Advice for your early game succession problems

[magnificentpumkinthewiseandclean]

Ive had many frustrating problems with my land getting divided upon character death. Learn from me and dont repeat my mistakes.

1. The nature of the situation is that for many cultures, early game simply has no law options that are suitable for what you want. Instead the early game fix is to either disinherit unwanted heirs, kill unwanted heirs, or divorce your wife/wives/concubines after your first heir.

2. You can also get away with having just one kingdom title (or duchy if youre smaller). However, if you conquer too much land, or subjugate another king under you, etc. You risk other titles being created upon character death. That will also divide your lands. I believe the fix for this is also a cultural innovation.

3. I tried some of the early game law options (ie Saxon, Scandanavian, and I think it was fuedal electives). These can work fine, but are generally not worth it as theyre not what you want and dont allow you to expand like you probably want to. (Getting an emperor title may be different haven’t achieved that yet).

Basically, early game, you just gotta live with it and try to work on county development and achieving the correct cultural innovations before expanding too much.

Ive only started games on the earliest year possible. Maybe if you start later or with a stronger house you start with better innovations and this isnt as big a problem..?

Im sure theres more, so feel free to add/educate in the comments below. If im wrong about something, let me know. I dont wanna mislead anyone. Long live the king, mostly cause partition sucks lol

[Newbmeister]

I usually pick a duchy and make it elective my first life, and then rush emperor how ever long that takes. I never bother divorcing or disinheriting cause if you get splinter states u usually have more troops for the first year. so you can quickly declare wars and such. biggest prob is sometimes u have to divorce ur spouse to get a good stweardship buff spouse for the elective duchy early game.

I had a great game as jorvik start in england 867. had two elective duchies and even after I got primo I really didnt need to switch! :D stayed high partition till I stopped around 1300

[Arlen Tektolnes]

Scandinavian elective is amazing, but you have to apply it to your domain (directly held) duchies too. It removes them from partition entirely and as Barons don't get a vote, if you hold the majority of counties in them there is zero chance of them going to anyone but your designated heir.

[someblk]

Celibacy in the learning lifestyle. Use decision to become celibate after birth of first male child.

I typically combine this with finding a spouse for my heir once they are adult, with the spouse being a child, so they become betrothed, and try to time it so the child spouse will come of age at approximately the same time that I think my current ruler will die from old age.

Obviously it's not 100% perfect, but what solution is? :) It's worked pretty well for me in my current game anyways though.

[Païtiti]

As you have said it is quite possible to hold your titles together with only holding certain titles. Thus one county -> one duchy -> one kingdom -> one empire.

So you can go from county to empire in 3 generations in theory. When your brother or brothers inherit you get claims anyway and can re-conquer the land if you wish to do so.

But I believe that's not how the game is suppose to be played. It is not so difficult to get to an empire but what is more difficult it so get a huge and glorious dynasty. Mind you that you dynasty gets renouwn for every title your dynastymembers hold. Having therefore your familymembers as vassals or even neighbouring rulers is considered a good thing as your familyrenown grows.

And this is how it actually played out in history as well. Certain families ruled over vast amounts of land for generations. If you "lose" land in partition you dont necessary have to see it as "lost" as your family might grow stronger, have more members, spread your culture and religion...

I certainly does feel like a loss and ofc it is not always the best thing to have family members with claims become too strong but i feel that is not as dangerous as it was in ck2.

[Landstander]

bro i got a easy fix for you man. go learning tree and after2 perks you get celebate. done. keep investing on learning tree btw. the buffs are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great

[someblk]

Originally posted by Landstander:

bro i got a easy fix for you man. go learning tree and after2 perks you get celebate. done. keep investing on learning tree btw. the buffs are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great

Dude I just said that few mins before you... Gotta love people who don't read anything after the OP before replying :P

[magnificentpumkinthewiseandclean]

Originally posted by Arlen Tektolnes:

Scandinavian elective is amazing, but you have to apply it to your domain (directly held) duchies too. It removes them from partition entirely and as Barons don't get a vote, if you hold the majority of counties in them there is zero chance of them going to anyone but your designated heir.

For my understanding of what you said, you have to kind of give the minority of counties in your duchy away. So if 3 counties you give 1 away? Can you give each of the 3 away to a different person and since thats no majority they cant vote? I also remember constant vassal battles in my kingdom so im sure some ambitious barons will take over their neighbors. How to keep track of all that? I enjoy playing as Vikings so Ill give it a try again at some point im sure. Thanks

[Païtiti]

Originally posted by Landstander:

bro i got a easy fix for you man. go learning tree and after2 perks you get celebate. done. keep investing on learning tree btw. the buffs are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great

But then your only male heir dies and you are left with the same issue only this time your daughters are going to get it all and everybody will hate them.

[someblk]

Originally posted by I`m a doctor!:

Originally posted by Landstander:

bro i got a easy fix for you man. go learning tree and after2 perks you get celebate. done. keep investing on learning tree btw. the buffs are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great

But then your only male heir dies and you are left with the same issue only this time your daughters are going to get it all and everybody will hate them.

Ideally you get one daughter before the male then go celibate but life isn't always perfect. If that does happen you still have clean succession. Otherwise you can re-marry (unless your wife is still young enough for kids) and stop being celibate.. Main issue there is you might end out with an underage ruler.

[magnificentpumkinthewiseandclean]

Originally posted by someblk:

Celibacy in the learning lifestyle. Use decision to become celibate after birth of first male child.

I typically combine this with finding a spouse for my heir once they are adult, with the spouse being a child, so they become betrothed, and try to time it so the child spouse will come of age at approximately the same time that I think my current ruler will die from old age.

Obviously it's not 100% perfect, but what solution is? :) It's worked pretty well for me in my current game anyways though.

Thats smart, didnt know that existed. Ill have to check out all the lifestyles more. Ive only tried a handful of them so far. Thanks

[magnificentpumkinthewiseandclean]

Originally posted by I`m a doctor!:

Originally posted by Landstander:

bro i got a easy fix for you man. go learning tree and after2 perks you get celebate. done. keep investing on learning tree btw. the buffs are ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ great

But then your only male heir dies and you are left with the same issue only this time your daughters are going to get it all and everybody will hate them.

Could you have two sons, disinherit one then go celebate? Then if the heir dies you undo the disinherit. Can you do that?

[someblk]

Originally posted by magnificentpumkinthewiseandclean:

Originally posted by I`m a doctor!:

But then your only male heir dies and you are left with the same issue only this time your daughters are going to get it all and everybody will hate them.

Could you have two sons, disinherit one then go celebate? Then if the heir dies you undo the disinherit. Can you do that?

That will work. Personally I don't like disinherit because it costs renown (which I consider one of my most important to protect currencies), but that doesn't make it wrong.

[Arlen Tektolnes]

Originally posted by magnificentpumkinthewiseandclean:

Originally posted by Arlen Tektolnes:

Scandinavian elective is amazing, but you have to apply it to your domain (directly held) duchies too. It removes them from partition entirely and as Barons don't get a vote, if you hold the majority of counties in them there is zero chance of them going to anyone but your designated heir.

For my understanding of what you said, you have to kind of give the minority of counties in your duchy away. So if 3 counties you give 1 away? Can you give each of the 3 away to a different person and since thats no majority they cant vote? I also remember constant vassal battles in my kingdom so im sure some ambitious barons will take over their neighbors. How to keep track of all that? I enjoy playing as Vikings so Ill give it a try again at some point im sure. Thanks

Right, I'll try explaining this another way :)

Only the vassals under a title (minus the barons, who get no vote) can vote on the heir under Scandinavian elective. So if you hold all the counties in a duchy yourself then nobody else gets to vote on the duchy title at all.

A king or above can hold 2 duchy titles without penalty. If your domain limit is not high enough for you to hold all of the counties yourself, then you can safely give a couple away as long as you still hold the majority of the counties in each duchy.

For example, if you have 2 duchies with 5 counties each and a domain limit of 6 then holding 3 in both means each title is safe because they only have 2 people who can vote against your choice, but you have 3 votes. Whereas holding 4 counties in one and 2 in the other would leave the second title at risk.

Note: This is a simplification because it's not actually 1 vote per county, vote are weighted by Domain Development and Capital Popular Opinion. In 99% of cases this isn't something you need to consider though, as long as you make sure to only hand out the lower development counties.