Achieving Large Empire Stability: How To?

[Emperialist]

A hello to the community from myself. I don't post much, but I have been experimenting with some ideas about how to keep large empires stable in CK3 with as little effort as possible. Especially early on around the 1000's when players tend to get into the full swing of Imperialism.

Succession wars (throne claims) and independence factions are the obvious main culprits of large empires, but there are no viceroys in CK3 or tools to aid with dispensing of claims held by multiple family members. Keeping vassals weak is also nigh impossible when holding too many titles yourself gives stacking maluses. Furthermore, the The North Korea strategy does not work early on assuming you don't kill all the other claimants before succession.

I would like to hear other people's methods. I am very much more interested in toying with numbers, modifiers and passive strategies than open war solutions. My goal is ultimately to take the knowledge given and apply it toward what could be considered a "Stable Strategy", one that works every time or at least most of the time when applied. For this I need to develop a theoretical max stability empire scenario. For the sake of the stability question, it would benefit the theory to assume you are master of all of India at least. The world at most.

Thank you in advance. I look forward to reading the responses!

[ste]

I dont have too much problems with rebellions, my current save 200 year and about 820 realm size I dont think Ive had any.

Not sure if I'm just lucky but Things I think might help,

Never give family members titles. No matter how much they like you or you like them.
I dont use the grant title button but use the find character button to give out titles.
Search for lowborn same religon and culture familyless. which also helps with titles leaving the realm
If I take over a large area at once, like a holy war I would make sure I cleared out all the wrong religion including cities. I would grant titles to young lowborns with no family, might help if you filter for craven and content, and avoid ambitious and stuff but I dont bother but that will help, I just make sure they arent lustful. Then grant the duchy capital to an old lowborn guy, Its not vital but its what I do.
Dont give multiple counties out, one county per vassal, if they want more they have to fight for it, dont help them, and only when you run out of space and are over limit start duking them one at a time keeping you under the limit. Same with kings, I have about 60 dukes before I make anyone a king. By this point you should be pretty resistant to rebellions.

[Emperialist]

Thanks for the advice, ste. I'll try to take down my powerful vassals and spread out the titles. What you've suggested was in enough detail where I can see the Empire game now. I've got a lot of work to do though before I stabilize my current realm lol.

[sunsetclick]

Originally posted by ste:

Never give family members titles. No matter how much they like you or you like them.

A useful way around this being an issue once you have good inheritance is to start a branch of your family without claims to anything important. You can use members of that branch to hold some duchies and countries. just be careful with how fast you hand out titles to them because they have the potential to merge up after a death or two.

[Emperialist]

That's a pretty clever solution to the problem of claims. The +5 same dynasty bonus is nice late-game, but not worth the hassle of fighting your siblings every twenty years. I'll do that.

[drus]

I don't see any point in giving titles to commoners. I only give them to members of my dynasty. Then it is much easier to manage your vassals by having influence over them as the head of the house. It also raises their opinion. You can choose their spouses, guardians. Giving titles to the rootless is just stupid.

[Monty]

Slow expansion

[Duuvian]

Breed a huge dynasty to give titles to, one county per dynasty member. Dukes get 1 county, Kings get Kingdom, capital duchy, and 1 county. That means due to using matrilineal marriages it would be difficult to achieve political marriages with female offspring, and also you won't get dynasty points for marrying them to rulers outside your realm, but having weak dynastic vassals is useful and you need a big dynasty for that if you expand quickly.

Revoke everything you can from non-dynasty members. Revoke everything but 1 county from dynasty members when you can, especially if you can then pass them off to be someone else's vassal. A good example is if you have a naughty Duke. you can take his Duchy (lol) and then give it to someone else (with a county in the de jure Duchy I recommend), and make the previous Duke their vassal so they never bother you again.

I also force everyone passing through the dungeon to renounce their claims (unless they are paying a hefty ransom and I could use that)

Avoid taking enough land to make a second Empire until you can change succession laws (if you want to keep the land in the second Empire); equally useful may be just picking a good Emperor as your new neighbor and hope your heirs can maintain friendship with theirs. You conquer one direction, they go the other. If you can find a dynasty member with no claims that would be a good candidate, big claimless line of succession ideal. That way they won't have claims on your stuff for a while. They'll probably marry one of your vassals' family members or something eventually for an alliance. I'm getting pretty close to a second Empire title due to enthusiastic vassals pushing out the borders; I guess I could let a few Duchies go independent to drop under the percentage, but I think I'll try making my heir's heir the neighboring Emperor and see if I can eventually inherit them together into one realm again. No idea if that will work or if it's an oops I screwed up my succession

Another thing to remember is that with partition (and maybe some other laws, haven't got there yet) you can't really land your primary heir until your other heirs have a county, and even then I think it's limited to capital duchy's counties only (unless you are holding a WHOLE BUNCH of counties where the Primary heir would have to receive more counties for an even partition). However, you can land your primary heir's heir (so your grandshild usually) as much as any other character. That way you can get it back when they ascend to Emperor, and hand out a bunch of goodies in the form of transfer of new vassals to the de jure lieges. This works well with higher titles; the eventual heir can then grant the duchy and transfer vassalage to the de jure King vassal, which pleases them. If your grandchild holds a Kingdom, they can hold it as Emperor or more likely grant it to a now very happy vassal (I usually give it to a Duke in the Kingdom in question).

[Kayeka]

The trick is in being the most powerful dude in the entire empire without relying on your vassals. Get a large domain going, develop it properly, and you can reach stupidly high numbers of levies and super-powered men-at-arms. Do it right, and factions will never be able to get past the power threshold to form a proper rebellion.

The easiest way to get there fast is to take the feudal contracts of all your vassals, and change it to High Taxes and Low Levies (you won't need a hook and won't get tyranny, because it's considered a fair trade). Add in the Scutage special contract if you have the technology. You will now be getting a lot more money to invest into your domain, while leaving your vassals with less to invest in theirs.

Your power will grow much faster than that of your vassals, leaving you as the undisputable top dog.

[ste]

I'm not sure why people are so keen to give family members titles anyways, I cant really see any benefits and only negatives, and within a few year theres every chance theyve cadet branched, changed culture and changed religion so they are about as related as anybody you find off the street.

The game encourages you to get themout of the realm, dynstay members are better off ruling in other peoples kingdoms

[Duuvian]

It gives you more dynasty points and alliances to do it one way, and better relations with vassals the other. I did optimize for it with a start with a ruler gen character who could take bloodfather on day 1, and started with about a dozen sons, and am going down the good genetics dynasty tree with the limited points I get for the dynasty due to not having many relatives ruling outside my realm. Since all the rulers are dynastic, they marry each other, but due to the above combinations (I think starting the dynasty with the ruler gen's half-siblings helped) I think I've seen a single inbred courtier character out of I think at least 6 or 7 generations. On the very bright side, it's rare to find a dynasty member who doesn't have multiple positive congenital traits. Now they are upgrading a tier if they match and if both parents have the best, all their children are will also have that trait. I bet this is how those aliens in the "5th Element" movie made that lady with orange hair.

I like to think that eventually in the far future they send the dynasty founder back in time because someone had to go start the dynasty and he was the biggest jerk they knew (had all the bad traits except for all the congenital positives) as a sort of time travelling astronaut goofball.

I plan to switch to the first way of marrying them to rulers outside the realm for dynasty points once the dynasty is so large that it continues to have unlanded members to give titles to even with the attrition of sending away dynasty members to marry rulers and heirs. I also made women equal in a religious reformation so that opened them up to receive titles too, so that helped reaching that point quite a bit.

I did consider releasing some dynasty members as independent allies for more dynasty points but I figured they would end up killing each other even more than usual. Maybe if I put them on opposite sides of the main realm...

EDIT: Here was where I left off, this guy just died:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2406109790

I'll see if I can get a picture of the living dynasty member number.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2406132461

I tried to do the family tree with all the branches closed except straight up from the current ruler, but the game crashes when I try to reveal the family tree upwards once I reach a certain point. It is the grandaughter of the founder I think, so plenty of generations back.

Positive Congenital Traits (due to rulers marrying in-dynasty for the most part with the genetics dynasty path thing)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2406147775

Random unsorted courtiers
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2406147799
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2406147827

[Emperialist]

So how many points did you use for your starting ruler? And how is stability now that you've got such a large Empire? I'd like to know your secret if you have one.

[VoiD]

Never had an issue, same thing as CK2, over the years I often turn my single dynasty dude into a dynasty with over 5k people, every single noble title above count belongs to my family, and then I create the most massive unrealistic and eye-shattering inner realm bordergore you can imagine, so everyone hates everyone else.

0 revolts in centuries, they are too busy hating each other.