As for educating heirs of vassals, I have found you need an opinion of 26 or higher with the child's liege to assign their guardian/mentor.
Very good. I especially liked the details on educating. Although I noticed that I don't always get the +25 when I grant people my children as wards.
As for educating heirs of vassals, I have found you need an opinion of 26 or higher with the child's liege to assign their guardian/mentor.
Yes, but if that duke gets pissed off, he now has 2+ counts that he can drag to war with him (against you). I would rather piss off a few counts and fight small scattered armies.
It's more helpful for large Kingdoms, where you can have close to 200 counties, and 20 duchies. Much easier to keep the Dukes happy than every single Count. Easier to keep a stable realm, though much more difficult with rebellions.
In general, unless your Duke is a title claimant, pretender, or Ambitious, you should have no problems keeping him above negative.
The configuration I find best for min-maxing troops and balancing relations is Absolute Crown authority, Min Levies, Min Taxes. This lets a small amount of wealth trickle up, along with you being able to raise 40% of troops anywhere.
Plus, this way you can control exactly how you want to expand.
Another important rule that makes things easier: Don't give fiefs to your brothers or sons that are not your heirs, these will have huge opinion penalties and it can become quiet ugly, when your current ruler dies and the heir is suddenly surrounded by 5 or more dukes, that are all pretenders and hate his guts in addition to the short reign penalty he gets.
They really need to up the penalties for having unlanded sons, because keeping them all at home is kinda gamey, because now why would you want to risk the pretender issues.
Strange... I've been hand picking, educating, and pruning all the rulers in my current game... I've had 3 successions and only 1 very small rebellion (happened during the first succession) for 110 years of game play. It's been relatively stable, kinda boring at times, lol.
I've handed everything out to my dynasty members almost exclusively (to include pretenders). I may have to recant the whole idea that you have to avoid handing things out to your family members.
My relations have been phenominal for the past century. Practically 100s all the way through. I decided that I wasn't expanding fast enough, so I took some risks and installed a duke and some non-dynasty counts here and there. Some of them have ambition tendencies. Lets see how that one plays out...
So the recipe you used for stability is 1) Picking good traits with some diligence and 2) Only using family members as dukes/counts/etc.? Or did I miss something?
Is it possible to get a save game file of a stable huge kingdom/empire? I would like to see the organization of provinces and duchies within a realm.