Are you fed up with surly vassals rebelling against you? Annoyed that they hold titles that could be helping your prestige and therefore score? Want to assassinate folks at will? Well, read on!
In a fit of pique, after yet another failed rebellion by my vassals, I banished all of the imprisoned vassals and seized their lands. Before I could redistribute the titles, I had more rebellions. So I put those down and banished them too. This went on for a while until I had crushed, imprisoned and banished all of my vassals of Count level or above. I held all the titles possible in the kingdom. And I enjoyed peace, as there was no one left to rebel.
Ah, you're thinking, sure that's great, but when your desmesne is too big, you take lots of penalties. That's true. When I did this, my tax income dropped to zero. So how to bring in revenue? The barons of towns are still making money. When they get enough, imprison them, banish them (thereby seizing their money), and create a new vassal to take his place. I call this "farming" the barons. Assuming you have a reasonable number of towns and enough piety you can actually make a lot more money doing this than you can from tax revenue.
Do all that and, congratulations, you've crushed all possible dissent, seized the country for yourself and devised a coercive economic model that can keep you going.
This approach has a number of advantages and disadvantages.
----- Advantages --------
* Incredible prestige. Holding all of the titles resulted in my prestige rapidly zooming through the roof. I tried this approach later with the Byzantine Empire and I managed to break a score of 100k by 1282. I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that this approach returns the absolute maximum possible score for a given amount of territory.
* Freedom from reputation. Obviously, all of the remaining vassals hated me. In fact, pretty much everyone hated me. I'm sure there might be many subtle ramifications of this, but in general I didn't find this a drawback. In fact, it was quite liberating. If I wanted to assassinate someone, they were dead. So what if my reputation was ruined? When various events came up where I had to choose between ruining my reputation with someone and some other outcome...I could ignore my reputation.
* Peaceful borders. I'm not sure why this is, but not once while using this approach have I had a foreign AI declare war on me. I don't know if it's because I didn't present them a moment of weakness due to internal dissent, or perhaps it evaluated the leader's strength (which, of course, is that of the entire country). Perhaps this is an illusion, but I even had the Golden Horde going out of it's way to not mess with me.
* No civil wars. Even when there is a succession, there is no one about to try to rebel against you.
* Infinite duration levies. So what if folks are upset that you've had the army called up for years? What are they going to do? Rebel? They can't! Bwoohahahahah!
----- Disadvantages --------
* Your income is directly dependent on the amount of piety you have. If you have a tiny territory or a huge one - the income is still limited by piety. You need piety to imprison & banish city barons for income. If your leader has little piety, then you can get into a pickle in regards to money. There are techniques to minimize this as I'll discuss below.
* Peasant revolts. Oh god, the peasant revolts. When doing this technique with the Byzantine Empire, I'd wound up deploying permanent standing armies to roam around and put down peasant revolts.
* Tedium. To be honest, this method got very annoying after a while. Farming your nobles takes more effort than simply receiving taxes. Also, putting down peasant revolts is tedious.
* You can't change laws. Since all of the vassals hate you, they're not going to agree to any law changes.
----- Tricks and Tips --------
* The first tricky bit is the "changeover" from feudal to dictatorship. The way I'd do it is this:
1) Play "normally" until you have a good bit of money and piety
2) Raise all the armies you can
3) Start arresting the highest level people in your kingdom. Don't banish them yet. Do this until rebellions break out
4) Put down rebellions. Note that I think there is some throttle on how many folks rebel at once. I kept getting vassals rebelling as soon as another vassal surrendered. This kept the number of enemies to deal with at once to a reasonable number.
5) Banish everyone you have in prison. Be careful to banish as soon as you can, because if the vassals dies in prison, then obviously his non-imprisoned heir appears and you have to imprison the heir.
* As mentioned, piety drives income. So it's important to get piety-giving traits and avoid the opposite. Humble and Zealous are good, Lustful is not.
* Since one has only so much control over one's heir or piety-giving traits, be sure to "cash out" your piety as often as you can and keep your bank account fat. This will help you ride out the cash-flow-poor periods when you have a ruler who has low piety. Since no one can rebel against you and since (at least in my experience) foreign countries don't start wars with you, it's not as hard as you might thing to ride out low-piety/low-cash rulers.
* Since you can't really change laws after the changeover, be sure to get your laws set the way you like them before that.
* If you have castles (that aren't the county seat) give them to a Baron. They will upgrade the castle on their own dime, so you don't have to pay for it yourself.
There you have it. A way to maximize one's score without ever having to be nice to anyone.
Enjoy!
In a fit of pique, after yet another failed rebellion by my vassals, I banished all of the imprisoned vassals and seized their lands. Before I could redistribute the titles, I had more rebellions. So I put those down and banished them too. This went on for a while until I had crushed, imprisoned and banished all of my vassals of Count level or above. I held all the titles possible in the kingdom. And I enjoyed peace, as there was no one left to rebel.
Ah, you're thinking, sure that's great, but when your desmesne is too big, you take lots of penalties. That's true. When I did this, my tax income dropped to zero. So how to bring in revenue? The barons of towns are still making money. When they get enough, imprison them, banish them (thereby seizing their money), and create a new vassal to take his place. I call this "farming" the barons. Assuming you have a reasonable number of towns and enough piety you can actually make a lot more money doing this than you can from tax revenue.
Do all that and, congratulations, you've crushed all possible dissent, seized the country for yourself and devised a coercive economic model that can keep you going.
This approach has a number of advantages and disadvantages.
----- Advantages --------
* Incredible prestige. Holding all of the titles resulted in my prestige rapidly zooming through the roof. I tried this approach later with the Byzantine Empire and I managed to break a score of 100k by 1282. I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that this approach returns the absolute maximum possible score for a given amount of territory.
* Freedom from reputation. Obviously, all of the remaining vassals hated me. In fact, pretty much everyone hated me. I'm sure there might be many subtle ramifications of this, but in general I didn't find this a drawback. In fact, it was quite liberating. If I wanted to assassinate someone, they were dead. So what if my reputation was ruined? When various events came up where I had to choose between ruining my reputation with someone and some other outcome...I could ignore my reputation.
* Peaceful borders. I'm not sure why this is, but not once while using this approach have I had a foreign AI declare war on me. I don't know if it's because I didn't present them a moment of weakness due to internal dissent, or perhaps it evaluated the leader's strength (which, of course, is that of the entire country). Perhaps this is an illusion, but I even had the Golden Horde going out of it's way to not mess with me.
* No civil wars. Even when there is a succession, there is no one about to try to rebel against you.
* Infinite duration levies. So what if folks are upset that you've had the army called up for years? What are they going to do? Rebel? They can't! Bwoohahahahah!
----- Disadvantages --------
* Your income is directly dependent on the amount of piety you have. If you have a tiny territory or a huge one - the income is still limited by piety. You need piety to imprison & banish city barons for income. If your leader has little piety, then you can get into a pickle in regards to money. There are techniques to minimize this as I'll discuss below.
* Peasant revolts. Oh god, the peasant revolts. When doing this technique with the Byzantine Empire, I'd wound up deploying permanent standing armies to roam around and put down peasant revolts.
* Tedium. To be honest, this method got very annoying after a while. Farming your nobles takes more effort than simply receiving taxes. Also, putting down peasant revolts is tedious.
* You can't change laws. Since all of the vassals hate you, they're not going to agree to any law changes.
----- Tricks and Tips --------
* The first tricky bit is the "changeover" from feudal to dictatorship. The way I'd do it is this:
1) Play "normally" until you have a good bit of money and piety
2) Raise all the armies you can
3) Start arresting the highest level people in your kingdom. Don't banish them yet. Do this until rebellions break out
4) Put down rebellions. Note that I think there is some throttle on how many folks rebel at once. I kept getting vassals rebelling as soon as another vassal surrendered. This kept the number of enemies to deal with at once to a reasonable number.
5) Banish everyone you have in prison. Be careful to banish as soon as you can, because if the vassals dies in prison, then obviously his non-imprisoned heir appears and you have to imprison the heir.
* As mentioned, piety drives income. So it's important to get piety-giving traits and avoid the opposite. Humble and Zealous are good, Lustful is not.
* Since one has only so much control over one's heir or piety-giving traits, be sure to "cash out" your piety as often as you can and keep your bank account fat. This will help you ride out the cash-flow-poor periods when you have a ruler who has low piety. Since no one can rebel against you and since (at least in my experience) foreign countries don't start wars with you, it's not as hard as you might thing to ride out low-piety/low-cash rulers.
* Since you can't really change laws after the changeover, be sure to get your laws set the way you like them before that.
* If you have castles (that aren't the county seat) give them to a Baron. They will upgrade the castle on their own dime, so you don't have to pay for it yourself.
There you have it. A way to maximize one's score without ever having to be nice to anyone.
Enjoy!
