Best way to grant titles

[Messman]

Should I give land to my vassals or to my children? What are the pros and cons of each?

[CrUsHeR]

As long as you are locked to some form of partition succession, you always want to obtain new land and give it out to additional sons beyond your primary heir. Keep doing this until the primary heir no longer loses land.


The problem with this lies in future generations. Every child will inherit claims to titles from their parents (i.e. when the parent dies). Now they are your sons, in the future they are brothers and distant kinsmen which all have full claims on everything you own.

So there always are legit reasons for malcontent factions to install one of them as ruler. Also any offspring of your line which doesn't hold land might start wandering off, then foreign realms can push their claims.


Another problem is that once you grant land to any of your sons, they are fair game for your other vassals. Often they get instantly declared war and lose the land you just gave them. Marrying them with strong alliances is a good idea.

And there are other problems with realm fragmentation; when you have a piece of land to give away now, then he still might inherit another duchy somewhere else. Then it gets a bit complicated to maintain the power balance.

[Messman]

Originally posted by CrUsHeR:

As long as you are locked to some form of partition succession, you always want to obtain new land and give it out to additional sons beyond your primary heir. Keep doing this until the primary heir no longer loses land.


The problem with this lies in future generations. Every child will inherit claims to titles from their parents (i.e. when the parent dies). Now they are your sons, in the future they are brothers and distant kinsmen which all have full claims on everything you own.

So there always are legit reasons for malcontent factions to install one of them as ruler. Also any offspring of your line which doesn't hold land might start wandering off, then foreign realms can push their claims.


Another problem is that once you grant land to any of your sons, they are fair game for your other vassals. Often they get instantly declared war and lose the land you just gave them. Marrying them with strong alliances is a good idea.

And there are other problems with realm fragmentation; when you have a piece of land to give away now, then he still might inherit another duchy somewhere else. Then it gets a bit complicated to maintain the power balance.

lol so what's the best thing to do? Just give the land to my vassals and try my best to only have one son? heh

[Myth Alric]

The pros of giving them to your children are:

1. Your children will get an income, prestige and piety for the land they own.
2. If something happens and they break away from you, you get renown for house members who own title outside your kingdom.
3. They tend to like you more and you get automatic alliances with your children.
4. If something goes really wrong, you may end up playing a brother or sister as an heir so them having a stronger position benefits you as a safety net.

The cons of giving them to your children are:

1. You have less control over them and some times they might get into wars or make bad marriages.
2. All your children have a claim on all your titles, so potentially they can declare war on you(or your heir after you die) and try to steal your land if they get powerful enough. Or even try to assassinate you or family members to steal titles from each other.
3. If something does go wrong a few heirs down the line, there are harsher penalties to murdering your own family than from murdering unrelated people.

Personally I like giving them to my children, but there are pros and cons to both and I don't think it is clear cut. It depends on what you are worried about. I was actually playing recently where my heir had married someone and did the wrong type of marriage(it wasn't my son but a grandchild and he had his own title so decided the marriages) so when I died I played as him and my child wasn't apart of my mouse. He was my only heir and so I would of lost everything and had to murder the son to fix things. Which really sucked because everyone hated me and I got the kinslaying penalty, plus I didn't really want to murder a child but I had to. It did work out in the end but it could of gone badly.

[Zaidah]

Another pro : if you're the dynasty head and have some family members as vassal, at some point (and thanks to 1 point in the intendance tree) you can get gold from weak hook (that you get for every new born of your family after you got in charge) and gather a lot of money from your loyal related vassals !

[Harris]

Originally posted by Messman:

lol so what's the best thing to do?

After several runs all I can say - beats me.

In the beginning I thought giving one county per vassal is a good idea so they stay weak and noone becomes a powerful vassal - it doesn't work like that because there will ALWAYS be powerful vassals out of those, and when they're upset they just make factions against you so it's no difference whether you're fighting 1 strong vassal or 50 weak of them.

In my games vassals always go out of control and I find myself needing to rely on dreadful ruler and Byzantium 40k expeditionary force more often than I'd like to. High dread build is a must if you want to actually imprison someone and reshuffle their titles. And I found reorganizing titles a necessity every once in a while - like when you become an empire, when you get primogeniture, etc.

However, vassals will always make factions against you, it's just a math game. Whenever their relations numbers are in the red, they'll rebel. So logical decisions like stripping all rebels off their titles are just busywork in reality. The names of your vassals don't mean anything.

Ultimately, even a task I tried to achieve of making sure all land in my realm is held by my dynasty is neither useful not realistic. Sure, there are specific bonuses like making friends with your dynasty, but when you have 50+ vassals you don't wanna micromanage relationships with every of them, you want to have an "AOE" option so to speak.

From this perspective, it is always better to have few vassals with a lot of territory rather than dozens of single county ones. Simply because it's easier to manage them, keep track of them, friend them and the like.

Back in the day I also thought that primogeniture would solve all my problems. Because otherwise if you give a duchy with 3 counties to a vassal then after his death you have 3 vassals instead of 1, and so on and on. But no, it wouldn't solve anything. Because every vassal has their own succession laws, and that is always some form of partition.

Coming back to the topic of planting your dynasty everywhere is pointless. First - you not only want your heir to be of your dynasty, you actually want your heir to stay in power. It doesn't help if your relatives overthrow you and make you a count of Distant Nowhere. Addionally, you can't even execute them outside of custom religion, as that would give kinslayer. And after a couple generation your dynasty won't be in control of those places because the descendants of people you gave titles to marry into other dynasties.

Conclusion I can make of this - don't bother micromanaging vassals, not worth it. Just a busywork. When starting as Charles II of France in 867 after my "county to empire" run I was overwhelmed with amount of stuff I have, the vassals to account for. Thing is, I shouldn't have bothered.

Previously I used to hold an empire title and ALL kingdom titles for said empire. Like Russian Emperor would historically hold King of Poland and other realms around him. Theoretically this is cool because you get to have every duke as your direct vassal. In practise, it's just babysitting a ton of dukes.

When I had a split upon death and had empire and single kingdom, and other 5 kingdoms in control by brothers, surprisingly it made for a much smoother game. It felt like CK wants us to play like that. #1 - you don't have to babysit dukes anymore, your kings do that, there are even events where they ask your help to solve vassals going war after each other. #2 - when I gave out every kingdom title and was left with my domain I suddenly found I have no factions anymore, no rebellions, and a much better gold income. Meaning the game actually punished me for trying to have a more direct control of things.

All right, let's make some tips out of this wall of text:

1) Don't micromanage your vassals - those below king tier at least;

2) Focus on kings of your empire, ideally have them of your dynasty so easier to stay friends with;

3) Don't bother making dukes and below of your dynasty, it's better marrying them abroad so you get foreign rulers of your dynasty - you can use house powers to make them fight your wars and the like;

4) Focus on your capital duchy, use their taxes to build up a solid domain so you have some staying power;

5) Let your vassals have some freedom - worst case they'll be your meatshield against enemies while you build up, best case they'll go win you a couple of more kingdoms.

6) Ideally your title structure would look like this: Empire title(s) => King title for kingdom that has empire's De Jure capital (ex. England if you're Empire of Brittania) => Duke title for the capital duchy + 1 one more duchy title in case your capital duchy is small (max 2 duchy titles before penalties) => Count titles up to as many as your capital duchy holds.

[Harris]

Originally posted by Myth Alric:

automatic alliances with your children

It is good if they are independent rulers. An alliance with your vassal doesn't give you anything, they won't join your wars or bring men-at-arms. The sole exception is allies can't join factions so it maybe useful to give a spare daughter to your most powerful/dangerous vassal every once in a while.

Alliances with independent rulers though. For example, I seduced queen of Bavaria and recognized the bastard daughter, then murdered the queen and got my daughter in her place. Because of high relations from being her father and house head thingy I get her to do what I want.. before she starts to dislike me anyway.