Is there a way to make sure my player heir gets everything?

[Kid Named Finger]

I feel like I can never make headway because my high chieftain dies and then everything is separated between my children. What's the best way to go about changing succession laws so this stops happening?

[lardbucket]

try to change your succession to elective till you can unlock single realm heir

[NewbieOne]

Originally posted by redacted:

I feel like I can never make headway because my high chieftain dies and then everything is separated between my children. What's the best way to go about changing succession laws so this stops happening?

You can keep your family small and make sure you only have one son (one child of the 'dominating' sex according to your religion/culture).

You can disinherit your juniors if you're the dynasty head.

There are ways of forcing them to take the vows.

If you aren't into metagaming, I recommed denouncing the rotten apples, so that you (and everyone else in the dynasty) get a valid reason to imprison them. Let's say your ruler doesn't want a Sadistic son to rule any part of the realm — denounce, imprison, force to take vows. You probably don't want to execute them and incur kinslaying.

In some cases you can delay marriage, for example when you have a brother, uncle or cousin ready to inherit. Or you can decide not to remarry when your wife dies after giving birth to just one son.

Another good but difficult way is to at least make it to Partition (regular Partition, with no adjective, as opposed to Confederate Partition), which means that titles will not be created for your younger sons — they will only inherit titles already had by you. In that case, if you have only one title of your highest tier, the realm shouldn't normally split (I can't guarantee that it never will, but lower titles shouldn't normally go independent, so if you're a king your duke sons shouldn't become independent of your king son upon succession).

A middle ground is High Partition. High Partition is an interesting law because it provides for some inheritance for younger sons, but gives the eldest a 'lion's share'. The game tries to give him about half and tries to make sure he gets titles under your primary title, rather than the 'border gore' of typical partition. This means you won't get to keep your whole domain, but you can make sure your eldest son is dominant by… making as many younger sons as you can — so that younger ones will get like 1 county each and pose no individual threat.

One exploit you could use is to grant all counties except for your capital to your oldest son before you make more sons. However, this can get tricky if he gets inherited by a daughter or startings giving those counties to vassals. But if you're 60 and widowed, then perhaps it's an acceptable risk to give everything but your capital to your heir (especially if he already has sons of his own and isn't sick) and start making sons.

However, be aware that in some cases your sons will appear as 'heir to kingdom/duchy of X' and that's it, with no counties. This means they will still get that duchy or kingdom and will revoke a single county from a vassal of that duchy/kingdom when they succeed.

[Kid Named Finger]

Originally posted by NewbieOne:

Originally posted by redacted:

I feel like I can never make headway because my high chieftain dies and then everything is separated between my children. What's the best way to go about changing succession laws so this stops happening?

You can keep your family small and make sure you only have one son (one child of the 'dominating' sex according to your religion/culture).

You can disinherit your juniors if you're the dynasty head.

There are ways of forcing them to take the vows.

If you aren't into metagaming, I recommed denouncing the rotten apples, so that you (and everyone else in the dynasty) get a valid reason to imprison them. Let's say your ruler doesn't want a Sadistic son to rule any part of the realm — denounce, imprison, force to take vows. You probably don't want to execute them and incur kinslaying.

In some cases you can delay marriage, for example when you have a brother, uncle or cousin ready to inherit. Or you can decide not to remarry when your wife dies after giving birth to just one son.

Another good but difficult way is to at least make it to Partition (regular Partition, with no adjective, as opposed to Confederate Partition), which means that titles will not be created for your younger sons — they will only inherit titles already had by you. In that case, if you have only one title of your highest tier, the realm shouldn't normally split (I can't guarantee that it never will, but lower titles shouldn't normally go independent, so if you're a king your duke sons shouldn't become independent of your king son upon succession).

A middle ground is High Partition. High Partition is an interesting law because it provides for some inheritance for younger sons, but gives the eldest a 'lion's share'. The game tries to give him about half and tries to make sure he gets titles under your primary title, rather than the 'border gore' of typical partition. This means you won't get to keep your whole domain, but you can make sure your eldest son is dominant by… making as many younger sons as you can — so that younger ones will get like 1 county each and pose no individual threat.

One exploit you could use is to grant all counties except for your capital to your oldest son before you make more sons. However, this can get tricky if he gets inherited by a daughter or startings giving those counties to vassals. But if you're 60 and widowed, then perhaps it's an acceptable risk to give everything but your capital to your heir (especially if he already has sons of his own and isn't sick) and start making sons.

However, be aware that in some cases your sons will appear as 'heir to kingdom/duchy of X' and that's it, with no counties. This means they will still get that duchy or kingdom and will revoke a single county from a vassal of that duchy/kingdom when they succeed.

Thank you for the extremely detailed reply, this helps me a lot

[NewbieOne]

Originally posted by redacted:

Thank you for the extremely detailed reply, this helps me a lot

My pleasure. If you try the strategy of unloading everything except the capital on your oldest son, let me know how it plays out. I haven't actually done that yet, at least not in CK3 and not often in CK2. But if you're allied to your son and have no other vassals or claimants to worry about, then it's probably worth trying.