Powerful Vassals - How do I deal with them?!

[LamboWalker]

I've only played a handful hours of CK2 and CK3 and have always had trouble with them. They always want a council position but their stats make them a waste and not giving them results in very low opinion.

What are the ways to deal with them?

[ottomanstamper]

Powerful is a relative term; the game calls them powerful but the only thing that matters to you is are they actually powerful enough that if they start a fight with you can they win!
I just ignore them and appoint the best person for the job (unless the best at the time is also rubbish in which case I appoint the powerful vassal temporarily).

You can use schemes such as sway on them and you can appoint your councilor to domestic affairs.

I usually don't find them sufficiently powerful to make any concessions but just let them revolt then put them down; once you win you imprison them and if they have any good features you can ransom them for gold (they will be prohibited from joining factions against you for several years), if they don't have anything worthwhile then if they are another religion I can torture and execute them with impunity otherwise I can throw them into a dungeon and NEVER let them out (I love how the game basically allows you to make any crime a capital crime by allowing you to imprison a criminal until they die and avoid all tyranny penalties).

[snuggleform]

- the hardest but most useful lesson to learn is to estimate how good your ability to win a military conflict is. This is hard lesson to learn because what will happen is, you will gradually get a sense of when you might be able to win against them versus times where you will fail miserably. It's trial and error that evolves with your understanding of military tactics, and depends on how strong the revolting force is versus what you have available (look at the readout of the military force against you, if they have something like 200+% of your military power I would be very nervous and maybe just concede the war to them), with terrain being a concern as well. The simplest advice I can give is to rely heavily on siege men at arms to "base trade" as quickly as possible, but this may not work if the terrain constricts you in such manner as to force your army into open fights. If you're forced into open fights you obviously want to be specced into the military lifestyle, have a wife with high military skill, and lots of men at arms and/or mercenaries. And still with all that you may be overwhelmed if you pissed off too many people. But the point here is that if you've mastered your full military tactics, you can simply shrug and say let them revolt because you'll kick their asses out of this life and move on like it never happened.

- a less hard lesson to learn, but no less important, is to pay attention to why people are pissed off at you to begin with. You may find that low council stats aren't actually that bad, or at least that it is less bad than having to deal with the revolt. So it's a bit of managing your expectations and accepting a lesser evil in order to avoid a bigger one. Hover over their icons to see what it is that makes them mad, and just try things out to deal with it. You can host feasts to raise opinion, gift people gold (diplomatic perks help with this), sway them, hand them land. You could also have done things in your previous life that you wish you had thought of back then, such as maintaining good relationships with people because their opinion of your previous self carries on to the heir (at a fraction), mentoring your heir which allows you a great deal of control over their traits (lots of traits can piss off a lot of people like arrogant, sinful traits, etc), stockpiling gold, paying attention to how much territory vassals are holding (some of them absorb/conquer lands to a great extent, and if you can monitor this and detect it early then you can deal with them before it gets out of hand)

- an alternate way to deal with powerful vassals is to be a tyrant. I don't feel like typing out a novel here on how to do that, but there is a valid way to play which involves raising your dread meter so high that most vassals will be too scared to do anything against you, and whichever aren't, do not comprise a big enough force to be a serious threat to your rule (you can also systematically imprison vassals, which if you can manage to do so certainly keeps them from revolting from you). The thing you have to worry about is keeping your intrigue defense high as people will launch assassination schemes at you left right and center, which is frustrating in itself as you will experience sudden deaths if you didn't prepare, but it can be a fun and effective way of doing things if you're tired of giving AF about their opinions.