to reduce the snowball effects.
we know the campaign AI is very aggressive and I think this is done on purpose not to bore the playertypes that seeks that experience,
and with just 2 factions on the map they will get locked into endless war.
with that in mind i started to experiment.
Increasing the number of factions on the map with interlocked relationships (A hates B, B hates C, C hates A for example) can significantly increase the stability of the map and reduce snowballing.
But if we are going to make real factions they can't be too weak either, If we want a power ping pong effect each faction needs to start with a minimum of 2 towns.
towns are the real powerfaction for any faction and not lords, if you create a faction with just 1 town but 20 lords for example they still get steamrolled fairly quick as they can't recruit.
we currently got 48 towns on the map, this mean we can have 24 factions if each faction should hold 2 towns.
but balancing it like this is not ideal either and can actually speed up the snowballing as power projection increases significantly if a faction captures it neighbor.
just taking 1 town means a faction becomes half as powerful as its rival.
From my experience with 48 towns - 16 factions with 3 towns each is as far as we can go, and 12 factions with interlocked relation and 4 towns each is the best balance for vanilla.
Now lets talk about what we can do for artificial tweaks if we want a different type of balance and what we can do the reduce the speed of snowballing.
increasing garrison size works great if you want a slow paced game, but also have the drawback that it makes it very hard for a loosing faction to make a comeback.
then there is allot we can do scripting ofc, best examples i have seen is Nick's war attrition mod over at the nexus https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/145
But if you are not that good at scripting as just want to mod with XML the best solution I found is to create 'punching bags'
Fake factions that everyone hates and that will get the majority focus of war declarations.
setup a faction that has no holdings, and just a tiny army, or no army at all for example, you can even hide them off the campaign map by flagging the lords as 'wanderer'
has to be kingdoms else they go and join as mercenaries.
the wars against such factions lasts for a long time and can act well as a 'artificial peace time'
Increasing the number of minor hated factions also adds allot to map stability, but keep in mind that they will still go around and act as mercenaries.