baronies vs counties

[Jet]

is it better to keep barony castles along with your capital inside the same duchy or a bunch of counties everywhere, assuming all lands are relatively equal in terms of development? i think in ck2 there was an advantage in keeping as many holdings in the capital as you could no?

[Corona]

bunch of counties everywhere is always better

[Emperor2000]

Originally posted by Jet:

is it better to keep barony castles along with your capital inside the same duchy or a bunch of counties everywhere, assuming all lands are relatively equal in terms of development? i think in ck2 there was an advantage in keeping as many holdings in the capital as you could no?

Keep your Duchy together, it is always the better Option.

Originally posted by Corona:

bunch of counties everywhere is always better

This is was the AI loves to do and this is the Reason, why the the AI is so weak in this Game, because they ignore Building Benefits, by granting secondary Baronies to other Characters.


It is never an good idea to have a lot of Counties across your entire Realm.

Keep your Domain centralized.

[Hao Zhao]

The optimal strategy is to fill your personal domain with counties that have powerful special buildings in them. Own every mine, every cathedral, etc.

If you can't go for special buildings at the moment, keep every barony in your capital. It's very easy to control the partition of baronies because they can't be separated from their count (you).

[jpcerutti]

Baronies are good for expanding your Dynasty when you have grown to a size where you have more domains than you can directly control without a malus and have already expanded your first tier (direct) vassals to a workable limit. Is like setting up counts for dynasty members on a smaller (and safer) scale.

Barons rarely (I'm not sure I've ever seen one do it) get enough gold or prestige to form a cadet house but will have children to propagate your dynasty. They are not powerful enough to start wars or conquer lands on their own, can grow far enough removed from the 'core' dynasty you are actively playing to be safe considerations for marriage within your dynasty in a few generations, and they may join rebellions but will never be a threat of rebellion by themselves.

Core capitol county I always leave directly under my control. So I have someplace close for family to move to if an enemy sieges, since you have to lose all of those castles to lose the county (and take a big warscore hit), but as long as there are no 'specials' in a domain in any other county you want to directly control Baronies should be how you expand to your vassal limit as next step expansion before you start setting up 2nd tier vassals under your direct vassals.

[CrUsHeR]

A county is almost always better than an extra barony inside a county.

There may be some exceptions, like a barony in a highly developed farmlands county with a culture that has more build slots compared to a poor undeveloped mountain county in foreign lands.


But there is another reason why it isn't necessary to hold baronies. In CK2, the baronies could for example be inherited by foreign rulers. And revoking a title was only allowed under special circumstance (plot to revoke). So you didn't want these to fall into the wrong hands, because you REALLY didn't want to wage a holy war against e.g. the Abbasids over a single barony.

In CK3, baronies can only be held by barons who are not allowed to own more than one barony, or the owner of the local county. And baronies can be freely granted and revoked at no cost and without tyranny.

So if your domain limit somehow increases, you simply revoke a castle and you got the full income from that. Usually better than conquering some foreign county which then takes many years just to restore order and costs a lot of gold to build up.

Just the evicted baron with his accumulated income is gone, which he no longer can invest into the holding. So you don't want to do this without reason.


Another use for baronies: If you want to grant a county or higher title to a specific lowborn character - like a knight, someone with great personality etc - you get a stacking penalty from courtly vassals. But you can completely avoid that by granting him one of your baronies first, which makes him a noble. Then you can directly grant him a whole kingdom, and nobody would object. He also loses the barony in the process because rulers may only own baronies within their own domain.

[ChaosKhan]

Originally posted by Jet:

is it better to keep barony castles along with your capital inside the same duchy or a bunch of counties everywhere, assuming all lands are relatively equal in terms of development? i think in ck2 there was an advantage in keeping as many holdings in the capital as you could no?

It's viable to use eithe approaches. Generally, as the time moves on, it makes sense to go from "taller" to "wider". It has multiple reasons and the most important one is the amount of men-at-arms you can sustain. While at the beginning, you will usually try to only have 1 or 2 fully stacked men-at-arms supported by corresponding accolades and stationed in 2 military centered counties, later you will have so much income, that you will have trouble to decide, which men-at-arms to keep and which not, since your slots will be choke full to the brim.

Proportionally, at the beginning, having only a couple counties and a couple baronies inside them, while holding one or two duchies is perfectly alright. Over time, you transition into somewhat centralised max holding counties. I usually prefer to hold 2 duchies, of which one is completely specialised for men-at-arms housing, the other is full income built. Even later though, there is nothing stopping you (well, nothing except your vassals hatred), to hold onto 5, 6 or 10 duchy titles all across your empire with only the captal county of each duchy in your possession. Not only will all your men-at-arms have a home, you will be able to access the humongous benefits of every single duchy tier building (and often some extra special buildings like universities, mines, holy sites).

Centralisation is easier to hold, but decentralisation has vastly bigger benefits. Because once you are at the stage of the game where you collect duchies, your men-at-arms will be so ridiculously overpowered, that you will easily beat any 100k insurrection army with your 10k men-at-arms alone.

For example, in my current Ind run at around 1100 AD, I hold onto 10 duchies, with a military academy built in 5, while the other 5 are dedicated to supporting one unit type each. That's 10 more knights and 125 % more efficiency. Also, I happen to have built a full warrior culture with a dedicated blademaster and a dedicated contender accolade, so even the most mediocre knights start somewhere around 30 prowess. Overall efficiency right now is by over 600 %. Every single of my men-at-arms companies has about 300 % stat increase. And the buildings are still just at lvl 4, it's not even close to peak performance yet.

Basically, since the AI is incapable of building proper military infastructure, ALL my vassals could make an insurrection, ALL of them could get EVERY single merc band in the entire diplomacy range - and I would still clap them easily.

That's the power of decentralisation.

That said, I just really wanted to go for it in this run. Usually more than 3 or 4 duchies don't make sense, since it's really detrimental to the stability of the realm. Dread and prison helps keeping the peace, but ultimately you wouldn't lose that much combat power anyway. The game is a cakewalk as it is already, so hyperboosting your men-at-arms and knights through the stratosphere by holding onto tons of duchies is simply overkill. Fun, but overkill.

[Danny]

Best is to keep full duchies and selects which buildings to build in the church or city holdings in the counties that are in those two dunchies.
You just keep the county capital in most cases.
One secondary barony can be leashed out to a holy order.