The boost option was not there originally in the kingdom building rules.
I like the kingdom building aspect of the game, but some of it is frustrating in the game design. The DCs for the things you have to do scale faster than you can reasonably raise the bonuses for enough of your ministers that you're eventually faced with a bunch of problems that all have 15% or less chance of success. Usually, at that point, you've built up enough of a buffer in your kingdom stats that you can take a few failures without it being too much of a death spiral. But, it does slow down your advancement, which means it slows down the rate at which you can raise your advisor's stats.... I've played through the game a few times. First time, I had to go back about a year of game time after my game ended because of kingdom failure. Later times had the boost option, which helped, although I did a little save scumming.
One thing I did figure out: once you get the "main threat" of each chapter, there will be kingdom hits for not having dealt with it yet. For instance, in the trolls chapter, you'll get kingdom events about rampaging trolls (or perhaps just negative status modifiers? I don't remember). You have to complete the main threat to make that go away. After that, you have the rest of the 180 (or whatever) days before the beginning of the next chapter to explore the map, do side/character quests, and work on building your kingdom. It's annoying that you have to spend 2 weeks of game time doing nothing other than ranking up and advisor or claiming a region, but at some level that becomes part of the resource management of the game. It's just an unwritten rule that you have to do the main story of each chapter right away.
The other thing is: when you get down to less than one month before the time of the current "Ancient Curse", you have to be very careful. At some point before that counter reaches 0 (I think it's at 14 days), you can go to Bald Hilltop and deal with that one encounter. If you don't, you get daily hits to all your kingdom stats; when the counter reaches 0, you fail the game. So, if you have 17 days left, and start a two-week rank up (foolishly thinking that 17 is greater than 14, and knowing that Bald Hilltop plus travel time takes less than a day), you take a gigantic penalty. So, you have to walk carefully once the Ancient Curse timeout gets below 20 days or so.
(I also got in the habit of saving my game right before doing one of those two week "rank up" delays, because sometimes even when Ancient Curse wasn't coming, there would be a "surprise, you didn't do anything when an event came up, here are some penalties!" thrown at you at the end of that two week jump.)
Another frustrating thing are the mysterious things that can raise or lower your Unrest. Sometimes, decisions you make when talking to advisors will make Unrest better or worse, and almost never is it obvious ahead of time what that might be. (Very rarely, you might guess based on the sort of decision you're making.) I would just notice after a while that my Unrest was "Worried" or "Troubled" rather than "Stable"; I'd hover over it, and realize that a decision I'd made three months ago in game time (meaning I didn't want to go back and reload from that long ago) had made me take a hit on my Unrest. Can be quite annoying.
