Back in the day I had considered bringing raiding back. I thought it would bring more field battles as one army could guard several fiefs at once. Just keep the fief empty so you could ignore the raid, then rush over and reinforce when it was besieged. But that gave the faction with more members the advantage. We had plenty of small armies doing double duty of short trading and patrolling, so we were guaranteed to be able to reinforce. I brought it up with WotN, but they agreed it would not be a lot of fun.
I do find it odd that Acre raided. They seem to be having some management issues. Froi attacked Dirk claiming he had permission, but none of the Acre leaders seemed to have known about it. Were these raids done without permission too?
But it seems this HoC/Acre war has kinda degraded. Since everyone seems to want to screw each other over, I suggest you make such tactics as gear bugging, poll banns, and raiding part of the game. This will save you having to waste time building armies. Just make sure you have more people show up on your roster, then poll ban. People will start looking at the reliability numbers rather than the performance. Get a reliable roster and you could conquer the maps in months with just a few naked armies.