I've offered, just with conditions that I don't expect anyone to accept.
Basically, I'd either want to be allowed to do something stupid (like convert to Islam) or play as a completely different ruler for a generation to make things exciting again.
So I think that upgrading ones holdings might be a wee bit more important than I had initially thought. Will definitely have to improve upon that in game number two which I started yesterday. Well technically number three, but I got wiped out so quickly in one game that I don't think it should count.
Game number one came to an unceremonious end due to my queen being of a slightly different flavour of Catholicism to everyone else. Not quite sure how it came to be, but I was having a ball of a time converting people and taking counties and duchies as I wished. That was until England and Scotland came a'knocking. Aforementioned lack of county improvements made those wars quick and painfilled.
I can take the save now that my PC is finally working properly again. Should make a nice change of pace from my insanely stable Karling game.
Won't be able to play til tomorrow evening (GMT) at the earliest though.
PM me your email address so I can send you the save.
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MackenzierGold Star Police NinjaLurking... less than usual.Registered Userregular
Anyone else ever had this happen? I started a new Ireland game (trying to rush to Britannia as my end goal) and things are going along smoothly, I've got a decent chunk of England, a few pieces of Scotland and all of Wales. The lords of England decide that its time for Elective Monarchy and pass that; all of a sudden MY heir as King of Ireland changes to a farflung cousin that held an English county. Hasn't really messed up my game much (aside from him being German...) but it was unusual.
I am still debating whether it was a good idea to swear fealty to the pope. Pope's in my game are better armed and actually pose a sizable threat against duke/small kingdoms. So far my pope has gobbled up the Kingdom of Mali (and almost always taking all the lands for himself). While great for my idea of expanding the religion, I wonder if it would have been better if I had created a kingdom for myself first and THEN sworn fealty to my pope.
As it is now, I'm going to be stuck as his vassal forever since his armies outnumber mine.
1453 (the fall of constantinopel) The traditional end of the middle ages.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I had a bit of a scare when my heir turned out to be an imbecile. I was torn because he was set to inherit 2 duchies and 5 counties outside the realms. But there's no way I could have him running the kingdom. My wife hadn't produced any other children besides him in a while, so I divorced her and married a courtier with some good stats and plenty of child bearing years ahead of her. Our first two children were daughters, but the third was a son. I'll remember his birthday as the day I assassinated my first born son. Assassinating heirs is expensive! 450 gold. And I missed the first time. But totally worth it.
I also lucked out. Poland is pretty large in my game, and the current ruler is an 11 year old girl. I betrothed my heir to her and my heir's heir will now inherit the Kingdoms of Poland and Hungary! Yay!
Though it's the year 1409, so the game may end soon? I don't remember when it ends.
All in all, my first game has gone pretty well. Ireland is really the best place to start. Let's you learn the ropes in relative peace and you have generally safe expansions. Once this game ends, I'll have to figure out a more challenging place to start. Maybe Spain?
Spain's honestly not too bad if you know what to do. Abyssinia and environs are pretty tough. I think starting as a count in Armenia is pretty tough as it's quite likely you'll get jihaded.
Aragon in Spain is pretty easy if you know what you're doing. You have a TON of de jure claims, and while you start out with only one county it's fairly built up, and has a barony under your control from the start. You can basically just save up 150-200 gold, buy some mercenaries, and then start a rampage of conquest to get back what's yours. By pressing de jure claims you avoid the dogpile of Holy Wars, and barring getting unlucky it's pretty easy to establish control of the de jure kingdom of Aragon with your first ruler - Barcelona is actually the toughest part of it IMO, as they've got a number of counties that you can't just take all at once (take the Duke's counties first to break it up for faster conquest).
Civics is not a consumer product that you can ignore because you don’t like the options presented.
I think my idea of giving Pope's personal armies was a mistake.
I began my days as a count of Sicily. I believed in the Cathar Heresy and sought to establish the duchy of Sicily, capture a single county outside of my duchy and give it to the pope. Afterwards I would swear fealty to him and watch the Cathar Empire grow.
It didn't go like I planned.
First of all, the AI for the pope was NOT configured like an ordinary count/duke/king/emperor. He would very slowly build up his armies and not even press de jure claims I had granted him. Furthermore, my duchy was constantly in a holy war and the Pope (who was supposed to protect me with his papal army) was sitting drooling in his castle while I was getting my ass handed.
Fuck it, I'll cheat myself to cash and wipe the armies out. While that worked, my alliance with the Pope went nowhere. Then I saw this:
Seems at least oneheresy is having better luck than I.
I ditched my pope and allied myself with the HRE (Technically the HWR now). The Catholic pope began to holy war all over the place and it is here I think papal armies should be restricted to heresy religions:
Under normal circumstances, one can hire a holy order to help out in holy wars. These holy orders are pretty tough (fielding tons of heavy infantry and cavalry), so they basically stomp anyone they run across. They only cost piety to hire. Add to that the 6000 strong army the Pope can dish out and we're easily looking at a 18.000 strong army comprised of elite units. Nothing can stand against such a force and the HRE, which is many sizes bigger, could barely hold its own. Furthermore, there are no holy orders for heresies (at least I haven't added any yet).
But beyond that, the most annoying thing was the constant holy wars the Muslims declared on me and I had (under the pope) no choice of rebelling, because the AI favors Absolute Crown Authority.
I am currently the king of Ireland and I am trying to get the last two counties under my control. Ulster belongs to the king of Scotland, so that will have to wait. However, Tyrconnell is a single county with no allies and should be ripe of taking.
Except the count keeps hiring a Holy Order every time I try to press my de jure claim on it.
I don't get it. I thought you could only hire holy orders if a holy war was pressed upon you. Not when it is a matter of legalism.
Anyone got a solution as to why? If it is a "bug" I caused in the code, I want to fix it since there is no way I can dish up an army to counter his 7k heavy infantry and cavalry army
I'm being puzzled by allying with other factions. When I'm marrying off someone from my dynasty and choose a partner with a blue flag next to their name, I'll be getting an ally through this. But I'll only be able to call in said ally if they don't have a liege? So in order to be able to call in France as an ally, I'll have to marry someone to the King of France? Or one of his daughters? Or can I marry a sister? I just want to stop those mean muslims from taking my Sicily!
I'm being puzzled by allying with other factions. When I'm marrying off someone from my dynasty and choose a partner with a blue flag next to their name, I'll be getting an ally through this. But I'll only be able to call in said ally if they don't have a liege? So in order to be able to call in France as an ally, I'll have to marry someone to the King of France? Or one of his daughters? Or can I marry a sister? I just want to stop those mean muslims from taking my Sicily!
Sadly, marrying a relative into a great house is no guarantee that the title holder of the house will come to your aid. In my Ireland game I was allied with the King of England and he only answered my call to arms when I attempted to take the Isle of Man as a claim against a depowered king of Scotland.
In other words, he was a coward and useless.
In other news, I found out something puzzling pertaining to my previous post. I tried to become the grandmaster of my fictional holy order and had to jump through some hoops to understand the process*. When I finally became the grandmaster, the holy order didn't show up at all and I had to take a look at the code again.
Turns out I missed a single "}" to end the line at every holy order. Now I understand why I never was able to hire a holy order when I really needed them (essentially causing me to cheat at various instances). The puzzling part was that the AI somehow managed to hire the order at certain points even though the code was incomplete. Guess I'll restart my game as some other ruler now that I have changed the code again.
*
Just for reference and if people want to know how to vassalize holy orders. It requires you to be of king level.
1. Find the title holder
2. Find a claimant to the title holder (If you can't see any claimants to the title, then you may need to give the current title holder some land. A barony will do. The title holder will then create a court who can be claimants).
3. Invite the claimant to your court.
4. Grant the claimant a county and then make him a duke. It doesn't matter if he actually holds the lands within the duchy. He just needs the duchy title as his primary one.
5. Grant the current title holder a barony. This will enable to you press your invited claimant's claim on the current title holder.
6. Obviously you win the war and now your claimant is the new grandmaster AND your vassal. Congratulations!
7. Now assassinate your claimant and become grandmaster yourself. Free armies! :twisted:
8. Alternatively wait til he dies if he is childless.
I find that holding grandmaster titles yourself is somewhat restrictive as they count as one of your two free duke titles.
You can also vassalize a holy order by granting the current grandmaster a duchy, and if he is of the same cultural group, you can just offer vassalization straight up from there.
I find that holding grandmaster titles yourself is somewhat restrictive as they count as one of your two free duke titles.
Maybe, but on the other hand you gain a free standing army of 2-7k elite units. That's hard to achieve in the game and you also prevent other rulers from using the holy order resulting in a sure-proof way to winning holy crusades. You can opt for ruling from a single county with this method.
You get some of those benefits just from vassalizing them. If they're your vassal no one else can hire them, and the troops actually cost no upkeep as far as I can tell, even though the holy orders screen says otherwise. They also only cost like 15 piety or something to hire, which is great.
You get some of those benefits just from vassalizing them. If they're your vassal no one else can hire them, and the troops actually cost no upkeep as far as I can tell, even though the holy orders screen says otherwise. They also only cost like 15 piety or something to hire, which is great.
Really? I thought you only benefited from the lower piety cost/no one else can hire you. If the upkeep cost is eliminated, then it is a bug.
So far it has been working out great. I am now a duke of Sicily with some extra land on the main land of Italy, and the holy order has been great protecting me against the filthy Catholics and Muslims (who actually tried to holy war me, but no jihad). Actually managed to send my holy order all the way down to the king of Abyssina, since his and my family are allied and he requested assistance against the Rhassid Emirate (though the Monophysite has a holy order of their own. Why he didn't use it is beyond me).
1) Minimize the number of your direct vassals
2) Convert everyone's children to your culture
3) Keep your capital relatively central. And when handing out king titles, give it to the noble closest to your capital.
A key guideline though is that you should never make a vassal so powerful that he could match your personal forces unless he sided up with a whole lot of your other vassals.
You should be able to at any time defeat your two or three most powerful independent vassals. At the same time.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I'm in no danger of losing to the rebellious vassals, since even with a fresh ruler, I can summon 200k troops. It just takes FOREVER to put down the rebellions. My personal force is 22k, which is bigger than any Duke, but can't handle what the Kings under me can raise.
How do you minimize vassals while still keeping them weak? I have about 50 dukes under me and it's not like I can horde their titles or destroy them. I do the whole, give a potential Duke 1 county in the duchy and then make them the Duke, but there are plenty who end up going to war with their neighbors and end up with like 2-3 duchies and 3-4 counties underneath them eventually. It's especially bad in newly conquered kingdoms that have had hundreds of years to amass power. So it's very slow revoking one duchy/county each time they rebel until they are more manageable.
I'm mostly afraid of the king of france rebelling as his kingdom has the most available troops at 90k.
The best way to keep someone weak is to make sure he only has a single county in his demesne. That makes it harder for him to consolidate power in his realm, leaving him less time to be a problem for you.
It sounds like one problem you're having is that you need to change to Medium Crown Authority. That'll prevent your direct vassals from making a mess of your carefully assigned borders. It won't prevent messes caused by marriage, but those can usually be resolved a revocation or two.
Otherwise, it sounds like you just need to consolidate some Dukes. When I take a Duchy whose Kingdom title I can't form, I do one of the following:
1) Give the Duke title to a nearby King. This lets the land incorporate into that kingdom, eventually solving your problem. Example: In my Muslim Iberia game, I gave the King of Andalusia every single Iberian Duchy. By 1200, the entire penninsula was de jure Andalusia.
2) Find someone of that Kingdom's culture with a lot of piety and give them enough land to meet the kingdom's requirements. Then gift them money until they have enough to form the Kingdom themselves. Example: In the same game, I found a Welsh noble, converted him to Islam, then gave him 2 of the 3 Duchies in Wales. After handing him a few hundred gold (and a few years) he was King of Wales. I then assigned his son to be educated by one of my female relatives so that once the King died, his heir would be my culture.
You do get less taxes, but the reduced need for gifts mostly evens it out. As for plots, I just leave most them alone as long as they aren't targeting me or someone I want to protect.
Are the people rebelling your culture? If not, defeat them, take their title, then give it to someone who is. That's about a 30% revolt risk reduction right there.
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
I think I'm losing the will to play this game. My ruler died and I have a continuous stream of 12 or so rebellions at once. As soon as someone gets put down someone else rebels. My previous ruler only lived long enough to do one and a half wars after his rebellion storm when he inherited. Argh.
I think I'm losing the will to play this game. My ruler died and I have a continuous stream of 12 or so rebellions at once.
White peace a couple of them, to get the number down to something manageable. Then, go one after the other, starting with the guy with the highest warscore.
Take this opportunity to take your uppity vassals down a peg and, more importantly, clean house. If they own territory outside their de jure duchies, strip that when they rebel. Take away their duchy titles and then give it to someone else in their duchy - then the new duke will love you for the promotion and he'll have to deal with the pissed-off newly demoted count.
If there's someone else who looks like he's about to rebel, and you don't think you'll be able to handle his rebellion at the moment, offer to tutor one of his children - if he accepts, that'll prevent him from rebelling until his kid's of age.
My current ruler - Queen Cathan THE FUCKIN' AWESOME* - had a reign like that. Went from her father's huge long reign bonus buoyed by mutual Crusader love to a huge short reign penalty with a "Female Ruler" kicker. There's about 6 or 8 vassals who have been in nigh constant rebellion the whole time, and the ability to repeatedly kick their face in has made them individually weak, put much more loyal people in positions of power (no ambitious traits allowed), trained their heirs, and has gained so much prestige from victories and gold from sieges that her whole demesne is running out of things to build - she's found 6 new cities all by her lonesome, off the backs of her rebellious vassals.
She's also managed to outlive 4 husbands, and the current is a 20-year-old Attractive Italian guy who was baseborn when she found him; I figure she's earned it, and ate the [very small] prestige hit for marrying a commoner.
* The game titled her "The Great," but she's going to increase my score by about 50% all on her own by the time she kicks off.
38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
Good advice, I think I might need to start over though. My empire is all over the place, and some county in Albania was able to get his warscore high enough because its a pain to get all the way over there. Somehow that triggers every empire and kingdom having their laws set to minimal crown authority so now I can't revoke anything anywhere. Seems a shame to resign at 1300 years but 90k points sounds good.
38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
I was trying assassination, seems like most people use that as their first option for any problem, but for whatever reason assassination seems to take 350-450 gold an attempt and only have a 20% chance of success. I tried to get my kin into positions of power, and that gives me kinslayer. Argh.
Assassination is based on the title holder you want to assassinate. Children and those not in power cost less because it is easier to kill someone who nobody cares about.
As such:
Count level titles cost 150 gold
Duke level titles cost 250 gold
King level titles cost 350 gold
Presumably Emperor level titles would cost 450 gold, but I can't seem to remember it. It's easy to check though (just look at the Kaiser).
In other news, I think I have given up on trying to establish a Lollard Empire at the foot of Italy. The constant Holy Wars from the Muslims and every Catholic ruler in the area makes it difficult for me to survive. Six times I have had to resort to cheating because I didn't want to see my hard work go to waste. Finally, the giant Fatimid kingdom decided to declare a Jihad against my kingdom with a 18k large force. I finally gave up and just surrendered instantly. I thought I would be shown the End Game screen, but instead my ruler became a daughter I had married off to a guy in the Byzantine Empire. She had a duke title, but she was orthodox . Would rather start over a better place, so I won't get holy warred left and right.
I'm pretty sure that heirs also have an assassination cost equal to the title they're set to inherit. That or all children of a ruler cost as much to assassinate as the ruler. Something like that.
It's usually easiest to just start a plot to kill kids, since there's almost always backers for the plots, since the kids haven't really made any friends yet, they've got super low intrigue scores, and there's almost always someone who stands to gain by their deaths
I've been trying to get back into Empire: Total War lately, but its lack of a diplomacy system compared to CK2 is making re-entry hard. If only we could combine the campaign mode of CK2 and the battles of a total war game, we'd create my favoritest game of all time
A trap is for fish: when you've got the fish, you can forget the trap. A snare is for rabbits: when you've got the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words are for meaning: when you've got the meaning, you can forget the words.
It's usually easiest to just start a plot to kill kids, since there's almost always backers for the plots, since the kids haven't really made any friends yet, they've got super low intrigue scores, and there's almost always someone who stands to gain by their deaths
I've been trying to get back into Empire: Total War lately, but its lack of a diplomacy system compared to CK2 is making re-entry hard. If only we could combine the campaign mode of CK2 and the battles of a total war game, we'd create my favoritest game of all time
The combination of low personal diplomacy and low intrigue is what makes it especially easy.
Apparently in the Middle Ages, everyone absolutely loathed children.
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38thDoelets never be stupid againwait lets always be stupid foreverRegistered Userregular
I never seem to need children dead, just rulers. What am I doing wrong?
I never seem to need children dead, just rulers. What am I doing wrong?
Not intermarrying into dynasties that you later assassinate, so that you're the sole heir.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
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MackenzierGold Star Police NinjaLurking... less than usual.Registered Userregular
I'll admit, I occasionally cheat at this game via saves. If my ruler dies from contracting an illness or just randomly at an inconvenient time like when I'm already fighting 10 independence wars when I die, my heir will now be even less liked and pretty much everyone will rebel, then I reload a save (usually the autosave) and the RNG usually does not cause me to die again. But I usually limit it to those extreme situations where continuing the game would not be fun. I've had several rulers who need regents because their parent died too young. It's more difficult, but not insurmountable.
I do this as well. Sometimes losing that monarch at that exact moment would just utterly ruin the game; though I've gotten a lot better about not artificially extending the rule of an awesome ruler. On the flipside, in my last game I had one ruler die and his 4 year old daughter inherited.. this girl survived at least 4 attempts on her life A YEAR until she ascended the throne proper (she had a bitch of a great aunt that I accidentally released from prison and then fled the kingdom with a weak claim). She absolutely earned that nickname of 'Ironside' as she went on to steal the Kingdom of Aquitaine from France as the Duchess of Brittany.
I never seem to need children dead, just rulers. What am I doing wrong?
Not intermarrying into dynasties that you later assassinate, so that you're the sole heir.
Or having a heir you don't like. (Are you seriously not able to make a plot against them? I can't get it to show up)
I find you have to go to the diplomacy page and occasionally you can locate the option to plot from there, little button on the left side, knife-in-hand. Sometimes it'll be an option, other times greyed out; not sure what the triggers are, to be honest.
Posts
I've offered, just with conditions that I don't expect anyone to accept.
Basically, I'd either want to be allowed to do something stupid (like convert to Islam) or play as a completely different ruler for a generation to make things exciting again.
Won't be able to play til tomorrow evening (GMT) at the earliest though.
Game number one came to an unceremonious end due to my queen being of a slightly different flavour of Catholicism to everyone else. Not quite sure how it came to be, but I was having a ball of a time converting people and taking counties and duchies as I wished. That was until England and Scotland came a'knocking. Aforementioned lack of county improvements made those wars quick and painfilled.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
PM me your email address so I can send you the save.
FFRK: 9rRG
As it is now, I'm going to be stuck as his vassal forever since his armies outnumber mine.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Spain's honestly not too bad if you know what to do. Abyssinia and environs are pretty tough. I think starting as a count in Armenia is pretty tough as it's quite likely you'll get jihaded.
I began my days as a count of Sicily. I believed in the Cathar Heresy and sought to establish the duchy of Sicily, capture a single county outside of my duchy and give it to the pope. Afterwards I would swear fealty to him and watch the Cathar Empire grow.
It didn't go like I planned.
First of all, the AI for the pope was NOT configured like an ordinary count/duke/king/emperor. He would very slowly build up his armies and not even press de jure claims I had granted him. Furthermore, my duchy was constantly in a holy war and the Pope (who was supposed to protect me with his papal army) was sitting drooling in his castle while I was getting my ass handed.
Fuck it, I'll cheat myself to cash and wipe the armies out. While that worked, my alliance with the Pope went nowhere. Then I saw this:
Seems at least oneheresy is having better luck than I.
I ditched my pope and allied myself with the HRE (Technically the HWR now). The Catholic pope began to holy war all over the place and it is here I think papal armies should be restricted to heresy religions:
Under normal circumstances, one can hire a holy order to help out in holy wars. These holy orders are pretty tough (fielding tons of heavy infantry and cavalry), so they basically stomp anyone they run across. They only cost piety to hire. Add to that the 6000 strong army the Pope can dish out and we're easily looking at a 18.000 strong army comprised of elite units. Nothing can stand against such a force and the HRE, which is many sizes bigger, could barely hold its own. Furthermore, there are no holy orders for heresies (at least I haven't added any yet).
But beyond that, the most annoying thing was the constant holy wars the Muslims declared on me and I had (under the pope) no choice of rebelling, because the AI favors Absolute Crown Authority.
I am currently the king of Ireland and I am trying to get the last two counties under my control. Ulster belongs to the king of Scotland, so that will have to wait. However, Tyrconnell is a single county with no allies and should be ripe of taking.
Except the count keeps hiring a Holy Order every time I try to press my de jure claim on it.
I don't get it. I thought you could only hire holy orders if a holy war was pressed upon you. Not when it is a matter of legalism.
Anyone got a solution as to why? If it is a "bug" I caused in the code, I want to fix it since there is no way I can dish up an army to counter his 7k heavy infantry and cavalry army
Because Catholicism is being a player hater against my homie Lollardy.
http://steamcommunity.com/id/pablocampy
Sadly, marrying a relative into a great house is no guarantee that the title holder of the house will come to your aid. In my Ireland game I was allied with the King of England and he only answered my call to arms when I attempted to take the Isle of Man as a claim against a depowered king of Scotland.
In other words, he was a coward and useless.
In other news, I found out something puzzling pertaining to my previous post. I tried to become the grandmaster of my fictional holy order and had to jump through some hoops to understand the process*. When I finally became the grandmaster, the holy order didn't show up at all and I had to take a look at the code again.
Turns out I missed a single "}" to end the line at every holy order. Now I understand why I never was able to hire a holy order when I really needed them (essentially causing me to cheat at various instances). The puzzling part was that the AI somehow managed to hire the order at certain points even though the code was incomplete. Guess I'll restart my game as some other ruler now that I have changed the code again.
*
1. Find the title holder
2. Find a claimant to the title holder (If you can't see any claimants to the title, then you may need to give the current title holder some land. A barony will do. The title holder will then create a court who can be claimants).
3. Invite the claimant to your court.
4. Grant the claimant a county and then make him a duke. It doesn't matter if he actually holds the lands within the duchy. He just needs the duchy title as his primary one.
5. Grant the current title holder a barony. This will enable to you press your invited claimant's claim on the current title holder.
6. Obviously you win the war and now your claimant is the new grandmaster AND your vassal. Congratulations!
You can also vassalize a holy order by granting the current grandmaster a duchy, and if he is of the same cultural group, you can just offer vassalization straight up from there.
Maybe, but on the other hand you gain a free standing army of 2-7k elite units. That's hard to achieve in the game and you also prevent other rulers from using the holy order resulting in a sure-proof way to winning holy crusades. You can opt for ruling from a single county with this method.
Really? I thought you only benefited from the lower piety cost/no one else can hire you. If the upkeep cost is eliminated, then it is a bug.
So far it has been working out great. I am now a duke of Sicily with some extra land on the main land of Italy, and the holy order has been great protecting me against the filthy Catholics and Muslims (who actually tried to holy war me, but no jihad). Actually managed to send my holy order all the way down to the king of Abyssina, since his and my family are allied and he requested assistance against the Rhassid Emirate (though the Monophysite has a holy order of their own. Why he didn't use it is beyond me).
1) Minimize the number of your direct vassals
2) Convert everyone's children to your culture
3) Keep your capital relatively central. And when handing out king titles, give it to the noble closest to your capital.
You should be able to at any time defeat your two or three most powerful independent vassals. At the same time.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
The best way to keep someone weak is to make sure he only has a single county in his demesne. That makes it harder for him to consolidate power in his realm, leaving him less time to be a problem for you.
It sounds like one problem you're having is that you need to change to Medium Crown Authority. That'll prevent your direct vassals from making a mess of your carefully assigned borders. It won't prevent messes caused by marriage, but those can usually be resolved a revocation or two.
Otherwise, it sounds like you just need to consolidate some Dukes. When I take a Duchy whose Kingdom title I can't form, I do one of the following:
1) Give the Duke title to a nearby King. This lets the land incorporate into that kingdom, eventually solving your problem.
Example: In my Muslim Iberia game, I gave the King of Andalusia every single Iberian Duchy. By 1200, the entire penninsula was de jure Andalusia.
2) Find someone of that Kingdom's culture with a lot of piety and give them enough land to meet the kingdom's requirements. Then gift them money until they have enough to form the Kingdom themselves.
Example: In the same game, I found a Welsh noble, converted him to Islam, then gave him 2 of the 3 Duchies in Wales. After handing him a few hundred gold (and a few years) he was King of Wales. I then assigned his son to be educated by one of my female relatives so that once the King died, his heir would be my culture.
Are the people rebelling your culture? If not, defeat them, take their title, then give it to someone who is. That's about a 30% revolt risk reduction right there.
38thDoE on steam
White peace a couple of them, to get the number down to something manageable. Then, go one after the other, starting with the guy with the highest warscore.
Take this opportunity to take your uppity vassals down a peg and, more importantly, clean house. If they own territory outside their de jure duchies, strip that when they rebel. Take away their duchy titles and then give it to someone else in their duchy - then the new duke will love you for the promotion and he'll have to deal with the pissed-off newly demoted count.
If there's someone else who looks like he's about to rebel, and you don't think you'll be able to handle his rebellion at the moment, offer to tutor one of his children - if he accepts, that'll prevent him from rebelling until his kid's of age.
My current ruler - Queen Cathan THE FUCKIN' AWESOME* - had a reign like that. Went from her father's huge long reign bonus buoyed by mutual Crusader love to a huge short reign penalty with a "Female Ruler" kicker. There's about 6 or 8 vassals who have been in nigh constant rebellion the whole time, and the ability to repeatedly kick their face in has made them individually weak, put much more loyal people in positions of power (no ambitious traits allowed), trained their heirs, and has gained so much prestige from victories and gold from sieges that her whole demesne is running out of things to build - she's found 6 new cities all by her lonesome, off the backs of her rebellious vassals.
She's also managed to outlive 4 husbands, and the current is a 20-year-old Attractive Italian guy who was baseborn when she found him; I figure she's earned it, and ate the [very small] prestige hit for marrying a commoner.
* The game titled her "The Great," but she's going to increase my score by about 50% all on her own by the time she kicks off.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
38thDoE on steam
38thDoE on steam
As such:
Count level titles cost 150 gold
Duke level titles cost 250 gold
King level titles cost 350 gold
Presumably Emperor level titles would cost 450 gold, but I can't seem to remember it. It's easy to check though (just look at the Kaiser).
In other news, I think I have given up on trying to establish a Lollard Empire at the foot of Italy. The constant Holy Wars from the Muslims and every Catholic ruler in the area makes it difficult for me to survive. Six times I have had to resort to cheating because I didn't want to see my hard work go to waste. Finally, the giant Fatimid kingdom decided to declare a Jihad against my kingdom with a 18k large force. I finally gave up and just surrendered instantly. I thought I would be shown the End Game screen, but instead my ruler became a daughter I had married off to a guy in the Byzantine Empire. She had a duke title, but she was orthodox
I've been trying to get back into Empire: Total War lately, but its lack of a diplomacy system compared to CK2 is making re-entry hard. If only we could combine the campaign mode of CK2 and the battles of a total war game, we'd create my favoritest game of all time
The combination of low personal diplomacy and low intrigue is what makes it especially easy.
Apparently in the Middle Ages, everyone absolutely loathed children.
38thDoE on steam
Not intermarrying into dynasties that you later assassinate, so that you're the sole heir.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
I do this as well. Sometimes losing that monarch at that exact moment would just utterly ruin the game; though I've gotten a lot better about not artificially extending the rule of an awesome ruler. On the flipside, in my last game I had one ruler die and his 4 year old daughter inherited.. this girl survived at least 4 attempts on her life A YEAR until she ascended the throne proper (she had a bitch of a great aunt that I accidentally released from prison and then fled the kingdom with a weak claim). She absolutely earned that nickname of 'Ironside' as she went on to steal the Kingdom of Aquitaine from France as the Duchess of Brittany.
FFRK: 9rRG
Or having a heir you don't like. (Are you seriously not able to make a plot against them? I can't get it to show up)
I find you have to go to the diplomacy page and occasionally you can locate the option to plot from there, little button on the left side, knife-in-hand. Sometimes it'll be an option, other times greyed out; not sure what the triggers are, to be honest.
FFRK: 9rRG
You can't plot to kill your own children.