Vassal Management

How to make your vassals happy and play a significantly easier game.

Introduction

This will be a short guide to cover some very useful tips and tricks for managing vassals. I'll try to cover as many aspects as possible but might miss some so feel free to comment if you think something could be added and I'll look into it.

EDIT: With the conclave patch a lot of these recommendations are obsolete. I will probably not update it unless they actually fix the things they broke(education system etc) since I do not enjoy playing the game in it's current state. Can go on about this forever but they broke the game in the last patch and thats thats. If you play an old patch this guide works fine.

Increasing opinion

There are several things you can do which increase vassal opinion.

- Educate their heirs. I find this to be one of the key things that you have to do when managing your vassals. This is also something that can make vassal management somewhat tedious when you expand and have alot of duke level vassals. The 25+ opinion with the heir is very much worth it however when he/she suceeeds to the title.

If you have an adult heir I would definetly consider letting him educating the majority of vassal heirs since when you do you will most likely already have the "long reign" bonuses and won't need it as much. Besides, it's very worthwhile to have a few people who like your new ruler more when succession takes place. When doing this however, you have to bear in mind that your heir will get to select the traits for the educated characters which essentially means the AI. If you can match the educated characters traits perfectly with your heir you may be able to win more that way, especially if both are able to get traits such as zealous which gives a hefty 30+ opinion. The AI should generally try to educate characters like themselves though.

As I mentioned above, trait matching is very important to consider. You will want to give the characters you educate traits which matches your own since that gives opinion bonuses. Thus, it's important to bear in mind those traits might not always be the ones that are best on paper.

Titles and grants Another way to increase opinion is to give characters a title or grant. I won't go into details on how to specifically give them out but it's very important to consider where you will benefit most from handing out an honorary title. I usually check the vassals tab under the military section ingame and hand them out to vassals with a high possible levy size which I do not have a very high opinion with already. Titles like cupbearer should be given to vassals which will basically get close to but not above 100 opinion from doing so since that specific title gives a higher plot power for assassinations against you if the vassal dislike you.

A main problem I am often faced with is I conquered a duchy and I want to give it to a family member to make use of the same dynasty opinion modifier. The only problem is theres noone approapriate to give it to. A good way I found to solve this temporarily is finding characters which have the celibate trait and are lowborn or the only person in their dynasty. Hand them your spare titles and inheritance will fall to you while they are unable to produce an heir. If you cannot find any men with it then find women, the younger the better. A woman who took vows of celibacy when she was 20 years old is likely to outlast her 50 year old husband. If you can find neither then find a very old man and marry him to a woman past her 40s, past 45 if she has the strong trait. They will basically manage your territory for you and improve the holdings until you either increase your maximum demense size or get a suitable relative to give it to. These guys will also have 100 opinion with you since you just granted them an entire duchy with the lower titles. Never ever create baron vassals unless you intend to keep the county yourself. Give the barony off to the same guy who's recieving the county and he will get an opinion bonus for the baronies too.

Archdukes Giving a vassal multiple duchies can be a great way of making vassal management somewhat easier if your realm is extremely large and spans several de jure empires. One key thing to make sure of when handing out the duchies is to not give too many titles within the same Kingdoms. If the vassal controls more than 51% of the de jure areas within a kingdom he will be able to form the kingdom and then you will have an angry vassal who wants you to transfer the remainder of the vassals within the kingdom to him. A good way to make sure they can never create Kingdoms is to give them duchies within different kingdoms. In practice, this means that you retain all the benefits from having duke level vassals as an emperor but can still raise massive levies from them since your imperial crown laws affect the ducal titles even though they are not within your de jure borders. The problem with Kingdom vassals outside your de jure territory is that their personal crown laws will apply and give you an additional penalty to levies and enable vassals within the kingdom to have more freedom.

Feasts Feasts is an excellent event to increase vassal opinion. Make sure you spend the maximum amount you can on the feast, it's not that expensive if you're managing your holdings somewhat properly. Vassals will never get negative opinion of you from holding a feast, if you spend the maximum amount on food. You may get negative of them but that doesnt really matter. There's also a chance of making a friend during a feast which will give you a 100+ opinion. This
seems less likely to happen after the latest patch however.

I haven't really found anything useful from summer fairs or hunts. Usually just barons opinions which are affected and it seems to be some kind of trade off in most cases.

Chancellor Your chancellor has a very useful task which gives a rather high chance of increasing the opinion with select vassal by 30 for a period of 4 years. I tend to use a simple rotation of the chancellor the vassals which dislike me the most.

Bribes I really consider bribes a last resort since they can be very costly. I use them occasionally however since Dukes are usually not that expensive to bribe and you don't want anything higher than dukes below you for reasons I wll come into later.

Times when you want to consider bribes is when you are facing a possible civil war or when you need to squeeze some extra levies out of a powerful duke.

Vassals who hate you I tend not to put any of the above mentioned things on vassals which genuinely despise me for some reason. The reason for this is that I will definetly be looking towards replacing the vassal instead by revoking his counties or killing him off. This should ofcourse be done when you recieve a just cause for doing so. To sum up, put your resources on making the vassals in the middle or high opinion segment like you even more.

What not to do/Maintaining opinion

Kingdom titles With Charlemange, handing out Kingdom titles is not really an issue anymore. This wholly depends on whether you'd like to run with Imperial administration or not however. With Imperial Administration, you will get free duchy revokations which obviously means that you do not want kings. It's perfectly viable to only play with feudal vassals however which is something I personally actually prefer doing since it is easier as they get no opinion hits with you from having Imperial Administration or handing out Viceroyalties. If you're playing as the Byzantines/Roman Empire you can easily manage this however due to the whopping 25+ opinion from having both Born in the Purple and Augustus traits.

There's two main reasons why Kingdom vassals are fine now in CM.
1. There is no longer any opinion malus.
2. The AI is able to create titular random Kingdoms(much like the player is) and will do so upon reaching the requirements. This means that Archdukes with a lot of duchies will start creating titular Kingdoms.

As you might have guessed, there are still some limitations and rules for doing this in an optimal way. You want to control which Kingdom title your vassals have in some way. You want them to retain preferably only one Kingdom and you want it to be in the de jure territory of your Empire. A great way to do this is to form custom Empires. Forming a custom Empire means that all your currently held Kingdom titles will instantly become de jure territory of your Empire.This, in turn, means that your Imperial Crown laws will override the crown laws in these Kingdoms. If they would not be part of your de jure Empire, the crown laws of the individual Kingdoms would apply, meaning that you might not be able to always raise a large amount of their vassals and that they might be able to wage war on your other vassals.

When you feel you have a decent amount of Kings, I tend to run with around 10, you just keep them around and keep handing conquered territory to them. You split this territory up between the Kings so that they can never form any new Kingdoms of their own. This will ensure that your crown laws still applies in your entire realm as the AI will never create titular titles of the same rank as their own.

Title claimants Never hand out titles to current of future claimants to your titles. This means you should simply eat up the prestige penalty for having unlanded sons. The opinion penalty for vassals with claims to your titles is massive and they will most likely cause trouble.

Archdukes Archdukes is a great way to play the game and it was unchallenged as the most optimal way before the introduction of custom kingdoms. However, I need to mention one thing that you need to be very careful about when playing with vassal dukes who control 4-10 duchies. Never ever give them enough counties within a de jure kingdom to create that title. Having vassal Kings is a major headache compared to Dukes, especially if their Kingdom is not within your De jure empire. King vassals who are not your de jure vassals will actually act upon their own crown laws meaning that they will not provide you the guaranteed levies that your Imperial crown law should entitle. Some real problems can occur when they have gavelkind on their new title banded together with minimum Crown authority. You manage to revoke the kingdom titles but you cannot revoke any titles under the kingdom since the crown authority doesn't allow it. You cannot destroy the kingdom, or any other title in your realm because that one little kingdom has gavelkind. Duke's can never have crown laws however so make sure your vassals stay dukes. A note is to take extra care with small kingdoms such as Bohemia and the northern spanish ones. Give these kingdoms de jure counties our county by county to different Dukes among the Archdukes you already have.

Barons and Unlanded chars You should never give out any honorary title to a baron or unlanded character. Their opinion doesnt matter at all. The higher the rank, the more you should focus on them. I generally try and appoint my dukes as councillors too even if it results in 1 or 2 less stats on the job, mainly due to the reason that the opinion boost for having them in council is very worthwhile. The only time you could consider giving honorary titles to unlanded chars is if it concerns your heir. He can use the extra prestige that comes with such a title when he succeed you. With the appoint regent function implemented in CM, it can also be a good idea to hand it over to your wife when you go for pilgrimage or if you know you're about to die and you're leaving a child successor. Your wife will almost never mess up stuff if she likes you and when you die she will most definitely not mess up stuff for your son. Make sure to give her a gold gift if her opinion with you isn't 100. It should really be if she's your mother though. You should also have picked a wife with high stewardship skills which means that she will make an excellent regent and you will be forced to give no lands away.

Landed Heirs While it can often be good to give your heir some land, this basically covers the misteps that can be made while doing so. The first thing you have to do is to make absolutely sure that none of your grandchildren of your heir will be adults and ready for marriage before you die. Your heir(the AI) will marry them off very stupidly otherwise. If your heir has a female heir himself he might just game over you. If you make that mistake, hire assassins and eat the negative opinion hits. It's better then game over after all.

Crown Laws, Inheritance laws and realm laws

Crown Authority Crown laws are a much debated issue on different forums and players seem to have different opinions on how high you should actually go. A consensus between all players is that you should always get atleast medium crown authority. Medium crown authority will give you some important benefits while still not crippling vassal opinion too much.

There are several pros and cons from going higher. Personally, I tend to prefer actually going higher, even up to absolute, especially if my realm is fairly large and my military organisation tech is high. This is mainly since my retinues and levies should be so strong so that no vassal can even dream of challenging me. My breeding program should also have gone to the lenght where my characters turn out almost perfect so I will never end up with an imbecile with bad stats. High or Absolute CA can be a serious mess if you're not comfortable with maximizing your characters so I would not recommend going there for newer players. Atleast not until you get a bit more hang of the game.

The reason for going to high/absolute crown authority is basically as the tooltip says. Vassal titles cannot fall outside your own realm through inheritance and vassals cannot wage war at all. The only vassal wars you will see is revokation or faction wars. This is obviously useful for keeping your realm neat and tidy. Increasing your crown authority will also let you raise more levies from your vassals regardless of whether they like you or not, this is very good for succession.

When increasing Crown Authority it is important to time it correctly. You don't want to do it during a time where alot of vassals have a low or average opinion of you. I tend to do it after a few years when the short reign bonuses are gone and people like me alot. When you have a very old ruler and non-elective succession you can also do it since he will probably die soon anyway.

Inheritance Laws In my opinion, there are two viable options for inheritance laws. This is, laws that you will want to try and get. These are Primogeniture and Elective or Tanistry succession. You will probably start out with Gavelkind(aka Gravelkind). Make sure to swap from it ASAP, ultimogeniture is even far superior to it.

Tanistry succession is only available for celtic cultures so I will keep that short. It's basically similar to elective except that all your vassals one and two ranks below you are able to vote and they can only vote for you family members. They will generally prefer older family members. I haven't tried this law alot but I have heard of mixed results with using it. For some it seems to work well but it seems that you risk ending up with old rulers, which is a bad thing. I'm currently playing an Irish game to try this so this section might be edited again shortly. This law gives you a 10+ opinion with dynasty members and a 5+ opinion with vassals. Thus, it is good if you want to land mainly dynasty members.

In Elective succession all vassals one rank below you may vote for you successor, however, Dukes are always valid electors, even in empires. Elective succession will give you a 20+ opinion bonus with vassals but a -5 opinion modifiers with people of your own dynasty. This means that if you want to play a game with only members of your own dynasty landed, then you won't get opinion modifiers from having elective. Elective succession will basically let you choose your heir as you please, assuming that your vassals does not hate you(which they shouldn't since you have elective succesion=20+ opinion). If you like to tyrant around alot this is probably not a law suited for you but it is very stable if played correctly i.e. if you're nice to your vassals.

Primogeniture is the second law which is very much viable to play with. It does generally require some gamey tactics however if you want to optimize succession. This is by far the most stable inheritance law. It basically means that your oldest child inherits everything from you. It will give you a -5 opinion penalty with dynasty members however but that's it. The gamey tactics that comes with it is that you will probably want to kill off any non optimal heirs who are higher than your best heir in the line of succession. This is not generally a problem if you're big enough but if you're smaller it might be. Small Kingdoms are the ones who are crippled the most for this since you have to pay a high price for assassinating your sons since they are princes. Primogeniture is probably the optimal law if you're like to tyrant around a bit before your old ruler dies off.

Realm laws These laws concern feudal, city and church levies and taxation. Since I never play with any prince-bishops or lord-mayors/republics(and I don't think you should either) I always max out those two in both areas. In regards to feudal laws you should be a bit more careful however. A no brainer is to maximize Feudal Levies. It will only give you a small opinion malus of -5 but it will allow you to raise the full levy of your vassals assuming they like you enough. Feudal taxation should be left on none, let the nobles keep their privilege of having to pay no taxes. Since you only have feudal vassals above count level, you should cater to them. The opinion malus from having high feudal taxation is also massive at a total of -30 opinion so I wouldn't recommend going there. It might be ok if you're a reformed roman empire with both the augustus and born in the purple traits but that's the only scenario I can think of tbh. Besides, if you have reformed the roman empire, your income should be more than sufficient anyway.

Other tips and tricks

Powerful dukes

I said previously that you should never make your dukes too powerful in regard to yourself. Which is entirely correct. If you control a single kingdom you really dont want a duke who controls more than one duchy in it. However, it's not all bad letting your dukes have some power if you stay below absolute crown authority since this means that they can go conquer themselves. It's then usually fairly easy to revoke any gained counties from them and redistribute. What I generally try to do to balance off the power better is to have alot of dukes which are all members of my dynasty. This means that they are all allies which has many benefits. If they're in a war and has a whole lot of allies they are very likely to win, thus expanding your empire. This also goes for revolts against them, your family members will help each others out so the dynasty will never risk of losing a duchy due to war. Alot of allies equals alot of power which means they neccesarily won't need that many counties, keeping them harmless in relation to yourself but dangerous to others within and outside the realm.

Destroying duchies

A great tip when you reach somewhat further into the game is starting to destroy duchies that you control all counties within. This means that as your demesne size increases up to 10 or above, you don't have to hold the crazy large duchies yourself but can keep several smaller ones with good counties. For instance, if you play as France, you obviously want to hold the county of Paris because it has 6 holdings, but the de jure duchy only has 3 counties. When you can only hold two duchies you should quickly realise that as your demensne increases up to and above 10 it's not really viable to have such small duchies exist as titles. As byzantium, you got the same thing with Constantinople, a small duchy of 3 counties but the capital is the most powerful single county in the game due to the Theodosian walls, which means you do want to hold it. The 25% increased levies from having a large duchy has to be weighed against holding several smaller ones ofcourse. I would almost go as far as to say that if you're not able to play with Thrace and Constantinople, you want to select a 6 county or at least 5 county duchy. Some great duchies to play with are Flanders(probably the strongest one ingame), Toulouse, Seville, Barcelona. There are a few more in India and Arabia but these are the European ones that I find the best.

Another great benefit with having no duchies at all within your demesne is the option to hold your vassals duchies for them. This means you can effectively keep two recently conquered duchies at count level until your heir suceeds you. Single you probably already gave away a bunch of counties with baronies to the person, he should be maxed out on opinion anyway so theres no need to give him more just for the sake of it. Upon succession, your heir can then distribute those duchies to the person that owns the land within them and the vassal will love your new character.

Securing Succession
This is probably one of the more important aspect in the game, and while not directly related to managing your vassals, playing a great character will obviously make your vassals like you more. There are several ways to have control over succession and it's best exercised as a Catholic, Fracatelli or Orthodox ruler. You need to have the ability to excommunicate. Using these methods below, I have been able to play almost entire playthroughs always having a genius ruler.

The idea is to excommunicate your sons that you don't want to inherit and simply force them to take become monks and take the vows. Take heed that you only need to imprison your heir however so you should disinherit those between him and your chosen successor before disinheriting your heir. It's a fairly simple method but might be considered a bit gamey by some. After you have made your sons monks, you can simply give them a bishopric if you want to get them out of your court.

Now you might be thinking "Woah woah, stop now. I'm a duke/king, I don't have a vassalised pope and the current pope will not accept my request to excommunicate my son!" Let me tell you that it's not a problem, non Emperors can just as easily disinherit their sons.

As an Emperor, you should have vassalised the pope by setting up an antipope and push him claim on the papacy. The vassalised pope will always accept your requests.

As a King, you have to set up an antipope to do your bidding. He will be able to perform the same things as a real pope would. Take heed that he will lower the moral authority of the catholic faith by 30%, making heresies more likely to occur. If you are Fracatelli, the Pope has only ducal tier however which means that you can have him as your vassals even though you're a King.

As a Duke, your vassals are not powerful at all if you have listened to anything this guide has to tell you. You want to control a very large amount of your realm as a duke, thus vassal opinion is rendered obsolete. This means that you will simply imprison your sons and eat the tyranny, you can chose between excommunicating and forcing them to become monks after that.

NOTE: After holy orders have formed, they are likely to join the Holy Order when being ordered to take the vows. This feature is currently bugged and will most likely never ever be fixed so if they keep returning to your court and are placed back in succession, you will have to execute them and take the Kinslayer trait. Once you have the Kinslayer trait, I would advice you to do some gardening of your family tree since the opinion malus with it does not stack. I find it totally worthwhile to take the Kinslayer trait to secure succession however. Make sure to grant your sons inbetween the selected one and the heir bishoprics.

Epilogue

I hope you found this guide useful. I'll play/think abit myself and probably add some more stuff but if you feel something could be added feel free to throw a comment.

Thanks for reading.

[Kon]

To add to that, it's very problematic when you conquer king tier titles from other religion and have a landed noble rule over it. Those Kings can be quite fickle and can convert randomly. Viceroyalties are great for those kingdoms that needs conversion. If the Viceroy decides to convert, I can choose a stronger candidate after the title reverts back to me.

[Kon]

Great guide. Personally, I love having Kings under my rule, I also give important and powerful kingdom titles out as Viceroyalties. Sometimes I even reward multiple kingdom titles to my vassals. One, on an Empire scale, it's very difficult to manage threat. There's usually only 2-3 targets you can actually declare war on. With powerful Kings on the boarders of my Empire, they will slowly, but surely expand my boarders for me. Two, powerful kingdom titles, especially ones close to my capital, are handed out as viceroyalties. Since they can't expand my boarders, they will look to my other vassals for expansion. So if their domain gets too big or powerful, I can easily revoke it and have the title back when they die.

[nigel, FatBloke]

I Like to play as scandanavian its a nightmare there all mental

[RichardMNixon]

Thank you, as a newish player with about 100hrs in game, this really helps with planning my realm, particularly keeping my underlings happy while I expand.

[3Bizmark]

Just change the part about assasinating your children for succession. Sadly you cannot asssinate your unwanted heirs anymore.

[SPRÆY]

"gardening of your family tree" hehe , im kind of unlucky with eugenetics but the boost it gives is most apreciated

[Asphyxion]

I also added a section under the tips and tricks about how to manipulate succession, I hope you find it useful.

[Asphyxion]

Thanks for all the nice comments guys. I just made changes to some section to make it more up to date with the methods I'm using in Charlemange.

[tjj113]

very useful, thanks for time and effort

[SPRÆY]

good tips, thanks +1