Playing large blobs
- Thread starter justadude
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- Lock down decadence.
- Put your strongest vassals on the council, if you have war declaration set to council vote.
- Form NAP's with your vassals when able.
- You can also force a vassal to rebel if you believe said vassal won't pull in anyone else, can be defeated quickly, and you have a valid reason to force imprisonment. Imprisoned vassals are a non-threat. You also really want to avoid different culture/religion vassals when able.
- Any time you can revoke a title from a strong vassal, do so. Double dukes can be a threat to security.
- Kings make for great vassals, despite the opinion malus, as they can be put on the council (locking them out of factions) and the player has enough ways to ensure loyalty. Having one king vassal removes multiple duke vassals, meaning less people to please.
You'll always have some strife, as well as openly rebellious vassals, when you are that large. The key to running an Empire is management. Manage your threats within and without.
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Keep decadence down, that's the biggest killer in Islamic blobs. I don't play as Muslims anymore and I only ever played with them a little bit, I mostly play as Catholic/Orthodox/Norse, but from what I remember you have to keep decadence down any way you can. Start by not landing your dynasty members, except for the son you want to succeed you. It also helps to not let your dynasty grow too big, so there's no need to take 4 wives all the time. Don't let your sons marry (except for the one who will succeed you).
After that it's just a case of keeping your vassals happy.
After that it's just a case of keeping your vassals happy.
- Elective Monarchy gives a +20 bonus with your vassals, but them there's the risk of getting ousted from office (never happened to me, but sometimes they don't elect the guy I want... lucky me my most voted vassals were from my dynasty!)
- As said by others, sometimes provoke rebellions willingly so you can get a Crushed Revolt bonus (as also getting rid of a troublesome vassal)
- Have kings instead of dukes as vassals. They're more powerful, but less in number. Keep them in your council if they don't like you very much; if they do like you, they won't give you many problems
- Educate heirs of your vassals
- Don't lose wars. At least with the AI, 1-3 rebellions against the loser appear months after the war ended
- As said by others, sometimes provoke rebellions willingly so you can get a Crushed Revolt bonus (as also getting rid of a troublesome vassal)
- Have kings instead of dukes as vassals. They're more powerful, but less in number. Keep them in your council if they don't like you very much; if they do like you, they won't give you many problems
- Educate heirs of your vassals
- Don't lose wars. At least with the AI, 1-3 rebellions against the loser appear months after the war ended
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Actually, since the 2.5 patch it's only +10 vassal opinion.
I can't speak for Muslims, but I almost exclusively end up playing big blobs no matter how I start.
Your biggest threat to internal stability are your vassals.
-If you're in a position where the Council is pulling too much weight, replace them with sycophants and have them vote to weaken council power.
-Marry your children/siblings into your vassals' families, and you'll get yourself an automatic non-aggression pact. With this, they will never take action against you no matter how deep into the red their opinion is.
-Consolidate vassal power. Having one giant vassal giving you 4,000 - 15,000 troops is a lot nicer than 15 vassals giving 100 - 400 each, and is easier to take care of. That's only one council slot you have to worry about handing out, one gift to send, one location for your chancellor to sit on.
-Go for viceroys. Even if the guy who inherits their landed titles hate you, they'll all love you after having a ton of viceroy titles shoved onto their laps.
With this, you'll have your biggest vassals supporting you almost 100% of the time, and all you'll need to do is collect the fat income and bloat so bad you'll need 3 centuries for your threat to drop back down.
Your biggest threat to internal stability are your vassals.
-If you're in a position where the Council is pulling too much weight, replace them with sycophants and have them vote to weaken council power.
-Marry your children/siblings into your vassals' families, and you'll get yourself an automatic non-aggression pact. With this, they will never take action against you no matter how deep into the red their opinion is.
-Consolidate vassal power. Having one giant vassal giving you 4,000 - 15,000 troops is a lot nicer than 15 vassals giving 100 - 400 each, and is easier to take care of. That's only one council slot you have to worry about handing out, one gift to send, one location for your chancellor to sit on.
-Go for viceroys. Even if the guy who inherits their landed titles hate you, they'll all love you after having a ton of viceroy titles shoved onto their laps.
With this, you'll have your biggest vassals supporting you almost 100% of the time, and all you'll need to do is collect the fat income and bloat so bad you'll need 3 centuries for your threat to drop back down.
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I also like going Intrigue focus when I am large & spying on troublemaking vassals. You can sometimes kill them, & if their heir is a child then that child will be no threat until he comes of age. You also have a possibility of kidnapping them, which will also remove them as a threat. Or sometimes you can turn up reasons to imprison them, which if you succeed, removes them as a threat, or if you dont you can defeat them in battle & then imprison & strip them of a title. 
thank you for the replies.
While the learning curve can be steep, I love the layers that CK2 has.
Although I am currently really on the fence regarding Conclave. Maybe its my amateur status with Paradox games, but I feel that all I ever do is worry about council power grabs now. I miss factions trying to put others on the throne or moving for independence. Sure they pop up occasionally, but the council constantly tries to increase its power.
While the learning curve can be steep, I love the layers that CK2 has.
Although I am currently really on the fence regarding Conclave. Maybe its my amateur status with Paradox games, but I feel that all I ever do is worry about council power grabs now. I miss factions trying to put others on the throne or moving for independence. Sure they pop up occasionally, but the council constantly tries to increase its power.
Don't worry about it. My advice earlier is fully Conclave-compatible, and assuming that you're playing it. My vassals all hold huge swaths of land and carry at least 20k in personal levies that I can never touch. If 3 of my vassals were to get together, it'd be about 120,000 troops versus my personal 40,000. If 6 of them were to factionalize, I'd be toast. Yet, they never join factions, never push laws, never push for claimants or independence or increased council powers. And my council is filled with low-ranking courtiers with great stats, and very few actual vassals.
My trick? Marriage. Every baby you pop out is a non-aggression pact waiting to be signed
My trick? Marriage. Every baby you pop out is a non-aggression pact waiting to be signed
1. Reduce decadence to zero and keep it there. Contrary to popular belief decadence is not super-difficult to control, you'll just have to a) keep good pious traits yourself and b) occasionally lock up decadent family members. The latter is easier if the family members aren't landed, but landing them reduces their chance of becoming decadent.
2. Optimise power structure. As a Muslim empire the Abbasids have a massive advantage over others as you can revoke duchies without incurring tyranny, and you can also freely retract county-tier vassals. Both of those still make the target lord angry, but nobody else will care.
Optimising vassal power structures is basically the main point of CKII and everyone has different opinions on what the best option is. In most circumstances you want to keep your vassals weak and powerless in order to stop them from causing trouble, and the most common way to do that is to give out one county per vassal and then give out one duchy per de-jure duchy, whilst keeping any kingdom-tier titles for yourself (or not creating them in the first place). This works well even in large realms, but the vassal limit eventually starts making things more difficult for very large blobs. You can counteract that by creating 'superdukes' (the colloquial name for dukes with more than one duchy), but they tend to become power-hungry and dangerous. As you keep expanding you'll end up with more and more superdukes and you will not be able to control them all.
For very large empires like the Abbasids a different strategy is better. Rather than keeping control by weakening your vassals, it can be more useful to use personal diplomacy to keep them in line: gifts, marriages, hostages, council positions, feasts and non-aggression pacts. This approach works better if you minimise the number of vassals rather than minimising their size, and that means creating enormous vassals far larger than any superduke. If you can divide your empire between five or six 'hyperdukes' or vassal kings you can keep an eye on all of them. In fact, if you have fewer than seven extremely powerful vassals you can more or less completely eliminate the threat of civil war by empowering the council and giving them the right to vote on war declaration.
The other advantage of this strategy is that it's popular. Revoking titles makes people very mad, especially revoking counties as that will still cause tyranny. If you want to reduce all your vassals to one county each you'll end up having to fight a lot of wars and generate a lot of claimants. But giving out titles makes people happy! Occasionally things will need tweaking by retracting the odd vassal here and there, but mostly your subjects will be prosperous and grateful.
The disadvantages of this strategy mainly come from the lack of control you have over your vassals. Vassal counts rarely do anything of note, and weak dukes are usually too busy fighting their own vassals to become really ambitious, but vassal kings have the resources to really get out there and start interfering with things. Vassal kings often declare war on neighbouring independent states at inconvenient times, sometimes even launching their own private holy wars. Making king-tier viceroys helps with this somewhat as they can't establish a multi-generational power base as easily, but that requires advanced technology and won't help if they start adding counties or duchies to their own personal holdings. Vassal kings are also hard to fight compared to weak dukes. Although in a full civil war they're at a disadvantage since they're geographically-compact rather than spread all over the place, if you want to revoke a single county from a single vassal you've got a hell of a fight ahead of you. Best to avoid that kind of conflict.
3. Use realm peace as much as possible.