Another update from Immortal Blob-Emperor Klas II of Scandinavia. In my achievement-hunting search for "Indo-Norse," "Norse-East" and "Never Start a Land War in Asia," I came up with a laid-back way to eventually "Conquer" the Western Protectorate. It takes a while.

• You need to be huge. You need a lot of soldiers, and you need territory near the Western Protectorate.

• You need to be able to raid the WP.

• It really helps to have descendants/relatives/vassals with the free invasions via the Alexander/Ashoka bloodline. Otherwise you have to let the "conquest" happen one holy war at a time.

All of the above came rather easy to me as a Norse blob.

Whenever I personally declare on the WP, a ~200,000 strong death stack spawns pretty far from where I can do anything about it. It was frustrating. However, I noticed whenever my vassals tried declaring, a mere ~40,000 troops got spawned. Much more manageable.

I granted land near the WP to my descendants/relative vassals that had the Invasion CBs. I waited for them to declare on the WP. When my vassal declared war on the WP, I sent my entire empire's army in Raid-mode to park themselves on all of the WP's counties. My 300,000 soldiers eventually became a meat grinder to the WP's soldiers and future reinforcements. Then I let my soldiers raid all the holding down so that the garrisons would be week.

My vassals finally came in and mopped up the weak counties.