Easy Gavelkind exploit

[trybald]

Just managed to circumvent the main limitation of Gavelkind - inability to give your primary heir huge swaths of land. Normally that leads to your domain being divided. But not this time.

This is how I did it:
1. Went unmarried and childless for quite a time. Had one of those "it's good to be the king" event.
2. Mistress gave birth to a son. Acknowledged him, refused to legitimize. The boy was therefore of my dynasty, but excluded from succession.
3. Got married, had plenty of children. After my character's death, the domain would fracture to a ridiculous degree. Legitimate sons turned out to be mediocre, to say the least.
4. Reminded myself about my bastard. Looked at him, wow he's got great stats.
5. Landed him. A lot. Since he's out of succession, there's no limit of how much land I can give him. In the end gave him everything but my capital county.
6. Legitimized him. He's now my heir and my other sons won't get even scraps.

Gavelkind rules supreme with larger domain limit, opinion bonun AND ability to turn it into primogeniture with this simple trick.

 

[Sirrobert1]

You'll have to suck up the loss of 50% of your stats though.
You can also just take new land and give that to your other children. Boom, problem solved and your heir still keeps your own demesne.

 

[thevmag]

Or just find the oldest, most infertile, frail lowborn you can find, and give him all the choice lands that gavelkind insists on giving to your lesser sons.

You die, other sons are either happy with the duchies you gave them or get nothing, and primary heir gets all the old man's titles when he's done babysitting them.

 

[Mr. Charisma22]

You'll have to suck up the loss of 50% of your stats though.
You can also just take new land and give that to your other children. Boom, problem solved and your heir still keeps your own demesne.

Does that mean children already given land by a father are put out of the succession?

 

[sigeena]

There's actually an easy gavelkind exploit, but it works only if you're Emperor level.

Change the succession of lower Kingdom titles to Primo. Keep your Empire title at Gavelkind. You'll get extra desmesne bonus, and no loss to prestige for un-landed sons.

 

[FrosT37]

There's actually an easy gavelkind exploit, but it works only if you're Emperor level.

Change the succession of lower Kingdom titles to Primo. Keep your Empire title at Gavelkind. You'll get extra desmesne bonus, and no loss to prestige for un-landed sons.

That's actually a very good idea. I think I might do that with the ERE.

 

[PAnZuRiEL]

You can manage succession easily without giving any of your land away, if you're unmarried. Just take seduction focus and pump out loads of bastards. Legitimise only the one you like best, and keep the rest around as backups you can legitimise later if anything unfortunate happens to your primary heir.

 

[Bernard95]

That's an interesting variation of "bastard succession", though having purely bastards and legitimizing one works out to be about the same.

 

[Arsonik]

Gavelkind rules supreme with larger domain limit, opinion bonun AND ability to turn it into primogeniture with this simple trick.

"Find out how this tribe became the envy of all feudal lords with this one simple trick!" Coulda had the best clickbait title man!

 

[Kumicho]

There's only one slight problem that can arise doing this... If your son has any children and dies before you. Your grandson gets all of the land, and when you die you play as your 2nd son with almost no land.

And yes, I've had it happen...

 

[Arsonik]

There's only one slight problem that can arise doing this... If your son has any children and dies before you. Your grandson gets all of the land, and when you die you play as your 2nd son with almost no land.

And yes, I've had it happen...

Won't gavelkind go to the son of the firstborn? I don't stick to gavelkind often so I'm not sure. And when I do I just follow the loss of titles tooltip to fix things up.

 

[Kumicho]

Nope. Primo works that way, but not Gavelkind.

 

[Sirrobert1]

Does that mean children already given land by a father are put out of the succession?

Sort off. If you give them the land they would have received during succession, that's what they get/keep. Nothing more.

 

[DPS]

Keep in mind too, that there's a difference between gavelkind and elective gavelkind. With elective gavelkind, your primary heir might will be an uncle or distant cousin, and you have basically no control over how many legitimate kids they might have before your ruler dies.

 

[romothecus]

You'll have to suck up the loss of 50% of your stats though.

It's not 50% of your stats. It's a potential gain of 50% of your spouse's stats.

But either way, not a great strategy. Giving a ton of land to any character backfires all the time when the character then proceeds to give the land away himself or do other annoying things with it.

 

[Kumicho]

It's not 50% of your stats. It's a potential gain of 50% of your spouse's stats.

But either way, not a great strategy. Giving a ton of land to any character backfires all the time when the character then proceeds to give the land away himself or do other annoying things with it.

Pffft, just marry someone over 45 years old. Problem solved...

 

[DukeDayve]

My experiences with gavelkind:

Marry, have a kid, wife dies in childbirth, it's a boy. PERFECT! THIS COULDN'T HAVE WORKED OUT BETTER!

Marry a 40 year old woman for the extra demesne I'll get from her stewardship stat.

She gets pregnant at 44. Please be a girl, please be a girl, please be a girl.

It's a boy.

 

[Ternega]

That's actually a very good idea. I think I might do that with the ERE.

I can't fathom a reason for playing ERE and having
a) Gavelkind.
b) Personally held kingdoms.

You really don't lack in prestige as Emperor, especially as roman emperor.

 

[FrosT37]

I can't fathom a reason for playing ERE and having
a) Gavelkind.
b) Personally held kingdoms.

You really don't lack in prestige as Emperor, especially as roman emperor.

It's for the extra demesne.

 

[Soladept]

It's for the extra demesne.

as the ERE i find it more easy to put up with the council when you start out with Thrace, gather more power via Varangian guard and Grabbing the duchy of Nikea, fiddling with obligations to increase taxes and go do a city building spree in my demense, pump up levy buildings and retinue, eat the EREs dejure lands, and after you have a 7k+ pike retinue you can buy favors to force the council to abolish war decs and council empowerment for the +2 demense and watch the vassals cower at the 20k+ troop power you personaly control, which will only grow as your realm size grows and you build more retinues, and tech grows and you build more levy in your countys, along with decent military/diplo stats for your rulers and heirs.

i hate relying on stewardship for demense sizes because factors out of your control can gurantee that your next heir wont be able to have the same demense bonuses from stewardship, i prefer to educate for Military/Diplo stats along with the foci for my ruler, War focus got even better with the new events to get commander traits AND teach them to your commanders, they fire pretty frequently and this along with military education makes your rulers/heirs strong commanders with good sized personal levy, and you patch up and boost your diplo with the other Foci, and as the ERE you have a massive opinion factory with Viceroys. council rebels after you establish your military power are merely a nusance unless your unfortunate enough to lose too many levy/retinue in a war and they get clever, but five years later you can use your massive treasury to favor the council back into abolishment, and you can build a large number of kids to keep your large viceroys into NAPS, its not like you have much better to do with them since most of your neighbors are terrible allys since they have land that belongs to Rome and your going to want to conquer them regardless, at best your closest possible allys are going to be the nomads in the steppe, since most nomadic land wont be of interest to you outside of the Crimea.

you dont want to create Greece (or Italy if you plan on moving capitals) because you want the area of your capital kingdom to have more duke viceroys that you can tax, along with avoiding the quirks of Born in the Purple inheritance. everything else gets stuffed under king vassals. early game you dont want to create anatolia either, only when the vassal limit becomes a concern you start consolidating vassals under king viceroys.

and as the ERE you can easly sit at 7-8 demense which lets you hold Thrake and Nikea + a barony in Constaninople, the latter you can give up if you want to hold the county of Rome later for RP, but Thrake/Nikea is one of the richest Demense combos in the game, six out of seven countys are all costal and you can stack a ton of citys in them for a huge amount of income. with abolished council you can add in two to three more countys, the two county duchy west of thrake is good for this, but you have to demolish a ducal title to avoid opinion penaltys, or you can fit in Latium if you wanan RP holding rome, but i reccomend keeping Thrake/Nikea because building up an italian demense will be a huge pain and it will weaken you to switch there too early. plus Constantiople has the Theodesian walls.