"Want a better alliance" has always been a mystery...
It's better than it used to be! But it does feel bad when the same guy goes on to marry a random lowborn.
no, i dont agree. this would make it RIDICULOUSLY easy for the player to inherit realms, and even worse, make blobbing awfull with people inheriting stuff all over the place. i'd prefer a system where brothers/uncles go before daughters simply because peopelw ould rather follow a man than a woman. this would at the evry least require pressign the claims of the woman, and would limit the dieing ot of dynasties with plenty of members left in the main line.
Well, the human player inherits a lot more when he plays more gamely, combining methodical assassination into the effort. That's not really something the game can stop any more than e.g. reloading if your father in law finally gets himself a son. Otherwise, marrying a son to a landed woman means you lose control of him, so you need to arrange a betrothal and give him an equally ranked title after they accept. This is still difficult and costly because you need to spare that duchy (which means you need to have one to spare) and it's also risky because the fiancée can die or the betrothal be broken by either party (has happened to me), and sometimes when they're already both landed and married she dies first and you don't have High Crown Authority. A human player will often intervene with revocations or assassinations to stop this, which is definitely not ahistorical but it's kinda in the gamey region and again something that's just bound to be exploited by players and can't really be stopped. But very often you simply don't have the spare duchies or even the children to effect all of the potential great inheritances.
Firstof all:
Lowborns are nobles. Even ERE emperors were of lower noble birth sometimes.
Well, in German nobility the distinction between high and low nobility is peculiar. For example, all Briefadel (nobles created by writ) are by definition low nobility, no matter how high a title they receive even if it's duke (so you have dukes belonging to low nobility), and of the old nobility (basically immemorial nobility, the
Uradel), while they're theoretically considered to be all equal to each other regardless of the title, it still takes at least a family of counts to qualify for the status of high nobility (barons and counts being out of luck unless perhaps they stem from someone more important than that), and this on the additional condition that there weren't any female ancestors originating from the low nobility, in which situation the entire family from that point on devolved to the low nobility even despite keeping all the high titles. So it's impossibly hard to be high nobility in the German system, it's mostly for mediatised princes and I'm not sure if all of them actually would qualify. Counts would be a grey area, even though in old German terms a specifically titled count (Graf) used to rank higher than a generic prince (fürst) until this changed later. So in this sense, all barons and most counts in CK2 would be lower nobles if they weren't cadets of someone bigger, and even a number of dukes (historically, a ministerialis could be appointed duke of some land, which could lead to a curious situation of an unfree person being a semi-royal ruler of free persons). But low nobility didn't at all equal low birth in the old German system, as low nobles were still specifically titled "highborn", "well-born" etc. (
Wohlgeboren, hochgeboren etc.). They were low nobility, but still highborn.
As for the Kaisers and Kings of the Romans, while most were actually counts at the moment of election of the first member (Salians, Luxemburgers, Rudolf v. Habsburg, Günther von Schwarzburg, William of Holland, Henry Raspe, Adolf of Nassau) or fresh dukes (the Hohenstaufer, Lothair of Supplinburg), each one of them without a single exception was at least a reigning count, no younger sons or brothers, barons, knights etc. And they were quite respectable counts: Raspe was the Landgrave of Thuringia, William was a Gerolfing and Holland was a Carolingian county, Luxemburgers were cadets of the ducal house of Limburg, Günther v. Schwarzburg was shabby in terms of power but had XXI for his regnal number, Nassau and Habsburg were respectable by the time as well. All or almost all of these guys would be high nobility.
As for Lowborns in CK2, please note that generic "of x" courtiers are the veritable nobodies who just hang out at the court, despite being referred to as "great houses" in the people finder. This group includes mayors, merchant families from Italy (correctly BTW) and other such, which means that low nobility is basically the randomly generated courtiers and the historical barons and some counts (in fact some dukes too but let's not go there). They can't even begin to compare to a Gerolfing or an early Habsburg. The real lowborns would need to be someone of lower birth than the most generic nobody of a courtier that doesn't even have a family listed on his character sheet (the "invite a steward" type of courtier). IMHO knights and squires could perhaps fit into the Lowborn category but it's mostly for the "ignoble"folk (the "roturiers"). This makes sense from the PoV of a king or perhaps duke, where the social distance between him and either a knight or a merchant/peasant seems so high anyway that the difference between the knight and the peasant is negligible but from the PoV of a baron or count the difference between a knight from a knightly family (not talking about, say, a peasant knighted for bravery) and a peasant for marriage would be much more meaningful.
Second:
In my current game Navarra inherited England
Some french duchy inherited Galloway
Georgia inherited several duchies in the ERE.
Inheritance happens.
That's normal! Weirder and more massive inheritances had taken place in the real world, e.g. Austrian Habsburgs basically inherited Spain from the Reyes Catholicos and Burgundy from the
last Capetian duke... speaking of Capetians, the
d'Anjou cadets actually put themselves in Sicily, Naples, Hungary and even briefly Poland (where they were inherited by the previously pagan dukes of Lithuania of all people), Scottish kings inherited England, which had been inherited by a semi-Welsh lord related to the Plantagenets, whose cousins of the older (but not oldest) house of Anjou got to rule in Jerusalem... not to mention the combination of the Norman inheritance with that of Eleanor of Aquitaine for England, sometimes being a half of all France if not more. Just some examples, there were plenty. Your game sounds conservative!
