Partition Is A Problem

[YellowPress]

since we play as the ruler of w/e you are playing we should be able to decide on what inheritance we want, I hate this mechanic, it is very obnoxius to keep the inheritance as you want it.....

And what costs should the player pay, you can largely control atm by handing out duchies during lifetime or pay stonking renown or pay piety to cloister or do elective or designate heir at max crown authority

 

[MatthewP]

There is another thread going now that I think correctly identifies the core problem with partition: the fact that domain is everything. Because of this a partition the player doesn’t game is just an absolutely enormous setback. So there’s a huge incentive to game it, which then in turn makes the game far too easy.

If power was more derived from vassals, and in particular from internal friendships and alliances, then partition could be fine. Sure, you might lose half your domain, but if your were friends with your brother then you might be almost as strong as before, with the potential to get stronger. Or if your dad had made sure you befriended some of the other powerful nobles.

Of course if your brother was a rival and you had no strong supporters it could get ugly. But that’s exactly the type of thing that should matter in the game and doesn’t currently.

In addition, if having vassals support you was the main way to gain power, then changes to partition to give more control to the player could work better. Currently anything giving the player more control will have one result: the player will choose to keep the good provinces in their domain, every time. No penalty in terms of vassal opinion or irrelevant rivalries could ever matter enough to change that. But if having strong vassals who strongly supported you was an important and good thing rather than just being neutral (“they won’t revolt”), it definitely could make sense to choose a fair partition in order to keep your heir’s siblings happy and ensure their support. At least, the honorable ones (again, a character and relationship driven decision, which is what the game is supposed to be about).

 

[Brightgalrs]

Yes! I've posted about this before: "partition is too big of a game mechanic for it to be as unengaging and shallow as it currently is".

Partition should be an ongoing negotiation where the player negotiates on behalf of their primary heir. The "starting point" of the negotiation would be what we have currently ie. the 'fallback', and you would be able to propose trades with your non-primary heirs. Titles would be assigned some value so the trades would need to be approximately equal. If you lose a heir (and they had no heirs themself) then their titles get split up automatically using the 'fallback', ie. start with the heir who's worse-off and work up. If you gain an heir then (working from best-off and down) the negotiation screen will tell each existing heir they need to give up a title (the player picks on behalf of their primary heir) to them, if the choice is delayed and succession occurs, then the game picks automatically.

Other thoughts:
Title value could be per-character, so for instance if your second son has a fond childhood memory of Orleans, then they wouldn't be as willing to trade it away, even for something objectively worth more.
Not quite sure how this would all work with confederate partition. I think it's enough to just add the newly created titles (which would be "phantom" titles since they're only created on succession) into the negotiation. Trading for them and trying to prevent a realm split would be pretty difficult.
I think their is room in this system to straight-up buy succession rights to a title, but it should be a rare event that fires for a desperate heir in need of money, rather than be a thing you can consistently do.
You'd be able to trade-away the primary title's inheritance to a younger son, basically as a way to peacefully downgrade your character's tier. Obviously this would be a roleplay-only thing.

 

[Prince Ire]

I think partition would be a lot more workable if we only had some way to choose what titles go to who like someone else said written wills would be a good way to do this. its bogus that counties within the primary duchy just get thrown around to non primary heirs, it quite frankly just makes no sense.. I shouldn't be getting counties in my brothers duchy and vise versa. it also seems like the primary heir for some odd reason receives less titles then some of the other heirs which again makes no darned sense

Besides that argument though I think some sort of balancing needs to be done for the AI's sake because they don't have the ability to cheese succession like the player does, couple generations in and the AI kingdoms are on the brink of collapse at all times weak, broken, and usually easily outmatched by the player far to quickly leading to a somewhat boring experience as the game progresses. Infact paradoxically it seems as the game progresses further the AI actually seems to downgrade and become weaker consistently and quickly due to multiple successions weakening kingdoms and empires. In my game right now for instance France sits at an embarrassing 4766 total soldiers and the "king" using that term loosely holds 1 single county to his name (and the kingdom obviously) weak and pathetic all thanks to partition succession and I'm 255 years in here.

Don't forget that with how much massively weaker levies are in comparison to men at arms, vassals don't help militarily nearly as much as they did in CK2. You are far more dependent on a strong demesne to accomplish anything in CK3. So the AI being left with a tiny demesne form succession is much more of a problem in 3 than in 2.

 

[Ivashanko]

And come to think of it, the new struggle mechanic could also be used to play along with inheritances and sucession crisis. Obviously we'd be talking about a temporal, easily solving and realm focused, struggle. Nothing that couldn't be solved within 6 months if the wishes of the previous ruler are respected OR 20+- years if things go wrong... but I think I would find these sort of localised temporal struggles very engaging.
Awww, if only I were a proper modder.

I love this idea.

 

[GeneralisimoAR]

you can completely bypasss partition from day one, just establish a succession law on your main title and trasnfer all your domains before dying to your prefered heir.