Feudal vassals are useless and only give headaches. Use republicans or theocratic vassals for actual significant contributions and way less time spent managing them.
I agree with the direction of your idea. Make it so that, for example, having taxes and levies on, say, low, will prevent vassals from joining or creating factions and I will set myself the contracts so from day one, their contributions are irrelevant anyway, because they have their own vassals with their own contracts, hooks etc.
I didn't know you could do this. Do you find somone owning a city barony and give them county titles to do this or is there some other method I've not heard of?
Having the contracts have some more indirect effect like faction join chance would be a really cool feature. If you had a vassal on no tax, minimum levies, title revocation protection they are essentially a completely autonomous entity within your realm, they would have to have so serious beef to settle if they wanted to start thinking about joining factions.
I was surprised to find out clan vassals can't negotiate religious rights or anything either. Religious protections just scream middle east and islam to me and yet I'm better off being a feudal if I want that safety.
Yeah, I had a great time as a clan last run, think I'm just going to go for a quick 20 minute adventure into Islam to take clan system rather than Feudal whenever I'm changing out of tribal in future. At least that's predictable.
There's a cool mod that lets you manage contracts en masse for all de jure titles under any title you have based on your realm authority. OneProudBavarian uses it in his latest series.
For vanilla I would suggest just limiting the number of vassals you have to minimize the headache. It does pay off to manage it though. It's often beneficial to trade taxes for less levies.
Oh I've been watching that series religiously, loving it. I looks like a good mod but I think that just sets defaults, vassals can still manage their contracts manually within that. Still it doesn't address the core issue I've raised and even if it did, I don't think the issue should be present in vanilla. (for clarity, the issue being the inbalance of the tiered parts of the contract with themselves and with the tickboxes).
I find Feudal Contracts to be just another part of the game that you can go out of your way to interact with if you want to, but they can also be totally ignored and don't really have a significant effect on gameplay.
Sure, this is true to some approximation (apart from the council rights option as another user has mentioned). However, it's a massive shame that that's the case, and even more of a shame when you realise that even if you did bother caring, the default contract is the best one anyway. Therefore you either ignore the system, or would prefer if it didn't exist, neither is a good look.
