One thing angers me!!!

[Don't Talking Please]

i hate it when i try to offer a duke vassalage and im a king, and he says "small difference in rank" IM LIKE 10 TIMES BIGGER THAN HIM......... plus im related to him.

[CalPal_The_Great]

You're related to that Duke? Bad idea to give him a dukedom. Relatives might have claims on your titles and cause problems for your whole realm. Giving him more power will only make him that much bigger of a threat.

[Don't Talking Please]

No, im the king of england, hes his own country in Wales. i didnt give him that title, he already had it..

[ShadoWwolF]

if he is of your culture, you border him, and he likes well you enough then he'll still accept. if one of those things isnt true however then you'll either have to become emperor or make all of those things true

[Johann Gambolputty of Ulm]

Would you like to play LEGO with your bigger, bullying cousin and his gang of friends and sidekicks? Or stay on your own, even if with smaller set of blocks? :>

You would join the play only if you'd have enough strenght to make sure, that the play goes as you like and noone can steal your bricks or make others play pirates, while you want to play spacemen...

[i.e., he will join if you're his liege (so he may plot inside your realm and join factions - if he's outside de iure realm, he cannot f.e. start a faction for change of succession laws) or of his culture (so he won't get a "foreigner" penalty, reducing his chances in plotting); not everyone wants to be your lacquey, you know...? :]

[Don't Talking Please]

well, i gave up on advice and just kept declaring war...... and killing the leader.

[happycats517]

Well, he's a duke and you're a king. That means you're only one step above him in the game's fuedal ladder, regardless of size. Your size and overall strength factors into his considerations of your power. If he is a duke in Wales and you're the king of England, you are also not his de jure liege and if he has Welsh culture then he almost definitely won't join you.

[Zeetarb]

It does annoy me though when I'm playing somewhere like Ireland and my son and wife refuse vassalisation requests. Situation I'm currently in, 6 counties, 2 duchies ... one county away from forming the Kingdom, +100 relationship with each of them, pressed claims to get both of them their titles too; still no.

In my son's case it'd be the difference between him inheriting one duchy and one county vs. an entire kingdom, so it really irks me that he won't just submit. Am going to change to primo anyway, if only to stop my second son inheriting enough power to overthrow everyone else; but it's a shame the AI isn't clever enough to put it's self interest first.

[Johann Gambolputty of Ulm]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Zeetarb:

but it's a shame the AI isn't clever enough to put it's self interest first.

True, weird story. I've seen AI heirs doing everything to hasten their coronation, their succession, yet almost always they were thinkin with some calculations. Usually he would join, then trying plot his way up the "food chain" ;) Well, maybe the AI tries to reflect some certain stubborness or stupidity of some characters? ^^

[Zeetarb]

I've certainly seen some characters act very cleverly in their own interest, just none of my dynasts or relatives who seem completely stupid, every single one.

One game my Steward kept plotting to kill all sorts of random people all over Europe. After about the fifth-sixth one I finally had a look, and it turned out he was killing every relative of his wife because a distant relative of hers had been granted a county in Siciily a few years after they were married. He couldn't quite get over the line, she was second in line to an infant when he died.

But in some of my experiments with the situation above, I keep getting my daughter in law voting for people other than my eldest son (her husband), despite us all having +100 relations with each other.

Maybe some characters just hae a hidden stupid trait? Or more likely the combination of their traits leads the AI to make really bad decisions? Another example is I had the (content, +100 relation) wife in the scenario I mentioned in my first post fabricate claims on every single title I held at the time ... like her 1 county with no allies besides me could hope to push them against my 6 county realm, allied with both my son and also Scotland?