Roguery Leveling Tricks
I find Roguery to be one of the best skills in the base game, right up there with Leadership, Charm, and Steward. In conjunction with good leadership and stewardship, it offers a pathway to a massive OP army -- dirt-cheap to operate & freely recruited bandit armies. The first 100 skill points yields perks that can give you 30% faster troop recruitment, 20% faster troop leveling, 20% cheaper wages, and 50% less food cost. Add another 50 skill points, and you can quickly walk up to 20+ stacks of bandits and insta-recruit them to pass off onto your companion parties to assemble free armies. Layer in Crossbow 250, and you can be doing T4 Forest Bandit / Raider armies for the total upkeep of T1 recruit armies, but I digress.
But it can be a pain to level roguery. 2XP per tier of bandit recruited or troop sold at the tavern, and some XP for using bandit troops in battles. Not exactly quick to level. And the larger gain pathways are risky (breaking lords out of prison, caravan attacks) or can tank your relations & traits (raiding).
Recently I found an early-game source of power-leveling; attacking villager parties. Join a kingdom as a mercenary at T1, and you can snipe enemy villager parties trying to head to nearby settlements to see their wares. You have to keep a small party, or else if they feel threatened by your power they will hide away in the village protected by the militia. But they are incredibly weak, worse than looters -- mostly unarmored with a bag of rocks and a scythe, risklessly dispatched on horse with a decent length polearm or a bow. No relationship loss for attacking villager parties.
The XP gain from wiping a villager party is quite large, around 500XP. But there is a caveat -- you have to attack them while they are in route TO a town with their goods to collect the roguery XP, if you wait until they are returning BACK to the village, no roguery XP for you (and also next to no loot). Not only do you get a good chunk of XP, you will also likely nab 1-3 sumpter horses or mules, a good source of pack animals if you are doing an iron-price run.
Anyone else know of any good roguery XP gain sources that aren't mentioned in the tooltips?