The Death of The Tribal Government Type: How It Makes Everything Less Fun (Including Pagans)

[sigeena]

A Tribal king can also call his vassals as allies.

I wasn't too clear on this. A tribal duke is more powerful in that he's able to tap all the county vassals in his realm.

Whereas when a tribal king calls his vassal dukes, the dukes only bring their desmesne levies, not their vassal counts. And going by how elective gavelkind splits titles, most of your vassal dukes tend to be 1 county dukes after 2-3 generations. Troopcount is heavily diluted once you reach King level.

 

[kmh42]

By the time you hit king you've typically got tribal organization too high for that. To play tribal effectively, you have to be strategic with your tribal organization law: only raise it past medium when you're ready to upgrade out of tribalism altogether.

What? With conclave enabled TO is pointless to raise except going straight for feudalism. I play on minimal TO till a am an Empire.

I wasn't too clear on this. A tribal duke is more powerful in that he's able to tap all the county vassals in his realm.

Whereas when a tribal king calls his vassal dukes, the dukes only bring their desmesne levies, not their vassal counts. And going by how elective gavelkind splits titles, most of your vassal dukes tend to be 1 county dukes after 2-3 generations. Troopcount is heavily diluted once you reach King level.

I only give out duke titles when I have enough Dukes to get the same effect like with Counts. I barley use my own demesne troops. I try to get my 'raise Tribal army' decision and then I go on a war spree.

Maybe I have to mention I mostly play with Norse I didn't tried out this strategy with eastern Tribal.

 

[Secret Master]

I guess I'm different.

I usually prefer starting as tribal. I like how the government functions, I love the prestige = buildings mechanic, and I like how tribal holdings work with empty slots.

I don't stay tribal for centuries on end (you start falling behind in power fairly quickly as feudal states build up), but I feel the tribal mechanics are a nice change of pace from feudal and republics. The whole "subordinate tribes are allies and not vassals" mechanic sits well with me. While by no means perfect, tribal government goes a long way to simulating the kind of rulers we see in Beowulf and other texts.

Note that I tend to find gavelkind elective annoying after around a century, but that's mainly because it's a damn nuisance to figure out how to manage title allocation among your heirs. If we had a specific interface that let us see and shuffle around titles for our heirs under gavelkind, I'd probably never leave it once I became an emperor.