Question Regarding Dukes and Vassles

[w00tness]

Hello all, I'm in a multiplier game with a friend and he's the king of Ireland and I am the king of Spain, I'd be the emperor but alas I turned out Greek so a in a generation or two I'll have the right culture. I dread having dukes as vassals and every county has an individual person ruling over one individual piece of land. No one the entirety of Spain and northern Africa has more than 1 piece of land but yours truly here.

I got to thinking though, am I missing out not having dukes? The only penalty I can think of so far is a little less prestige but I keep winning wars and really that's never an issue with me. On the plus side since I have elective Monarchy I can quite easily handle my heir and I seldom ever worry about factions because the likelihood of roughly 120 individual characters liking each other and hating me enough to be 50% of my total strength is pretty god damn low.

 

[Kimberly]

Hello all, I'm in a multiplier game with a friend and he's the king of Ireland and I am the king of Spain, I'd be the emperor but alas I turned out Greek so a in a generation or two I'll have the right culture. I dread having dukes as vassals and every county has an individual person ruling over one individual piece of land. No one the entirety of Spain and northern Africa has more than 1 piece of land but yours truly here.

I got to thinking though, am I missing out not having dukes? The only penalty I can think of so far is a little less prestige but I keep winning wars and really that's never an issue with me. On the plus side since I have elective Monarchy I can quite easily handle my heir and I seldom ever worry about factions because the likelihood of roughly 120 individual characters liking each other and hating me enough to be 50% of my total strength is pretty god damn low.

You and your dynasty miss out on the prestige associated with all of the ducal titles. Besides that, it is generally easier to a bunch of dukes than it is to keep track of your relationship with every single one-county count. Having dukes greatly simplifies realm management, at the cost of creating people that have the power to challenge your rule.

I typically take the exact opposite strategy from you: I create all duchies, and let every duke have all the counties in their duchy. This means a nice income for me (because you don't get a cut of the taxes counts pay to dukes, but you do get a cut of the duke's direct income if you have feudal taxation) and a realm that is simple to manage. If you have a realm that's large enough, the fact that a rebelling duke is more powerful isn't that big of a deal, so long as the majority of dukes are still on your side. The problems really only start when a duke stands to inherit another duchy and associated counties, making them pretty powerful--but this is solved by staying alert.

 

[w00tness]

I see, but as far as army size and county improvements go, it is largely unaffected? I don't mind the micro management so much as I dread factions. In my single player game every damn time I waged war on the Fatamid Calpihate as the Persian empire, right on que just as I'm winning the war half my realm goes up in flames because of insolent sons. So I have to go and execute them all and by then my forces are too spent and I'm forced to enact white truce....Hate Dukes. They're bastards.

 

[JonStryker]

It was long true that that creating titles for vassals is a very bad idea. One county per person is the best way to go. Keep your vassals weak!


Since factions/liege-levies were introduced creating titles has become more useful:

- less direct vassals = less people participating in plots = less people you have to make happy
- large vassals = large levies that are raised at one location; you don't have to merge tons of tiny levies into big ones. That gets incredibly boring.

 

[yezhanquan]

It was long true that that creating titles for vassals is a very bad idea. One county per person is the best way to go. Keep your vassals weak!


Since factions/liege-levies were introduced creating titles has become more useful:

- less direct vassals = less people participating in plots = less people you have to make happy
- large vassals = large levies that are raised at one location; you don't have to merge tons of tiny levies into big ones. That gets incredibly boring.

This. As an emperor, it feels kinda funny, when you have a faction made up of dukes, and you said to another vassal,"Here's a new kingdom for you. Enjoy." and have a war erupting soon after the new king took over.