Yooo...
Yes, you should recruit and train in batches, but not batches this big. Just collect around 30-45 dudes, get them to T2 or T3 via bandit slaying, then collect another 30-45 and get them up to T2/T3. If you have 60-90 T3 units, you can take down a good chunk of lord parties with low-ish losses and upgrade from there.
250 T1 recruits are of course going to get absolutely murdered by anything slow enough for them to catch -- assuming they don't get run down and slayed instead. Even if you bought 250 horses, they'd still be pretty slow on the map.