If you're a warlord...

Take a few tips from warlords who succeeded in empire building.

Build roads. Take hostages from the previous nobles and your new client nobles. Make them responsible for keeping it pacified but educate their young sons into your culture. Definitely build roads and garrisons. Use any soldiers not actually in the field at the time for constucting roads and public works so that it's very, very easy for your army to get from wherever a garrison is stationed to any problem spot.

Then your people's merchants come in and sell them on a lot of luxuries found only in Empire and in a while these dependent peolpe start acculturating to you.

The roads are essential, your troops must have mobility within your areas. Also take over any temples and incorporate your now-ruling culture's religious ceremonies. Make sure your god marries their local goddesses. Make sure your people's priests take over the local holidays. Dig in deep. Make it worth the while of petty nobles, merchants and artisans to stick to your Empire and prefer it to their previous independence.

Conscript any surviving males of the captured region. Train them elsewhere than their home region. Once trained, break up ethnic and cultural groups, intermingle them and ship them to completely different fronts where they are not fighting their personal relatives but people they don't know and might not like. Or field them against their hereditary enemies, now that they have your special training and better military hardware, that really gets some enthusiasm going.

Trick them at every turn, use both the carrot and the stick, and never turn your back on a conquered province.

Oh and if they are too resistant, just kill them off and chain up any noncombatants as slaves, they're worth something to folks back at the capital, at least they can die in the arena or be taught to serve in the fields depending on how resistant.

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Ooooh, Robertsloan2 thank you! You've just given me a rough outline idea for my Empire's history!

A couple of counterpoints/additions to robertsloan2's comment, which you might like to consider.

Yes, yes and yes. Also: build a good communications system. The Persian Empire had a relay system set up across the vast empire: the same rider can change horse at every relay post, so their horse remains fresh and they can keep riding at high speed until they reach their destination.

The 'Greeks' of the Battle-of-Troy era used fire signals, as in tLotR movies, which is useful for sending a single message (Troy has fallen! Or, in tLotR, Shit is about to go down!), but not as good for detail. Still, it can travel even faster than a relay horse.

Carrier pigeons or other birds are another method. The people of Cappadocia in Turkey used to cultivate pigeons for this purpose.

Roads are essential for troop movement, but also for communication. If a region rebels, the King (or whatever) needs to know ASAP so he can determine whether to send in more troops.

This... does not always work. People can be very, very defensive of their religion, and letting them keep their religion -- and some of their local culture -- can give them less incentive to rebel. Your ruler might decide to act different depending on the region and how the people initially react to his/her invasion.

The Persians had a system of satraps ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satrap ), where they often let local rulers govern their own areas. Local rulers carefully chosen, mind. The edges of the empire were always a bit blurry, true, but this gets almost inevitable when an empire reaches a certain size.

I find this approach more interesting, but YMMV.

This wasa used by Elizabeth I to warn against the Spanish Armada invading too, they had beacons all along the south coast to light when the first ships were seen. I actually live near a few of these historc beacon sites, they're more like viewpoints now up on the hills near where I live.

Thanks for all the inspiration.

You can be like Joshua from the bible and just kill all the males of a population.

Rome after the destruction fo Carthage was another large slaughter and destruction of the fields (planted with salt).

I think it was Attila after conquoring of one town that resisted him had the right ear chopped from every person and made into a pile.

Vlad the Impaler got his name form putting people on pikes and letting the weight of their body slowly push the point through them till they died.

Alexander the Great 'Helenized' the people that he conquored (which is the idea of bringing Greek culture to small satellite colonies where ever he went).

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A more diplomatic way of being a despot is creating a unified foe. The idea being, "The enimy of my enimy is my friend." So the province in question is actually being fought over by 2 or more powers--Empires A and B or Humans and Goblins or Religion X and Z--and one side maintains a hold over the hearts and minds of the province people by demonizing the other side. It is easier to make people hate the other guys than it is to make them love you. This is where ignorance and superstition really pay off. It worked for communists and cult religions. ;)

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