Viceroyalties or Kings

[SkiRich]

Which do you prefer and why?
I am emperor of all the british isles as well as king of each kingdom.
Yep I have too many vassals.
So I am thinking ahead, do I implement viceroyalties or give out the king titles to my heirs for each kingdom?
I'm leaning towards kings since I dont get opinion penalties plus the dynasty gets a boost in prestige giving more vassal limits.
I read a few threads here that said the having kings under an emperor create a negative opnion penalty of -25 on each king I make. But that was reported as a bug in 2014.
Is that still an issue?
I really want the kings but -25 per king makes for keeping them loyal difficult. I dont want a kingdom rebellion.
Thoughts?

[JD]

I think the answer depends on the empire size. If we're talking about a regular empire that has around 5 kingdoms then I'd definitely go viceroyalties, but if you're going to conquer whole the map then it might be better to play without vassals at all.

EDIT: In your case i'd go viceroyalties.

[al_x_ator2411]

Never heard or experienced the -25 opinion. And if all your vassals are viceroys then they don't get any negative opinion because of it. The regular dukes underneath them might dislike you but since they won't be your direct vassals they won't be able to hurt you.

[ZombieHunter]

I prefer Kings. Viceroyalties are nice but become a burdern b/c death happens a lot and then you get the entire kingdom for the viceroyalty back. After a bit they become quite tiresome.

[the dark wizard]

Depends on the land that you give, and what laws you have in place. If my laws are set up "perfectly" then I enjoy having them be a mix of vice and normal kings.

I usually give out kingdoms to permantly to ppl that I believe will be able to manage them and whom I want to be around as a powerbase for me. Vice is a temp position, most likely to reward a good subject while also deligating annoying land.

But 9/10 times it will be normal kingdoms that I give out, if the family then dissapoints me, then I will root them out in a few generations, and repeat the process.

[Numenorean]

I prefer viceroyalties, because that allows you to hand it out to whoever you want after the viceroy dies. This makes them like you and as its you who chooses the viceroy, you can choose vassals that are most likely to like you (ie you share traits, theyre content, etc). Also if you grant viceroyalties to older vassals they are likely to die before the bonus for granted viceroyalty wears off.

And it works great with Imperial Administration laws, allowing for vassal retraction without opinion penalty and so on.

[galadon3]

The opinion malus you get is -2 for every vice-roy king and -1 for every viceroy duke you have as direct vassals but only from direct normal vassals, not from the vice-roy ones.
So as al_x_ator said, as long as all your direct vassals are vice-roys you don't have any opinion malus to deal with.

Viceroyalities are a lot of work to establish especially if you already have a big empire when getting there tech-wise but as soon as you have the whole realm as vice-royalities they have 2 distinctive advantages:
1. No matter if a vassal manages to become dangerously powerfull, when he dies his highest title reverts to you and a lot of power he accumulated will fall apart (while in normal feudal realms you might end up with one vassal king who conuqers another and then inherits a third crown from a marriage having to deal with a tripple-mega king or things like that).
2. You can re-choose the vassal every generation. While inwith feudal vassals you might take one who has fitting traits to your own and stuff like content to assure loyality that can pretty quickly change as soon as you or the vassal is replaced by the next generation.
With Vice-royality you can take the most fitting one every generation.

Have to keep a look on vassal external wars though, since if those are allowed it might be a way for a vice-roy vassal to aquire a permanent title of the same level by himself.

[Sander]

The negative opinion penalty only gets applied to direct vassals who are not viceroyalty. Keep in mind that viceroyal Kings are easier to control, as their family essentially loses all their power upon succession.

[Malus]

Více royalties are also revocable without tyranny i think, or what is thr opinion debuff for unjustified revocation.

I prefer not having the viceroyalties laws on as it severely decreases my vassal limit, making me less able to spam merchant Republics. It also requires thr holder to ve feudal for me to be able to grant him viceroyalties, and i dislike having feudal vassals as they provide less gold than Republics

[flicking]

I've never really tried Vicroyalties because if I have a lot of kings the vassal limits become a problem and if I only have a few, I have had no problems managing either their ongoing relationships or succession, using the tools available.

That said, my empires tend to be growth operations where I try to minimize the number of kings while feeding them new conquests on a steady stream. It is possible that if I was playing an empire for a long time that wasn't growing anymore that Viceroys would be more attractive. The ability to reshuffle the power dynamic at each succession, transferring vassalage as needed to balance things out does seem useful.

[flicking]

Originally posted by ZombieHunter:

I prefer Kings. Viceroyalties are nice but become a burdern b/c death happens a lot and then you get the entire kingdom for the viceroyalty back. After a bit they become quite tiresome.

Yes. The one time I really worked with Viceroyalties was in a Byzantine focused game and in the end I just reorganized everything with kingdoms. Part of the problem was they were all dukedoms and half the dukes were normal, so there was a malus there that was annoying.

But mostly it was that I kept having to micromanage it every time somebody died. I just find it easier to scan my vassals from time to time and spot the succession changes by some kid being in charge who doesn't like me as much as my other vassals because I gave stuff to his dad, but not to him directly.

[Mr_Faorry]

Originally posted by Christmas Potajto:

Více royalties are also revocable without tyranny i think, or what is thr opinion debuff for unjustified revocation.

I believe it's only viceroy duchies that can be revoked without tyranny, pretty sure viceroy kingdoms still incur tyranny when revoked without reason.

[SkiRich]

To wrap this up I've been playing with one Viceroyalty in my empire.
Its been pretty good. The viceroy has been quite productive.
I would continue to use them except for two issues.

The -10 malus I get for making just one, plus -2 for each viceroy.
That I can handle myself, since I have many more ++'s to compensate.
The big issue is the viceroy himself gets a -10 malus for viceroyal admin.
That I cant control, and it results in so many factions and people hatting him its been a wonder he hasent been killed yet.
All other functions he would perform are also just that much harder to overcome as wel with that malus.

So when I get the viceroy back, I'll turn it into a king and give it to his best heir.

I will use it again if I am unsure of a characters ability when handing out kingdoms or if I want the kingdom back in the future.

[Mr_Faorry]

Originally posted by SkiRich:

To wrap this up I've been playing with one Viceroyalty in my empire.
Its been pretty good. The viceroy has been quite productive.
I would continue to use them except for two issues.

The -10 malus I get for making just one, plus -2 for each viceroy.
That I can handle myself, since I have many more ++'s to compensate.
The big issue is the viceroy himself gets a -10 malus for viceroyal admin.
That I cant control, and it results in so many factions and people hatting him its been a wonder he hasent been killed yet.
All other functions he would perform are also just that much harder to overcome as wel with that malus.

Don't combine viceroys and regular vassals, either have all viceroys or none so you don't have to deal with the negative opinion.

[Count Von Count]

Originally posted by Mr_Faorry:

Originally posted by SkiRich:

To wrap this up I've been playing with one Viceroyalty in my empire.
Its been pretty good. The viceroy has been quite productive.
I would continue to use them except for two issues.

The -10 malus I get for making just one, plus -2 for each viceroy.
That I can handle myself, since I have many more ++'s to compensate.
The big issue is the viceroy himself gets a -10 malus for viceroyal admin.
That I cant control, and it results in so many factions and people hatting him its been a wonder he hasent been killed yet.
All other functions he would perform are also just that much harder to overcome as wel with that malus.

Don't combine viceroys and regular vassals, either have all viceroys or none so you don't have to deal with the negative opinion.

I suspect he means that other characters get a malus towards the king, not towards the emperor player character

[76109108007942031]

Kings because I can't be bothered to give out the viceroyalty after each death, and having a group of powerful landed families makes for a more interesting game in my opinion.