Is there a guide to using Elective effectively? I've had a few experiences with an Elective Kingdom under me as Emperor and from my experience it's not the way to go. As Emperor I controlled one Duchy in the Kingdom but the other Dukes would rarely vote for my heir even at 100 Opinion. They would also change their vote frequently (several times a year) and vote against themselves or in other weird ways. It's just looked like a crazy uncontrollable situation.
It's not really the elector's opinion of you that matters, but their opinion of your preferred heir. The heir really needs to be liked and so needs high diplomacy and good traits, so if your culture is different to that of the electors, this makes it hard, because of the penalty for being a foreigner. Also, you will find it hard to get people to vote for your child if he/she is still very young (because of low stats) and you need to temporarily elect someone else in this case. Elective is amazing for a single kingdom or even multiple kingdoms where the cultures are similar, but it does get difficult to manage once you expand a lot into other cultures. For this reason, once I'm an Emperor, I usually switch away from elective.
It has probably been asked a million times already, but didn't find the answer in 90 seconds of search so here goes:
Is there any way to hold on to 2 or more kingdoms without rebellion (lacking an Empire)? I seem to remember there was a mechanic that allowed you to transform a de jure kingdom into a titular title and absorb all its vassals into your primary title or something. Am I imagining things? Or am I thinking of a mod?
If that mechanic (still) exists in vanilla, how do you go about it?
You can use de jure drift as grandcheater said, but really I don't see why you are having so much trouble holding onto two separate kingdoms unless you're using elective and having difficulties because of being a foreigner. The vassals will dislike you somewhat because they will desire the kingdom, but usually I find this manageable. Just give gifts to keep your vassals happy and keep an eye on plots and faction. Does your character have high diplomacy? At the start of the game a lot of people tend to go for high stewardship to have more holdings, but later on in the game, you really need grey eminence characters.
I have just created the Empire of Hispania and now there's a problem. The succession law become Gavelkind as soon as I created it. All of my Kingdom titles are elective and I have chosen my third son to inherit those. I figured the best way to deal with this situation is to make my first two sons bishops so I've pissed off all my vassals by revoking titles so I could do that (my sons were already barons so I had to take that from them to make this work plus I had to revoke titles from two other bishops as I had no new temple to give them). I made my first son a Bishop but for some reason it won't let me give my second son a Bishopric, when I try to the message I get is: 'Cannot disinherit your heir by making him a bishop!'. What's the deal here?
Do I have any other option other than assassinating my second son? I would rather not do that because he has pretty good stats and traits (just not quite as good as my third son) but I don't want to risk waiting 10 years so I can change the law as my ruler is currently 49 and might not live that long.
Firstly, when you create the empire and you're currently in elective, it will switch to gavelkind. If you are in primogeniture first then it will stay primogeniture, so if I already have a lot of sons, I try to change law before creating it. If you are in free investiture (or can switch to it) and gavelkind, you can also just appoint your sons as successors to bishoprics and disinherit them. This is often preferable as you can easily change this again later if you want, but they do have to have come of age to do this.
In your situation without masses of gold to try assassinations, I would probably give titles to my main heir and just wait it out. Passing titles out to one son will reduce the number that can be inherited by the others and even if the worst happens and you die before changing laws, then you won't lose your empire, just a few minor titles which can be reclaimed later.