Easy Gavelkind exploit

[Red Earth]

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.

I married a 40 year old lesbian and she still managed to get pregnant. Killed a lot of wives that game.

 

[FrosT37]

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.

It's not a typical ERE game :

https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/first-game-in-one-year-ironman.967364/

Just completed step 6 yesterday. Now I'm planning on step 7 (vassalizing the pope).

 

[Matthias_Wlkp]

Legitimate sons hate this trick...

 

[Conan Troutman]

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...

You can't kill your kids, but grandsons are fair game.
That said, I still wouldn't go gavelkind by design just for the demesne bonus. Just pick laws that give you a demesne bonus and go elective (or primo/ultimo).

...

Yeah, that's a pretty solid guide. Personally, I like to build tall and hold 5 castles in my capital (easy now with prosperity, no need to go after Rome early before the Pope ruins it with churches) and build a huge levy to keep factions from becoming dangerous. Military education is great for that, also gives you a stewardship bonus. You don't need 20+ diplo, just enough so you get the favorable event choices. Once you're a brilliant strategist (improves the fastest of all educations), you can switch to family focus for diplo, fertility and health boost. It's also ridiculously easy to get game master (all your vassals invite you to stuff, no need to pick carousing yourself), which boosts both diplo and martial and gives a 30% narrow flank bonus on top of it.
For money, you should use your free demesne limit for tax. About 10 should be easily doable for an emperor after a couple decades manicuring all the relevant laws, minus the 5 castles still leaves you 5 counties. Just go for the money makers here, basically anything coastal that doesn't have extra castles in it. Use prosperity to add more cities where needed and you're set. Flanders is still pretty great, Artois as the only non-coastal county makes for a great capital. If you need to give away a county because your heir had lower stewardship, you can easily plot revoke it back.

As for retinues: If you have a crappy cultural retinue, instead of going the generic defense route, you can just pick the light skirmish retinues and have an even crazier boost to your total troop count (Ethiopian and Somali skirmisher are even cheaper). They suck at actual combat, but are great for preventing factions.

 

[thevmag]

As for retinues: If you have a crappy cultural retinue, instead of going the generic defense route, you can just pick the light skirmish retinues and have an even crazier boost to your total troop count (Ethiopian and Somali skirmisher are even cheaper). They suck at actual combat, but are great for preventing factions.

Just marrying into your vassals prevents factions, and allows you to keep your military investments combat-capable

 

[Arsonik]

I've been using this the last couple days in my 769 Karloman game. Karloman is long dead but my current ruler is now Immortal and is sitting pretty with 6 holding slots in all three counties of Valois and a demesne limit of something like 16 or 17.. Trouble is the succession breaks once you are 150+ years old and your kids start marrying your great grand kids and stuff. But I can easily fix that if I decide I want to kill this ruler at some point and have a succession... Interestingly enough I already had the reincarnation event this game, as Karloman himself. Also much to my dismay shortly after becoming immortal I had a female demon spawn (almost have full status of women as well) but I had to have her 'put down' since it's my first time being Immortal. Fun stuff!

 

[Conan Troutman]

Just marrying into your vassals prevents factions, and allows you to keep your military investments combat-capable

Sure, but kids can be too valuable for that. If you're Christian, you don't have a ton of them and need them for getting claims instead if you don't have a pet Pope. Or if you're rolling with elective and opt for a more distant relative, you may forfeit all those NAPs on succession anyway, right when you need them the most.
I usually decide which culture I'm going to be at the start of the game, specifically so I don't have crappy retinues, but if you're dead set on going for something else for whatever reason, at least you'll get something out of it that way.

 

[DPS]

A lot depends on what faith you are, though. If you're Romuva, once you unify Lithuania (which you should be able to do with your first ruler), there are no other independent Romuva rulers, and you probably don't really want a lot of NAPs with your neighbors anyway, 'cause you really just want to conquer them (and you'll have a CB on every neighbor), so using your kids to shore up your relations with your vassals makes sense.