Like I said, haters gonna hate.
A new noble is ~19 years old. Unless you've been playing a character for RL years, we're all of the maturity and inclinations of modern day university students. To have *everybody* roleplaying as either a grim chessmaster or a Roman general is wildy nearsighted. People read too much into the "serious" part of SMA. SMA is just a euphenism for realism. Sha'Shanti acts like what you'd expect from a 19 year-old girl who just inherited her daddy's empire.
http://wiki.battlemaster.org/wiki/SMAOff to more substantive matters, not enough people have realized how code changes over the few months have completely upended grand strategy. The whole Alliance A's doomstack vs. Alliance B's doomstack is really suboptimal now.
First the agriculture system was put in. Rural provinces produce surplus food which cities need. Cities provide the megabucks needed to field armies. Mismanagement and turmoil in previously "filler" provinces now threatens starvation in the cities, which take RL months to recover from. Irvington went to shit in what, June or so, and still is 5000 population short of max.
Then not long after Danaris and Tom's spat on the forums, sea travel was released. Since Dwilight was previously a donut with some itty bitty islands in the middle, you were stuck along some obvious beaten paths. Now with alittle preparation, you can crisscross the donut hole and bypass rough terrain for long journeys.
But quietly last week, a small announcement was made that got surprisingly little fanfare. The realm adjacency requirement for annex land now extended across water! Whereas before you had these medieval Maginot Lines and alliances blocking clockwise or counter-clockwise expansion, now you can grab anything with a coastline. D'Hara had been independent so long only because previous geography stated Luria had to annex them either from right (Sallowtown) to left, or left (Port Nebel) to right in sequence. Hence they made impenetrable defenses at Sallowtown and Port Nebel and laughed at the world as we were forced to try and get our best doomstack to their city walls.
Combine those three, and now you got some revolutionary opportunities for warfare. I haven't seen any calculations for amphibious landing penalties, but you'd think a 5+ noble army (respectable but modest by current doomstack standards) would be enough to beat the average rural militia garrison. Burn the silos and attempt a takeover. Keep an eye on the scout reports, and escape into the sea before their doomstack clobbers you. Laugh as their cities starve when winter comes. Get a warm and fuzzy feeling as you spend the next six months watching the difference between the population on
http://battlemaster.org/testing/regionlist.php and its max on the wiki.
Chivalry is a romantic notion and not very SMA beyond the most superficial of levels. Welcome to total war.