This discussion seem to raise few questions:
1) fixing unrest costs the population.
I haven't seen that. Taxing to 200% reduces population, but as soon as tax is set to less or equal than 100%, the population stops shrinking (unless death scale)
2) patrolling kills a lot of population. Does it? I've never seen more than dozen or two brigands killed during the patrolling, and this is quite rare, more typical numbers are below 10. It seems to be something like 0.1% of population.
3) realism of 200% taxes, unrest and population reduction. When the army marches through the province and battles there for a month (1 turn), foraging in the process, increased unrest sounds very reasonable. The army may choose how to do it.
Being kind to population and foraging carefully (tax=0%) will not cause populatin loss may even decrease an unrest, marching through pillaging quickly on the way (tax=200%) will get some part of population killed (2% ?) and certainly will cause unrest (because of taking away herds, seed, burning houses and infrastructure etc). Pillaging (as in "pillage") for an extra month would probably mean army going in various areas of the province and pillaging all their way through, instead of pillaging quickly on the passage. As expected it causes massive population loss and unrest. The middle way (tax=100%) implies that the army loots within a reason, without taking everything and does not do the damage for the sake of it. In this case there's a mild unrest and no population loss. And one should remember that nearly all those provinces were free only 1, 2 or 5 years ago, so probably different armies are all look as invaders to them. All this looks very sensible.
4) Hit, destroy and run tactic and how it impacts the balance. I wish experienced players would comment on it. The obvious impact is that there're may be 2 kind of wars: full fledged war, where everything goes and "border dispute" where military action are limited to the border provinces and the opponents are intent on annexing those provinces rather than damaging them. This may affect diplomatic relationship, sides in the border dispute may come to peace to make an united front against other enemy. Hit, destroy and run tactic will probably be not welcomed early in the game, because nobody would want to get into this kind of war ealy on. But of course, Ermor may welcome this tactics even if it's not involved directly
