Budget black hole of bureaucracy

[Gambit Kstulati]

Restoring Rome is like 80% of the gameplay for me. I buy every DLC, start 5 saves at a time with unrestored Rome to do it all over again with all the cool new mechanics to look at when I get bored from restoring Rome. I build 9 legendary palaces and reach 100 development before 1050. And my treasury is enough to buy every mercenary 5 times over.

Naturally, I play as the Greeks with their bureaucracy because it gives me full control of my beautiful borders and allows me to get rid of awful vassals. I try not to go map-painting, but there's just nothing else to do for me after I become practically undefeatable. So at some point, I can't spend another month without someone telling me that nobody from nowhere slept with an ugly old woman with leprosy. Why can't I ask my advisor to stop telling me stuff like that?

Anyhow, naturally, as I don't want to deal with 500 vassals on my own, I give out big titles. Before they added hegemonies, I had to manually give counties to kings that weren't in the de jure borders, because I wanted them to look pretty. It was such a boring and pointless task, so when I finally could give out empire-tier titles, I was super happy... UNTIL MY INCOME WENT TO –200 GOLD.

My god. Why do I pay development payments to my empire-tier vassals and it's OVER 1k GOLD???? THEY AREN'T EVEN PAYING THEIR VASSALS, I AM. They just end up sitting with thousands and thousands of gold and do nothing with it. Not only that, they also receive taxes from the dukes, while not paying the development taxes – I need to pay those.

Just why? Why can't I live with my pretty Roman empire without getting a note from each and every minor crap, if I don't want to throw all my income into the endless money-sucking exarchs... I never saw that problem while playing as China.

[Deusmodeus]

What is your distribution?

I usually keep mine at 25/30 or 25/25 and I never have any issues outside of the first year or two of a new ruler.

[Gambit Kstulati]

Originally posted by Deusmodeus:

What is your distribution?

I usually keep mine at 25/30 or 25/25 and I never have any issues outside of the first year or two of a new ruler.

The neat part is that it doesn't matter. Development payment can't be manually set in the treasury management. Every vassal gets it, even when I put 0/0, and those empire-tier vassals are eating more combined than every single source of my income.

In my recent save, I gave out the Empire of Frankia. It's the year 1021. My whole income is ~4500. Development payment for the Frankish exarch is 520. And the more titles he controls and the more development his land has, the more this development payment grows.

[Deusmodeus]

Originally posted by Gambit Kstulati:

In my recent save, I gave out the Empire of Frankia. And the more titles he controls and the more development his land has, the more this development payment grows.

I wonder if this is due to it being a high rank vassal. I never let any vassal go above a duke.

If I had to guess, due to how odd the treasury system is, where you collect from direct vassals, to then pay out "everyone", your high-tier vassals are resulting in a direct loss as you no longer receive the direct-taxes of the landholders below him, but still pay in proportion to his held-territory.

Western Administrative is literally designed to play wide, as its the only Admin government that provided a substantial vassal limit bonus, allowing for hundreds of direct vassals.

I think your preference for high-tiered vassals is ultimately what's causing your problem, as not only do they decrease your vassal-income, but they also have a higher base-pay even before taking their size into account.

It would take a bit of prep and cause a bit of buff loss, but perhaps you should consider switching to feudal/Clan and reestablishing yourself as a Celestial Administrative. You may need to do a bit of heir/culture planning tho.