Why can't you give your vassels more than 1 holding?

[Sweynforkbeard]

In my view there are currently 3 primary reasons why I want strong multicountry vassals.

1. Rasing armies and fleets. The new system really cuts back on micromanagement to the point that I practically never raise my personal levies anymore (please allow us to raise all our personal levies in the same way we can raise our vassals levies). I always divide the Kingdom of Jerusalem evenly between all my major vassals

2. Tech efficiency. Without the ability to exploit the demense tech bonus your realm, outside your personal demense, is simply never going to develop technologically.

3. Economic efficiency. Vassals do improve their holdings just fine, provided they have a sufficient income to build stuff. Increasing the average income of your vassals will allow them to get started sooner. The only real weakness with the build priorities of the ai is that it seems to prioritise the cheapest always, so universities are rarely build.

 

[Onedreamer]

You can follow guides to mod the game or small how-to's, but following a guide that tells you how to play a grand strategy game is just silly. YOU play YOU set your strategy and change it according to your play style. Yes, there are play styles, especially in this game which has or can have a strong roleplaying component.

 

[Daelix]

You are sort of correct/incorrect. You tax your vassal´s full income which include the taxes he raise from his own vassals. However a duke (or any ai ruler for that matter) will never tax a feudal vassal (count).

You do however get a cut from the taxes your duke raise from his vassal mayors and bishops.

This. The income will very often be quite small per holding, which may have easily led to you not noticing. Particularly because vassals tend to lower their tax rates very low (and will never tax castles, like Sweyn said). And for Catholics, because they often will not have the piety and skills needed to out-popular the Pope to tax their bishoprics. But anyway, if your assumption was right you would lose 100% of the income you would otherwise gain from those holdings, which would be worse But if you have medium, harsh, harsh taxes on your castles/cities/bishoprics respectively, let's say arbitrarily say you're getting 0 gold, 8 gold, and 2 gold respectively (the Lord Mayor taxes the baronies), and every county has 1 of each holding. Each county directly below you = 10 gold annually, let's say a duchy has three counties = 30 annual gold. Now you implement a doge. He starts by default with your tax laws, so now (assuming he's getting bishopric taxes and no horrid opinion) he's getting 30 gold from them. With harsh taxes, he turns around and gives you ... 13.5 gold annually, a loss of 16.5+ gold for one duchy, for the return of an increase of revenue in 1 city. Now imagine you cover up 4 identical of our arbitrary duchies with a grand doge. Before you added the doges and grand doge, your counties were spitting out 120 gold in taxes to your annually. Now with 4 doges, your same counties net you 54 gold, plus the tax boon from the capitals. Now the Grand Doge gets the 54 gold, turns around, and gives you ... 24.3 gold.

There are many subtleties at play here - any cities that stay in the doge/grand doge's demesne (which is probably no more than 6 except for uncommon guys) don't suffer the layer penalty. But conversely, many of them will probably lose bishopric taxes completely and will almost certainly lower the taxes paid by cities below them (and eliminate any taxation on castles you had in place). Really, it depends on how heavily you rely on gold to achieve your goals. Or whether you'd just rather not bother with the micromanagement B.S. And hey, if your vassals are too rich, you can always scheme a way to imprison and banish someone and take ALL his loot.

You can follow guides to mod the game or small how-to's, but following a guide that tells you how to play a grand strategy game is just silly. YOU play YOU set your strategy and change it according to your play style. Yes, there are play styles, especially in this game which has or can have a strong roleplaying component.

This. I can say all day that you should max your taxes by blah blah blah but in reality, if you want to play a CKII where you play as a classic feudal lords who grants land to feudal lords and manages his constantly pissy vassals through a sublime game of thrones, then by all means have fun doing that!

 

[grumphie]

for me it generally dpeends. how strong am i? how strong is the soont o be duke? what do i gain? for example, dont really care about the duke of gloucster or meath owning all his counties personally, but at smaller sizes duchies the size of tunis useally stay divided just because that duke would easly overpower me, if only because he has a crapload of tech advanced holdings in that duchy.

 

[Sweynforkbeard]

This. The income will very often be quite small per holding, which may have easily led to you not noticing. Particularly because vassals tend to lower their tax rates very low (and will never tax castles, like Sweyn said). And for Catholics, because they often will not have the piety and skills needed to out-popular the Pope to tax their bishoprics. But anyway, if your assumption was right you would lose 100% of the income you would otherwise gain from those holdings, which would be worse But if you have medium, harsh, harsh taxes on your castles/cities/bishoprics respectively, let's say arbitrarily say you're getting 0 gold, 8 gold, and 2 gold respectively (the Lord Mayor taxes the baronies), and every county has 1 of each holding. Each county directly below you = 10 gold annually, let's say a duchy has three counties = 30 annual gold. Now you implement a doge. He starts by default with your tax laws, so now (assuming he's getting bishopric taxes and no horrid opinion) he's getting 30 gold from them. With harsh taxes, he turns around and gives you ... 13.5 gold annually, a loss of 16.5+ gold for one duchy, for the return of an increase of revenue in 1 city. Now imagine you cover up 4 identical of our arbitrary duchies with a grand doge. Before you added the doges and grand doge, your counties were spitting out 120 gold in taxes to your annually. Now with 4 doges, your same counties net you 54 gold, plus the tax boon from the capitals. Now the Grand Doge gets the 54 gold, turns around, and gives you ... 24.3 gold.

There are many subtleties at play here - any cities that stay in the doge/grand doge's demesne (which is probably no more than 6 except for uncommon guys) don't suffer the layer penalty. But conversely, many of them will probably lose bishopric taxes completely and will almost certainly lower the taxes paid by cities below them (and eliminate any taxation on castles you had in place). Really, it depends on how heavily you rely on gold to achieve your goals. Or whether you'd just rather not bother with the micromanagement B.S. And hey, if your vassals are too rich, you can always scheme a way to imprison and banish someone and take ALL his loot.



This. I can say all day that you should max your taxes by blah blah blah but in reality, if you want to play a CKII where you play as a classic feudal lords who grants land to feudal lords and manages his constantly pissy vassals through a sublime game of thrones, then by all means have fun doing that!

I am sorry, but I really do not think you fully understand how lordmayors and doges works. So for clarity, for a costal city, which would usually be where you most inclined to use lordmayors and doges.

A doge will recieve a 140% income bonus for his capital and a 40% income bonus for any other cities in his personal demense.
A lordmayor will recieve a 40% income bonus for any cities in his personal demense.
Vasal mayors of either will also recieve the 40% income bonus, however ideally you would normally not want a doge or lordmayor to have mayor vasals.

Obviously, because of this income bonus and the inherently better base income and income progression of cities, X number of lordmayors will practically always provide a larger tax return than X number of any other type of vasals. So if your main concern is to maximize your personal income then you should always favor lordmayors.

Whether and where you should use a doge over a lordmayor depend mainly on the size of a duchy. Though there ways to work around that.
If the duchy consist of two counties then you effectively have no choice. It will be created so your best course of action is to ensure that the lordmayor control both counties in the duchy and either allow him to create the title himself or grant it to him.
For any duchy with more than two counties it depend on the total number of current and potential city holdings vs. the legalism level in the duchy(capital). Ideally a doge should hold precisely (3 + the legalism bonus) cities in his personal demense to avoid the vasal on vasal tax issue.

 

[unmerged(192917)]

I'm a brand-new player, but I'm surprised that nobody has made this point: More direct vassals means more options when picking councillors and guardians. Right now as Norway I'm grinding against pagans, accumulating counties that won't be worth anything for decades. If one of my vassals has a councillor who's better than mine, I give him the newly conquered county and immediately put him to work for me. Once I adopted this strategy, my councilor scores jumped from the high teens to the low twenties, which gave a noticeable benefit.

If I were forming duchies as some in this thread suggest, I would be careful about losing councillors. I know that tranferring a county means that I lose councillors who were bishops or mayors in that county. I assume that creating a duchy would cost me the councillors who were counts within the duchy.

 

[Mutineer]

It's a valid point - up to dergee. On some stage amount of counties become unmanageble and even if you create duchies (and when I do that I tend to give it to best count famaly stats wize or my bloodline count) you will still have hundred of direct vassals.
But yes, early on it is an addition argument in favor of creating single county counts.

 

[Sweynforkbeard]

Early in the game most players will probably be quite expansive meaning you will have a regular inflow of new holdings that you can grant to skilled people. Later in the game there will always be rulers that need to be/can be replaced whose lands you can then grant to skilled people.

 

[Lorehead]

If I were forming duchies as some in this thread suggest, I would be careful about losing councillors. I know that tranferring a county means that I lose councillors who were bishops or mayors in that county. I assume that creating a duchy would cost me the councillors who were counts within the duchy.

It’s a valid concern to worry about. I try to install my five best councilors as barony-level vassals in my demesne and keep higher-level titles in my family. You can still send children to the courts of indirect vassals in your realm.

 

[Lessing]

A doge will recieve a 140% income bonus for his capital and a 40% income bonus for any other cities in his personal demense.
A lordmayor will recieve a 40% income bonus for any cities in his personal demense.

I can't see those particular bonusses anywhere.

The bonusses I see are:

+15% city held by republic
+25% coastal city held by republic
+100% capital city of grand republic

So what you want to do is for a doge to hold all counties in his duchy by himself without county vassals (removes 1 layer of vassals and this 1 layer of tax loss), and to avoid any doge having more than one duchy, so that there are the maximum number of grand republic capitals. There are no other ways to optimise it.

 

[Sweynforkbeard]

There... has been times when a baron in my demense and his family has met a suspicious end. When such unfortunate tragedies have occur I have often used the opportunity to promote a highly skilled young man to baron.

 

[Sweynforkbeard]

I can't see those particular bonusses anywhere.

The bonusses I see are:

+15% city held by republic
+25% coastal city held by republic
+100% capital city of grand republic

So what you want to do is for a doge to hold all counties in his duchy by himself without county vassals (removes 1 layer of vassals and this 1 layer of tax loss), and to avoid any doge having more than one duchy, so that there are the maximum number of grand republic capitals. There are no other ways to optimise it.

Coastal doge capital = 15+25+100 = 140
Coastal LM/doge = 15 + 25 = 40

If you really want to optimize then you can do this.
1. Grant the cities (and all counties ofcourse) to the doge.
2. Then grant the barons, that your doge will create, count level titles outside the duchy.

That way you will have created doges that essentially only control cities. The doge will ofcourse dislike your newly minted counts (the structure will not affect his relationship with you) but he will be unable to do anything about it, provided you have medium crown law or above.

 

[Lessing]

Coastal doge capital = 15+25+100 = 140
Coastal LM/doge = 15 + 25 = 40

I know the numbers add up to your numbers, but only for all coastal cities, and you didn't state that so clearly. Besides, the assumption of all coastal cities is just an ideal world, not the real world.

 

[Sweynforkbeard]

I know the numbers add up to your numbers, but only for all coastal cities, and you didn't state that so clearly. Besides, the assumption of all coastal cities is just an ideal world, not the real world.

Which part of "So for clarity, for a costal city, which would usually be where you are most inclined to use lordmayors and doges." was unclear?

 

[Lessing]

Which part of "So for clarity, for a costal city, which would usually be where you are most inclined to use lordmayors and doges." was unclear?

The part where you go from ONE (aka "a city") coastal city to ALL coastal cities when considering doges and lord-mayor vassals.

 

[AmpsterMan]

My first Game as Ireland I tended to have one county dukes and the like. I was able to united all of Britannia and be the most powerful family by the end of the game. In my second on going game, I have rewarded my most loyal servants (usually of my family line, but not exclusively) dukes and all of the counties seats with them. I am in about 1160 and have the Kingdoms of Ireland and Wales under one crown and have about 6 dukes I have to worry about.

The differences I have seen are thus: In my first game I had upwards of 100 vassals, too many that I couldn't really know any of them personally; their tendencies, their ambitions, etc. Still, it made everyone weak around me and made sure I was top dog. In my second game, I already see the pitfalls and benefits of having lots of dukes. I have 6 duke vassals, and about 10-15 baron-mayor-bishops that report directly to me. My dukes are happily upgrading the lands I have given them and so I have no problems while providing sizable levies when I call upon them. A great majority of my money comes from my own desmense. The advantage is that since I have so few vassals, I can keep them all happy and know them on a personal level. I give them honorary titles, I invite them to jousts/ meals. I appoint them to my council (even if they aren't the best ones) Using these methods, I have been able to expand at a moderately high pace,my family spreads itself very naturally and I have more fun taking care of the Macro things rather than the Micro things. Furthermore, flavorwise it is more fitting to the era. That said, I do run an absolute monarchy toward the 1300s and above. I am always trying to get the highest authority possible and I do like to have some archbishops/ doges here an their.

 

[Sweynforkbeard]

The part where you go from ONE (aka "a city") coastal city to ALL coastal cities when considering doges and lord-mayor vassals.

I...fail to see you point. Clarification needed.

 

[Lorehead]

Anyway, I’m going to experiment with creating doges in my small coastal duchies, probably with one-province lord mayors below them, and maybe keeping direct vassalage of the barons and bishops for their levies. Low city levies, but high city taxes. In theory, that should give me vassals with lots of income, but who are too militarily weak to ever challenge me.

 

[Lessing]

I...fail to see you point. Clarification needed.

With a realm full of coastal cities, you can do anything you want to max gold. Duchy composition / vassal composition doesnt matter. With only a few coastal cities, it gets different. Because a doge without a coastal demesne grand city actually earns less money. Ideally, all your doges only hold 1 duchy and have access to a coastal province they held by themselves.

 

[Sweynforkbeard]

With a realm full of coastal cities, you can do anything you want to max gold. Duchy composition / vassal composition doesnt matter. With only a few coastal cities, it gets different. Because a doge without a coastal demesne grand city actually earns less money. Ideally, all your doges only hold 1 duchy and have access to a coastal province they held by themselves.

1. Effecient duchy composition is always beneficial; you argument makes no sense. I seriously doubt you are going to find many players who will conclude that "because I have so many nice coastal provinces I am not going to bother with doges or lordmayors"....
2. There are good reason why doges and LMs are mainly associated with coastal duchies, so why would you possibly complain that I use coastal provinces values.
3. Ofcourse a doge should never hold more than one duchy title it would be senseless to ever give them more. If a duchy does not have enough cities or free holding slots available to reach the maximum safe demense size for the doge, then city holdings can just be added from other places.

Eitherway, this discussion isnt leading to anything meaningful since we clearly both agree on how doges are generally best exploited.

Back to topic. You doges should not have count level vassals below them. Rather they should personally hold the counties and spare city holdings in their personal demense to avoid the tax loss from vassal on vassal.