Trading regions early in certain situations

[Loki_999]

Been thinking about this a bit recently, and also what i've noticed about the AI when it has split regions (eg: High Elves, Dwarves, not Mordor though strangely). High Elves and Dwarves seem to perform a lot better when they don't have split regions. For example, in my current campaign, HEs were doing semi-ok, but Dwarves pretty sucky, but as soon as I took from the HE Rivendell, and the Dwarven western territories, suddenly both factions went into overdrive and within a dozen turns had rapidly expanded.

So, i'm thinking, what situations is it good to have a word with some factions and change the political layout of Middle Earth as soon as possible.

Here are a couple of options i've come up with:

Playing as Eriador: Trade western territories to HEs for Rivendell (if its possible). Alternately, eastern territories to Dwarves for their western ones.

Playing as Dwarves: Trade your western territories to Dale in return for as many of theirs as you can. Dale sucks, so offer them to hole up in the west where they can play with the OoG for giggles while you get on with the real business of cleaning up Middle Earth.

Thoughts? Ideas of your own?

[Duke of Metz]

One thing to keep in mind is that the AI gets a significant boost whenever it looses a key region - like Imladris for HE, Erebor for Dwarves - what are commonly referred to as "dread stacks". So when one of those split factions loses a key settlement and is no longer split, they get a significant free boost in there remaining theater. This will not happen if the settlement is traded/gifted away, thus the faction may not perform as well after trading away that settlement than they would if that settlement were captured.

[menawati]

Playing as Dwarves: Trade your western territories to Dale in return for as many of theirs as you can. Dale sucks, so offer them to hole up in the west where they can play with the OoG for giggles while you get on with the real business of cleaning up Middle Earth.

I've done that. You can get some decent Dale towns in exchange for your western settlements. I also seem to remember that the western settlements then rebel quite often and you can retake them and swap them again. You need one of them for victory conditions but easy to just buy it back later. But it just felt a bit sad screwing over Dale like that. More fun if you just smash the High Elves and take all those rich towns in the north west.