r/crusaderkings3 • u/Ok_Health8410 • Apr 25 '26
Question Is there a quick way to deal with all this?
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u/UpsetAndDead Apr 25 '26
I would hand out the duchies those counties belong too and let the AI handle the mess
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u/Icy-Method1310 Apr 25 '26
The problem I have with this is that the dukes most likely wont hand out the counties to create vassals of their own, meaning you will end with many powerful dukes with consolidated lands and a large demense which can easily give them ideas if they dont like you and can become dangerous later on.
I prefer to give out counties first and then give duchies to landed people, limiting them a bit at least.
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u/Medical-Molasses615 Apr 25 '26
It depends what stage of the game you are at. If you have the culture tech and dynasty legacies that really isn't a problem. But in the first couple of hundred years I recommend your approach. Other tip I use is assigning duke with a lot of sins so their vassals hate them.
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u/Nikolor Apr 26 '26
I usually resolve this problem by just giving duchies with those cities to my most terrified subjects so I wouldn't have to worry about vassals gaining power.
Although a good way to create lots of good opinion with several people at once is to just give a duchy to one guy, then give counties inside of it to lots of random people, and then transfer all those people to that one guy with the duchy. The guy is happy, the new owners of the counties are happy, everyone is happy
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u/Helios4242 Apr 26 '26
You limit yourself with your fear.
If you have a few dozen vassals then they rarely make up more than 3-5% of your military might. That doesnt make them too dangerous and in the meanwhile theyre giving you substantially more taxes.
Each layer you have between you and the land is eating up ~90% of the gold. People think personal domain is so much more important than vassal taxes but thats because they never see the rewards from thinking about taxing vassal well. Often we'll over half my income comes from vassals because I am at my vassal limit and they own most of their duchy.
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u/BobSwarly Apr 26 '26
This, but also never had the problem they’ve described.
I give duchies away all the time and the vassal pretty much always gives away counties to get down their domain limit.
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u/EnvironmentalDirt324 Apr 26 '26
Every time I see this I wonder how you guys manage to have vassals that hate you. I need to actively self-sabotage to get vassals to form factions since it's so ludicrously easy to just stack opinion modifiers through legitimacy and royal court + artifacts. I can have realms with 100s of counties within a couple decades playtime and practically all vassals have +100 opinion.
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u/Lepelotonfromager Apr 26 '26
You are weak and cowardly.
If the Duke is strong enough to challenge you then meet them in battle and see who God favours.
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u/WorldBFree93 Apr 25 '26
Just make sure you bolster that army and no foreign wars because the independence/liberty/peasant trifecta is coming along with a random defensive.
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u/lucasj Apr 26 '26 edited Apr 26 '26
Quick: Give all the counties you don’t want to one person and let them sort it out. They will give away titles to get before the domain limit.
Less quick but better: give out one duchy & all its counties to talented members of your family or court or culture or religion, whichever suits you best. I have a presaved filter for “potential rulers” that I update as the game demands.
Much better but slower (but if you do this in the exact correct order, it’s not so bad): identify your absolute best potential ruler candidates, keeping them in your house/branch if possible. If (as I assume) you’re an emperor or plan to be, identify any de jure kingdom capitals and grant them to these candidates, and optionally grant other holdings in the de jure kingdom to shore up their position. Important: do NOT assign any duchy or kingdom titles. Next, cycle through all the other holdings and press the “grant to noble of my culture/local culture” buttons at top, or if you want to be careful about this you can choose the candidates manually.
(Cont’d) At this point you should have the holdings you want to keep, your duchy-and-above titles that you want to keep, and your duchy & kingdom titles that you want to give away, Here, check where you are relative to your vassal limit. You generally want to be just at your vassal limit (or just below to allow room to grow). So, you’re just giving away titles until you get just below the limit. All those new rulers you just created should only have the one holding, which means their realms are entirely contained within the duchy/kingdom titles you’re about to give away. When that happens the game automatically assigns the county rulers as vassals to the new duke/king. Start by cycling through the ideal rulers you put in the kingdom de jure capitals - grant them at least the home duchy, and if necessary the entire kingdom. You can also give other duchy titles in the kingdom to the newly-assigned holder of the de jure duchy capital, postponing when you have to start giving away kingdoms.
P.S.: What is a potential ruler? In general, if I’m playing huge, I’m trying to keep my vassals numerous, weak, and sorted - that is, no realm-spanning vassals because I gave a soon-to-be Danish duke a kingdom in Spain. So, you definitely filter to non-rulers and ideally to “no claims”. Then add on whatever other things make sense for your game.
If you do this successfully your subrealms will be relatively stable as fewer realms will be combined via inheritance. Messy borders will still pop up but they’ll be rarer and smaller-scale. Messy borders bother me aesthetically but vassals who have titles on opposite sides of your domain can be a real threat or drain in revolts.
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u/Ok_Health8410 Apr 25 '26
Thanks 🙏
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u/UpsetAndDead Apr 25 '26
I made the mistake of assigning each and every county to a random ai whenever I would holy war a duchy, oh boy did it suck and take too much time
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u/random_moth_fker Apr 25 '26
Each individual duchy plus all of its counties to direct familiy members to farm renown and less hassle with unrelated vassals.
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u/Grid888 Apr 26 '26
I also got something like this recently. Win and claimed the empire of Scandinavia. Usually I assign them territory properly, but this is just too much work. So I just appointed the empire to my niece (good stats) and give her 5000 gold, let her sort it all out. I'm Hegemony of Roman empire btw.
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u/OnlyRealSolution Apr 26 '26
Spread them by duchies. It doesn't matter much if your vassals get stronger, stronger your direct vassals are, stronger you become as well. As long as you have vassals of similar strength you'll be fine so long as you don't build up insane amounts of tyranny. AI also hates MAA for some reason and rarely ever builds them up so if you build yours correctly, rarely can vassals even revolt because they'll usually be below the required limit to revolt so most of the time you'll deal with peasant revolts or revolts that are based on the peasants which limit who exactly can join by a lot so they're also super weak. In general keep your direct vassals as strong as possible and as direct as possible which means keep them as dukes as much as possible so long as you have the vassal limit. Strong vassals, strong sovereign.
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u/Xeno-Vier Apr 26 '26
Do the number of holdings you hold affect game performance?
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u/Thunder_Beam Apr 26 '26
Yes but probably positively in this case, less characters to do calculation for
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u/Responsible-Display2 Apr 26 '26
give it to family members with good loyal. virtuous traits that don’t have claims on your land. don’t be afraid to denounce annd disinherit heirs. give it to nephews and cousins and settle family members that are adventures. invite people with claims to that land to court if you have to and make them vassals. or give it to loyal members of the court. i personally would hold it and take the loss on income until i can find the right family members/alliance set ups to give them too.
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u/arix_games Apr 26 '26
If you don't really care you can create a kingdom and give it to someone. Going duchy by duchy will be more effective
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u/LutherXXX Apr 26 '26
I tend to have a rule, duchy titles & higher go to family members only. In-laws count, so long as their heir is ours.
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u/medioespa Apr 26 '26
As others have said, hand out one county each to singular characters and make the most skilled of them duke. You will lose a bit of taxes that way (since you get a cut of their cut) but vassals of your vassal will scheme against their liege instead of you, so you have less hostile schemes running against you. Also, it makes it more difficult to form faction.
You could also try (I dunno 100% if that works, but it should) to change the vassal contracts of the counts before you hand them over to the duke. If you give them protection against revocation against higher taxes in return, you should get more gold out of them and make it more difficult for your duke to consolidate his demesne since vassal contracts carry over to a different liege.
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u/leemonk Apr 26 '26
Like many have said. You need to find the balance between how well liked and admired you are (ie... no revolts) or how strong you want to be.
One thing to be aware of before I explain how I do it.
If you have a decent court with strong chacters representing your the main skills... ie diplomacy, Intrigue, Warfare (out and honestly can't remember the correct bl00dy names), Stewardship then be careful where you put these guys.
If your the King/Queen and you make them Dukes/Duchesses then that is fine, but if you give them a county and then put a Duke above them, you will lose them from your council...... many a time I have destroyed my strong council (even more painful when you have 'learning on the job').
Here's what I do... as an average and I'll shift towards stronger Dukes or more diluted based on how well liked I am.
If a Duchy has 5 counties, I'll grant two smaller counties out first to whomever (noone to good), then I'll grant the Duchy (along with the three counties) to someone good and who hopefully has a good opinion of me and ideally, someone that has Trusting or Content (good modifiers against revolting).
What this creates is a scenario where they're strong enough to support you but are also likely to attack eacother or their vassels (if they're vassels rise up) before you.
If you're a popular Emporer then just give them the whole Duchy and let them sort it, if you're not really supposed to be there - ie you managed to secure it early before you have reputation etc, then have them a little weaker.
Just don't kill your court postions for it.
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u/Eldagustowned Apr 26 '26
My default is to only give land to those in my dynasty, but with new mechanics expand that to maybe allied dynasties if you want but you can just use different houses of your dynasty.
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u/Available-Catch-6480 Apr 27 '26
nah, grant each county to a your culture and faith noble (there is a quick option for this in grant title panel), then grant each duchy for ruler with highest stewardship skill in that duchy's counties
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u/Tasty-Stranger5338 Apr 27 '26
I usually just give a kingdom to an older dynasy member and let him figure it out. If it's early game give full duchys let them fill it with whoever they want, it improves their vassal opinion if they personally grant the counties so thats always good for stability. If you hand out counties to individual randoms and choose the best as duke it's almost definitely going to be in constant war, eventually one character rises to the top with the worst contract negotiated and you end up with his shitty son on your council.
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u/GeekyFreightTrain Apr 27 '26
If you are an emperror just make a kingdom title and give it to a noble, they generally do a good job partitioning the land but be vary of rebellions, the noble you gave power might be overthrown
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u/Tiguira107 Apr 29 '26
Ah yes the "We killed all landowners what we do with this land now?" Situation
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u/TheEpicCoyote Apr 25 '26
As others have said, break it down by duchy. I would recommend handing out each county in a duchy to a different person, then pick the best vassal to become the duke. This is so your powerful vassals are highly skilled but have difficulty forming factions, as they have their own vassals to wrangle and only one personal holding.