I can't call it historical because even countries which are within a game are above the limit, few examples:
769: Abbasids
1187: England
1337: Golden Horde
I agree that there was a historical problem with managing many lands\vassals but CK2 simplifies that in a very wrong way - it puts arbitrary limits instead of making it about efficiency, pretty much like EU1-3 had a badboy system with everyone stupidly declaring war on you after crossing the limit. EU IV introduced much more complex and realistic system which makes sense for me.
Yes, I would agree that they could implement a better system. At the same time, though, it cannot simply be a matter of "efficiency", because if you rule the whole (known) world, why would you care how big your levies are? There has to be some diplomatic penalty too, to ensure that you actually
need those levies.
Can't they create empire titles and become independent this way? I haven't played for a long time and don't remember this.
I don't think so. That would be fairly broken. It's also avoidable anyway, just don't give them the land they'd need to do that (Empires are difficult to create, you need 80% rather than 51%).
Destroying/not creating empire titles to avoid vassals desiring them seems a bit gamey to me but thanks for a tip
It's not really "gamey", as such, because I can't think of a
single example of someone claiming multiple empire-level titles. The reason for that is that an "empire" IRL is pretty much
defined as "all the land we hold, with no regard for culture or geography". The de-jure empires system that CK has is extremely ahistorical (few of them existed, and those that did were either not called "empires" or didn't care one bit about their "de-jure" lands), it's there purely for game mechanic reasons.
I think that main issue here is a belief that large empire should be either decentralized or break apart, what's the historical basis for this? Pretty much all successful big non-colonial empires were centralized at the time of their greatest power and struggle for power in them was not about central government(emperor) vs provincial governments (vassal) but about who get's to be the emperor. Byzantine Empire was all about palace intrigues for the crown, not vassals demanding their rights. Pretty much the same thing happened in Ottoman Empire and later in Russia.
For me CK2 should be about a ruler(s) trying to a)install absolutism b) expand while vassals should aim for the opposite and I don't say turning let's say HRE into absolute monarchy should be easy - I'm fine if that would be nearly impossible, but once it's done the empire should function much better then it did as a decentralized state.
The game already models this to an extent. That is what the "imperial" government type is. Rather than having "vassals", you have "viceroys", who are essentially governors. And, if you think that governors being temporary stopped them from using their power as governors to seek further power for theirselves, you have evidentially not read much Roman history.
Yes, I agree the modelling is not perfect, but that's unavoidable. Modelling what
really happened just isn't possible given the limitations of the game engine and the very
concept of the game.
Then give them that too. It really doesn't matter. No one gives a crap about your achievements.
Honestly, if they're going to do that, they should just remove the concept of "ironman" entirely and allow people to get achievements no matter what. Disabling the vassal limit makes creating and sustaining a large empire far,
far easier, and I don't see why people should have to use the (often annoying) ironman mode and not use mods etc. if they can turn off one of the biggest sources of late-game difficulty and still gain achievements.
