Can you sabotage a faction you belong to?

Question

Currently I am a vassal for the Kingdom of the Nords, with a small village part of my estate. It takes everything I have to just keep it from being raided since I don't know if / can't figure out how to garrison at a village, and my long-term aspirations is to one day have my own kingdom.

However, I'm the kind of player who likes conflict, and I don't want to conquer the whole world or even destroy a whole faction, and currently the Nords are getting close to eliminating the Swadians, something which would irritate me to no end.

Is there a way to stop this? Can I "help" the Nords lose? It seems that even if I don't participate in their attacks and campaigns, they're winning the war at an alarming rate (causing other factions to declare war and this is quickly turning into a world war).

Answer 1

You are very limited in what you can accomplish in terms of sabotage. The only thing that comes to mind will cost you a lot of friendship points with various lords and may end up getting you kicked out of the kingdom.

What you can try to do, is to sow dissent within your kingdom by questioning the success of your marshall. If you can somehow get him evicted and become the marshall yourself, you can command as many lords as you can into attacking strongly fortified positions or just to lead them to the other side of the map while your castles/towns/villages are sacked.

However, losing towns or letting villages be raided while you are the marshall will cost you a LOT of friendship points and will get you evicted in short order.

The only other thing you can do is to talk to each lord and try to send them in wrong directions (I suggest you ride to so and so location, etc). This also requires you to be on good terms with those lords first.

As for fortifying your own village, you cannot, but if you have certain mods installed (I highly recommend Floris mod), you will be given to option to swap fiefs and/or send out patrols to defend those villages.

As a last resort, since you only have a single village as a fief, you aren't too attached to the Nords and you can simply defect and join Swadia instead to help them out.