How do you deal with factions?

[Prince of Thieves]

Trying to play as King of England (absolute weird country when one looks at the duchy scheme), but it’s tedious, seriously sometimes I think this game should be called Faction-Kings or something. How in the hey do you deal with factions? Why do all vassals immediately rush into factions whenever a new king accends to the throne? All I ever do is battle factions, how do you deal with them?

[ApricotMigraine]

Ascension is the most difficult part of a rule. Nobody knows or likes the new king. For the first few generations, factions are inevitable as are succession wars. It pays to spend some splendor to cut our your least successful heirs.
1 Make sure your heir has plenty of gold for mercenaries AND gifts. Characters with higher opinions will leave factions. Sometimes it takes a couple of months to take effect after a gift.
2 Check if faction members have opinion maluses for whatever reason, most often it's that they want some de jure land or vassal that you hold. Transfer land and/or vassal for massive opinion boosts.
3 Starting from 40s invest in building relationships and even friendships with the most powerful vassals AND their heirs. They will have positive "opinion of predecessor" opinion modifiers to your heir. There's always an ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in the bunch, but most of your friends will actually support your heir.
4 Imprisoned characters or those who you have hooks for will not join factions.
5 Hold as much land as possible, invest in your holdings so you're always the strongest cat on the block.

In general, if you're a well liked ruler and you're not grooming a troll, factions aren't a huge issues. The higher your splendor, the less likely factions are to spring up, unless you go around doing tyrant stuff.

[Ashling]

Make sure your biggest vassals are allied to you or aren't in a position to join a faction against you. If they're always on your side that means the faction leaders will always be the minority and thus easy to prevent (factions need both a minimum force to declare against you and they must wait a few months. If they're just barely managing to meet their minimum force then by preventing one person from joining a faction you reset the wait period as they try to build up strength again, giving you more time, or even forcing them to abandon the faction altogether). Going off of that, make sure you're also as strong as you can be with men-at-arms and levies as the stronger your are, the stronger they'll have to be to declare on you.

Secondly, and this is a side point really, find out why they want to start a faction in the first place. They aren't always arbitrary in their decision (yeah, sometimes they just don't like you), but they could be a claimant, or maybe you used them to secure an alliance with a neighboring ruler and they're now using that marriage against you, or maybe it's a family thing and you need to make an effort to please their family, maybe it's cultural, maybe you have land that's rightfully there's, maybe they just think you're weak.

By finding out why people don't like you, you can fix it and prevent the next faction war from being so bad. It's a bit of a no-brainier, but I often forget to do it and end up slapping my face for it.

[Myth Alric]

Typically they join factions because they either don't like you, or they have something to gain from it. So making friends with lots of people and being well liked is a good way to stop it. Also you can arrest or kill troublesome people. The troublesome people are usually people with claims to titles and what not.

One thing that gets people really bent out of shape, is when the titles don't line up. So the kingdom has a set of de jure duchies under it, and each duchy has de jure counties under it. It is like a hierarchy of titles, and if that gets messed up people get pissed off.

So you are the king, and you probably have a duke title but you also might have given a duke title to someone else. If so that duke is going to want all the counties that are de jure under his duke title under his control. If you own one of those counties, or have given one of them to someone else, he is going to be pissed. The same is true if a count is your vassal, instead of being the vassal of the de jure duke. He will be upset because he should be working for the duke above him, not you, even if you are the final boss.

People also just get greedy because they have claims on each other titles. So for example, if you had 3 kids, they all have claims on each other's titles. If given the chance, they may very well try to take those claims.

So the best thing you can do ahead of time, is get all the titles sorted out and make sure the primary heir is getting the most valuable land so they have a strong army. You want to be especially careful if there is any powerful vassals who have large armies. Afterwards the new heir takes over you should improve relationships with people and if there are still trouble makers find a way to remove them.

[dwarfpcfan]

-Bribe/gift and sway every powerful vassal as soon as you can when a ruler takes over, make sure the most powerful/vassals get seats on your council even if they don't like you, it gives a huge boost to opinion and it will get you there faster.

This is why you need to make sure your heir inherits lots of gold. it will go fast when he takes over.

-Make sure you max out your men at arms, regardless of if you're tribal, feudal or clan. Men at arms are crucial in the early rule when your number of levies will be significantly lower then your previous ruler.

as mentioned by the previous poster, gold also buys you mercenaries so make sure you have some exactly for this reason.

-Dread, seriously. You don't even need to be a murderous tyrant. But getting the ominous reputation dynastic legacy for that +15 to dread for free and them putting your heir on martial realm control right at the start nets you an additional +15 to dread right out the gate. That's basically 15-30 dread right out the game without doing anything. Weak count 1-2 county counts will take your dread into account.

This will cow weak vassals that would join the factions of treasonous powerful vassals out of joining them

-Diplomacy, rulers with low diplomacy scores are to be avoided, regardless of what focus your next ruler will have, make sure while you raise them to choose the option that will give them the highest diplomacy score possible because your vassal opinion is tied to your diplomacy score and your prestige, the higher the better.

If you're ruler's on the diplomacy focus tree, befriend scheme can be very useful.

-Marry your kids to vassals, this garantees an alliance between these vassals and these kids, alliances with vassals are far more useful then alliances with neighboring ruler because they add to your perceived strength with enemies check to see if they can mathematically take you, and vassals allies are much easier to control then neighbor ruler allies.

None of these things will 100% garantee factions from forming. But if you play intelligently with all these tools, you can survive the early rule relatively without too much trouble and get back to managing your realm

[snuggleform]

Econ, econ, econ. Develop your personal domain's economic buildings that you intend to pas s on succession. With money everything is possible, you can afford mercenaries, bribes, the best MAA, etc. It is by far the best universal answer to countering factions and having a smooth reign. You do need to understand how to play the succession game so that your heir inherits a full domain when you die, as well.

[Prince of Thieves]

Going to have to go a bit back to the drawing board and see what I'm going wrong. I can understand if there's a new monarch, some nobles are harboring feeling that this other claimant might make a better king, but at the same time a large section of vassals should be like "well we have a new king, might as well try to exploit this" or "this powerful noble is in this faction and he could become too powerful so not going to join" - I feel there's not enough vassal bickering among themselves (maybe I was expecting this too much). Also I would understand if they were joining factions to demand perks or tax/levy relief, offices, or something. However I can't understand all nobles suddenly joining claimant factions, that might have had severe repercussions in the Middle Ages, religious and otherwise.

[dwarfpcfan]

Originally posted by Prince of Thieves:

However I can't understand all nobles suddenly joining claimant factions, that might have had severe repercussions in the Middle Ages, religious and otherwise.

It's a problem at the moment because CK 3 isn't as develloped as it should be.

Unfortunately, CK 3 is missing A LOT of depth with vassal and neighbor ruler interactions. The new royal court DLC has improved this but there really isn't enough. There should be more options/events/decisions to help you interact with your vassals and neighbors

Similarly, there should be a lot more interactions with your family/heir/dynasty to keep them out of trouble, help them make smart decisions and facilitate the transition between ruler and heir.

[Dufflebags]

The new courts seem to help if you have a fancy court, gives a lot of opinion bonuses.

Also you can get a nice roll over in opinion bonus if everyone really liked your predecessor. If they really didn't like him at all, hated their deals and now you're weak because of succession they're going be like flies on ♥♥♥♥.

Quick fixes could be bribes and swaying, or even offering children as wards or court positions for a quick opinion boost. You can also lower your crown. And last, but definitely not least - start executing people and putting those factions under your boot and rule with dread and an iron fist.

[endymionologist]

Originally posted by Prince of Thieves:

Going to have to go a bit back to the drawing board and see what I'm going wrong. I can understand if there's a new monarch, some nobles are harboring feeling that this other claimant might make a better king, but at the same time a large section of vassals should be like "well we have a new king, might as well try to exploit this" or "this powerful noble is in this faction and he could become too powerful so not going to join" - I feel there's not enough vassal bickering among themselves (maybe I was expecting this too much). Also I would understand if they were joining factions to demand perks or tax/levy relief, offices, or something. However I can't understand all nobles suddenly joining claimant factions, that might have had severe repercussions in the Middle Ages, religious and otherwise.

Claimant Factions are often more about replacing a strong/competent ruler with a weak/incompetent one, than they are about immediate gain for the supporters. Even so, supporters will get hooks on their liege if they win, which is usually better than a simple reduction of crown authority. As for vassal bickering, it does happen, but the game's systems all drive a player liege away from encouraging it...and if you really want to see it all the time you have to make it happen. As a King, every time you acquire a direct vassal that is de jure part of another direct vassal's Duchies, the game will suggest that you grant them that vassal and even open the screen pre-set to that assignment for you. How about, "no"? How about, instead you give it to their brother, or the guy who's sleeping with his wife? Same with land you own; the game shows you that a vassal has an opinion malus because he wants a county, so naturally you have to give him the county to get rid of that malus...but no, if you're fine with giving up the county anyway, you can just assign that opinion malus to one of his allies instead, or whoever.
Lastly, don't romanticize these Lords and Ladies. These are rich people who kill for fun and do worse for money, they think they're better than everyone, and they're engaged in a multicentury project to make all human governance more nepotistic and cronyistic. There's a reason improving opinion doesn't do much to keep them out of Factions at succession; you can't make a shark love you enough to ignore blood in the water.

[The Met4l God]

Factions can be due to claimants, low opinion, and/or stronger military strength than you. The only way to avoid them, that I'm aware of, is keep a good opinion and make sure your military is strong. I found destroying duchy titles keeps one vassal from becoming too powerful as was the case when I played Ireland.

[Prince of Thieves]

The silver lining - if you can call it that - is the surrounding realms are almost entirely swamped with the same problem. Both France and Scotland, all they do is fight claimant wars, they change rulers like clothing, nothing else really happens, even Crusades are almost non functional.

[Æthelwulf]

I find England tends to have a lot more rebellious vassals then when i play any other location. Not sure why that is.

[glythe]

When this game out I played a long game with Ireland starting as a one land dude and eventually made Scotland and England "Green".

You need to keep some of your vassals weak. You need to keep some of your vassals strong. Make sure your strong vassals like you. Try to keep some extra land you "probably shouldn't".

This keeps you rich/strong and people are far less likely to bother you.

For extra defense you can marry off a son or daughter (matrilineal) to a countery near a duchy size that will become an ally.

This son/daughter will expand your kingdom and give you an extra ally. Remember to re-ally with them when they directly take over rule.

Factions in this game are quickly beat down if you have a bunch of allies. If you keep some vassals weak then the factions go after them instead.

[Prince of Thieves]

Yeah going to severely limit the amount of dukes from how on, that was one major issue. This is major learning curve.

Find it a bit annoying that Paradox also chose Saxon Kingdoms to represent English duchies, makes for poor realism. Hope they’re going to do an English depth dlc in the future cuz I’d pay for that!

[ACS36]

Originally posted by Prince of Thieves:

Yeah going to severely limit the amount of dukes from how on, that was one major issue. This is major learning curve.

This only works if you're a really small kingdom. It doesn't really work that well if you want to be an expansive empire. Later on you have to give your county vassals away to dukes or other kings in order to stay under the cap.

Overall, the entire game is going to be you trying to stop people from having faction wars and the only means to do so are repetitive and uninteresting.