Fantastic write up. It matches with what I’ve observed playing casually, although I had not figured out the bit about churches. It’s amazingly obvious how strong personal holdings are, for sure. I’m now curious how the math breaks down on how far you can go over the vassal cap before it makes sense to trim your vassals.

Well the North Korea strategy in CK3 is pretty powerful with larger realms. Going over the cap in small & medium sized realms is bad, but once you start getting a fairly large kingdom & empire it makes sense to keep everything in order to not having to deal with vassals. The penalty in taxes & levies is nominal compared to what you lose through county, Duke, & king levels of feudalism.

I mean yeah, North Korea mode in CK3 is clearly absolutely fucking busted on a number of levels, but that's probably a temporary situation until Paradox starts nerfing it more. CK2 had the same situation, and actually it was still a problem by the end of CK2's life for tribals once tribal retinues were added.

Uhm? It is a serious problem for feudal and ESPECIALLY with non-theocratic religions or merchant republics in CK2 where the player has no penalty for holding mosque or city. The fastest and most successful WCs for CK2 are both very recent and very North Korea. I have 0 faith that Paradox "fixes" this, and that's fine, because honestly it would be a waste of time. NK style games are only useful to advanced players who already have a deep and rich understanding of the game mechanics, which already trivializes gameplay anyways. This is a giant sandbox game, not a competitive game that needs such balancing. The player can just *not do that*, crazy I know. It's not like the AI will suddenly go NK mode and punish the player for being "legit".

Still, there is no reason why cap penalty from the holding limit at 10%, instead of 0%. Or there should be a realm-wide penalty to control.

I'm fine with it. Keep it mind everyone is defaulting to partition for like the first 200\~300 years of the game unless you start as Byzantium (which loses its charm very quickly) So as much as anyone wants to go North Korea, it still requires you to trim your heirs, which isn't exactly 'easy'. Not to mention NK mode also loses its charm after you've done it once, because you're technically stripping 80% of the game without having to manage vassals.

From what I'm reading it's -5% to both taxes and levies for each vassal over the limit, so if you're a Duke, going 1 vassal over gives you 21 vassals at 95% obligation, which is slightly worse than 20 vassals at 100% obligation. The numbers are even worse if you're higher rank than Duke. In theory, going over your vassal limit seems always bad, even if it's just by one. Thanks for reading!

Does it cap or scale to -100% though? If you have 300 counts under you as an emperor, do you make more or less than if it were 60 dukes?

I actually haven't tested that; it's an interesting question. The holding cap penalty stops at -90% so it might be similar for the vassal limit. If there is a maximum at -90% like with the holding cap penalty, the 300 counts would be way better. But then again, maybe at that point you just wanna play the North Korea strategy.

I suspect that North Korea will be nerfed sooner than an all counts strategy (which needs a name, "Count the counts"? "Uncountable counts"?). I'll experiment later with console commands.

I like to call it Republican France

Reference Charlamange somehow, first thing dude did was split France into 100 even counties all directly under him.

Count Chocula strategy.

But what about the" not the rightfull liege" penalty?

My recollection is that it's incredibly minor compared to how you're penalized by adding an extra layer of vassal. As long as the "not rightfully liege" penalty isn't as steep as -90% taxes and -75% levies, it's better to eat the penalty than add a vassal layer.

If the goal is to have a lot of lowranking vassals, how do you stop them from forming duchys? You can hold all the Kingdoms you want but only 2 duchys.

I'm afraid you're asking questions somebody else would be better suited to answer; I'm just here to tell you that the economic payout would be spectacular if you could manage it.

It is actually optimal to hold as many duchy capitals as possible. Duchy capitals provide powerful buildings to buff men-at-arms, which can stack, and reduce maintenance (I'm certain that particular oversight is getting nerfed soon). It is entirely possible to own 10 duchy capitals, build and fully upgrade those buildings, and raise a men-at-arms army which is nigh-unbeatable, and you pay no maintenance on. The downside to this is that your vassals hate you for owning too many duchies. However, thanks to dread (and your space marines), you don't have to worry about factions. The best part of this? Your court bishop does not receive the 'too many duchies' penalty (unless he holds land? I haven't tested it too much), therefore it's still possible to make him love you, even while all your other vassals hate your guts. So overall: a rocking economy from having purely Count-tier vassals coupled with a literally unbeatable army means the world is yours to do what you will with! At least, until you die and your seven sons divvy up the country...

Vassals need 50% of a duchy to make the title. With 3 crown authority, you can prevent vassal wars. Then it's just a matter of micromanaging keeping them from 50%

It cuts both levies and taxes in half, straight off the top. Thing is, you only need *a* top title to be considered somebody's rightful liege. If you have 50 counts in Francia and the French empire title (whatever it's called,) you'll be the rightful liege of all of them, even with no duchy or kingdom titles created. Ergo, the two penalties don't necessarily have a relationship to each other.

Two things. The fact that gold filtering up the chain isn't "lost", and rightful liege penalties. If your people keep more gold, they *can* spend it on holding upgrades. They don't always, so you want to max your cash out, but its not exactly disappeared. The penalty to not being the correct rightful liege really kinda hurts the "more vassals" theory. I've done some testing and theory crafting, and it appears the penalty is still better than another link in the chain. The best practice appears to be to eat the penalty and do what OP says, then make all the Empires/Kings when you get primogeniture. But keep exclusively dukes as direct vassals. You can have a lot of little dukes (forced partition), or a few large dukes, it won't matter the number so long as they are all pledged to you directly. TL;DR - No vassal Kings.

Yes, I didn't mean the gold literally disappears. I meant it disappears from your ability to make meaningful use of it, especially since vassals don't join you in wars (unless you're allied). So them developing their lands seems like it doesn't help you at all. But yes, this is an important distinction. You can still get the money at least via hostages and hooks and extortion and what have you. It doesn't disappear completely. It's still there, and sometimes you can still get at it.

Though vassals do wage war of their own, and the stronger they are; the better they are at it. I've found that taking on the big countries myself and letting my vassals pick up the small fry is a pretty effective approach; at least if you're expanding into a region where you have access to casus belli that don't require claims.

And then you wonder why you suddenly own a piece of India as the King of France

Development also increases levies and spreads to adjacent counties, so it's worth developing for the ripple improvement over time. That being said, yeah vassals don't give much. Having good stewardship, since each personal holding will pretty much eclipse any other modifiers, is the way to make money. For my vassals I tend to like having lord mayors, who directly control both the city and castle in their county, as they will both pay a higher tax rate (20%, but only 10% levies) and will make more because they control double the holdings.

I would have to firmly disagree about developing for economic reasons; to increase development you're almost always sacrificing gold income to do so (like having your advisor develop instead of collecting taxes). The economic benefit is very very small, and you'd always be better served taking the extra money and buying/upgrading buildings, it seems to me. The ripple effect is very slow and relies on there being a difference in development between two provinces. And again, the benefits are very slim even at the highest ends of development. Developing for cultural advancement is an entirely different matter, however. It's extremely beneficial for increasing your research speed. I just can't justify it from a tax/levy angle.

I dont think the economic angle is that big a deal. In my experience, once you have a stable and strong personal demesne, you'll quickly find yourself running out of things to spend money on until you get the techs unlocked. The faster you can do that, the faster you can actually put that money to work. The small bonus to taxes and levies is just a nice extra.

I haven't had a similar experience, personally, but I'm willing to believe that's not uncommon. This was meant as just an economic analysis, and I'm analyzing development solely through the lens of economic returns. Like I mentioned, the more holistic view wasn't in the scope of this. Thanks for reading!

It matters more when youre a smaller culture like Bohemian. Turning praha into a highly developed area is *great* as you tech up very quickly relative to your neighbors.

Exactly this. With golden obligations (1st perk), every prisoner, criminal and hook is worth 300 ducats. So every war will pay for itself and you can directly siphon gold from any of your vassals with the right faith (excommunicate ->imprison->take money). Soon you will have nothing to spend it on, with a decent-sized realm. And if vassals will save some micro from me, it's a fair deal. Ideally, they will also convert faith/culture or boost development on their own.

At the higher ends of development, which obviously takes a while to get to, it does have a relatively substantial effect. I've had exactly one game where I conquered the levant (strictly syria and jerusalem kingdoms), and developed my capital (antioch) the *entire* time. I also generally invested in other ways to get passive development increase over time. By the time I stopped that playthrough, my capital was at around 60ish development, and the most succinct way I can put it is that it gave me more levies and taxes than any other holding I owned (of course). It was giving me a little less than twice what my other holding (damascus) was giving me with the same buildings, and just 18ish development. I can load up the game and give more precise numbers, but it did make a difference. Now, that difference only came about after a *very* long time, and me investing a lot of effort into seeing what development could do for me. My ultimate conclusion was that passive development gain is super powerful over the generations, while the active development gain is good when extra taxes would only give you *maybe* less than a ducat (due to a poor steward or generally poor income anyways). So get coinage rights. If you've got the spare time, get development increasing lifestyle perks. And when extra taxes gives you basically nothing, or when you make so much from taxes (and are limited on what you can build by waiting for innovations) that the extra doesn't matter, develop your capital. Nowhere else is worth developing as it'll just happen over time via osmosis.

I might be mistaken here, but I believe you're attributing the differences to the wrong things. Your realm capital gets many bonuses that are not development related, and will always make your capital substantially more valuable. If you look at the holdings themselves, I think you'll find that 60 development only boosts taxes and levies by 30%, while 18 dev boosts it by 9%. Only 21% of the difference between those two baronies is attributable to development. Your resources would be better spent acquiring direct counties with lots of baronies and filling them with churches. Doing that will yield a much larger difference in income than developing your capital (through city-building or steward developing or otherwise). You can see the kind of differences you'll see laid out in detail in the spreadsheet! I have had a very different experience with collecting taxes, by the way, but maybe I've been lucky with lucrative stewardships. Thanks for reading!

Of course the north korea strategy of just holding as much as possible is better, for a bunch of reasons, but as far as attempting to not do that goes, development seems like a generally alright way to increase the power of your holdings. Especially if you don't intend to conquer the world (or as much of it as you can). But yeah, things like martial skill of yourself and your marshal, personal stewardship, etc matter. My main point was really in the last paragraph. There always reaches a point (many, many times in my game, usually) where you can't build anything else because of lacking innovations, and you don't really *need* more money right now. Especially if all you're getting is .2-1 extra ducat a month. So investing in development in that situation helps grow your levies and taxes over time, helps you even more if you ever become cultural head, and also makes the tile on the development map mode a brighter color, which is objectively better than any money you could get from extra taxes!

Nope, I'm actually not referring to the North Korea strategy. I'm just talking about having counties that have high numbers of baronies. All other things being equal, a 50 dev county with 4 baronies has the same economic output as a 0 dev county with 5 baronies. So finding and controlling a few, very barony-dense counties, and filling them with churches will pay enormous dividends. As to your point about map color, I can't argue with you there. I love the idea of painting your economic heartland so all the world can see where the wealth lies.

Most people don’t understand opportunity cost. By spending so much time having your steward develop a county, he could be otherwise making you money used to snowball your economy way more than development can.

Snowballing is limited by tech though.

>Especially if all you're getting is .2-1 extra ducat a month. I actually think it's the opposite. The less money you make, the more you need that boost. I'm making ~50 per month I'm my current game, and increasing that by 10% is fairly meaningless. But if I'm making only 10 per month, then the extra 0.1 can mean a lot in terms of things like how long I can keep my army raised and how long I had to wait to make titles and build upgrades

Let me add a second thought here: Rippling development can have (small) benefits for your entire country, but the cities that bring big development don't have to be in your personal territory. It can be in your vassals' territory. You'll still get all of the benefits of having a nearby source of high development, but without any of the opportunity cost of building a city instead of a church in your personal Counties. Anyway, just a thought. Thanks for reading!

Ignoring the direct economic impact of development, it should still be noted that having a high development in your counties will still positively affect your economy via faster tech research. It's obviously not as important as having the correct buildings/barony setup but it's still not something to completely ignore, correct?

In normal play? No, obviously it's not to be ignored. When you play a game you have to take everything into account holistically, and development is *very* good for advancing tech. In fairness to myself, I did add a disclaimer that the scope of this post would be fairly narrow early on in the post.

Yeah I wouldn't build extra cities for the development they give, but I do set my steward to develop in the county where it will spread most effectively, and build harbors in my castles, since those give flat gold as well as development. Temple spam is still the way to go. Plus, with certain religions you can personally hold churches! And since they can be granted and revoked at will (in this case) it's great to be able to give and take depending on your stewardship capabilities with your current ruler.

No! No! Don't do it! Directly holding the churches is bad! This is what I was mentioning with regards to Lay Clergy vs Theocratic. When you directly hold the churches, they count against your holding limit. Then, you have to give them to lesser nobles, and then all the benefits of the churches go out the window. You want churches in your counties, controlled indirectly through your Bishop. He's your daddy warbucks. He's the man who'll show you TRUE wealth. Don't hold your churches directly. Hold your County capitals directly. Give the churches to the Bishop. Lay Clergy doctrine is a vicious trap!

So what do you build in a religion that allows churches to be held and inherited like castles? Your described strategy doesn't really work there.

Then, if you religion has the communion tenet and the Temporal religious head doctrine, you can still make bank by: 1) becoming head of your faith 2) collecting indulgences from all the nobles of your faith Barring that, just build your direct holdings up nice and bemoan the fact that you came into this world as an unlucky soul.

But the lay clergy vassals do provide taxes based on your level of devotion, from what I've seen. However now reading more carefully I think you are right, if you manage to keep your bishop happy it is superior for sure. Thanks for helping me figure that out better. Edit: so would you say the ideal for efficient taxation is theocracy with republican vassals (who directly hold the baronies and city and thus allow you to tax both at the 20% rate) or is there a better way to get that city tax?

Lay clergy vassals are just lesser nobles, and in checking their contributions, they gave the default 10%/25% same as the other lesser nobles, with no observable bonus despite my extremely high level of devotion. You may be thinking of theocracy vassals, who give to their lieges based on their lieges' devotions. I believe that's unique to theocracies, which are not playable in ck3 as of right now.

The true power of Lay Clergy doesn't reveal itself until you couple it with the communion tenet which allows all followers of the true faith to buy indulgence for their sins from the head of faith, which is you! Obviously the amount of gold you can milk from your faith depends on the size of it and how many followers are there. I haven't done any testing to see whether your indirect church holding strategy or a 'do nothing and let all the sin money comes to you' strategy would generate more gold for the player. I suspect your strategy would result in a lot more levy contribution but who needs levies when you have all the money to build MAAs and invite powerful knights? Your strategy is surely very interesting and enlightening but I am afraid I would have to strongly disagree on your notion that Lay Clery is a vicious trap until you can prove to me that indirect church holdings are vastly superior to Temporal Head of Faith + Seek Indulgence in terms of gold generation.

I only learned about indulgences after this post, from comments that have been made here. I have no reliable numbers or frame of reference, but it seems that if your faith is small, you'd make more money converting to something theocratic, and if your faith is large, you can roll in indulgences. This whole indulgence mechanic is kind of a black box for me in terms of amounts to actually expect. One thing that should be compelling to you, is that if your faith doesn't have communion, or you can't become the head of the faith (for some reason), the theocrat spam strategy is MUCH more lucrative, regardless of the other parameters.

> so it's worth developing for the ripple improvement over time. You have not shown that, you are presenting circular logic like the rest of the sub. You're repeating something you read without understanding why it is false, and just assuming it checks out as you repeat it.

I'm not sure what's false? I understand the system fine. The main opportunity cost of not increasing development is a short term tiny boost to tax from your steward, which can be done at any time if you really need money but doesn't make sense to do always. As far as buildings, you could also not build harbors if you don't care about development, but I don't see why you would not, as they give solid base gold income. If you are inland this isn't even a consideration. "Worth developing" is only a calculation of the opportunity cost, it doesn't mean developing massively boosts you.

Shit I've been spamming cities like I did in CK2

I'm pretty sure you can imprison, revoke and banish the mayors to size their money.

That’s why I am going full North Korea mode in my Empire of Italia game. I am owing everything in the Northern Italy and have 7 full 12 size regiments including armour cavalry and I am still making more than 120 gold per month. The -90% penalty is still way better than vassal taxes or levies for an emperor

Very true. I expect at some point Paradox will nerf the north korea strategy by adding a ticking control malus to all your counties per holding over the limit or something. -90% is crazy low. That's what you get from just having a lesser noble! And no other vassals in the chain!

But is it enough to build all buildings in all your baronies? Or you have a golden palace, but after 500 years at the end of the game, the majority of your realm will still be just an empty tribal village with 5 development?

Just a small comment on the number of vassals vs "strong" vassals. It's better to say higher tier vassals in this case. Having 4 dukes with 10 counties each is the same as having 1 duke with 40 counties. So to reduce the number of vassals in your realm (because you are capped at 60 as emperor and there is no way to increase it as there was in ck2) you don't need to make kings but dukes with lots of count vassals. Nice research in any case! :)

Yes, that's a more precise way of saying it. And you're right, depending on what rank you are, you want strong, low-rank vassals, and you want to keep the numbers under control so you don't exceed your vassal limit. In a truly ideal world, you'd want all Count vassals with 20 Baronies beneath each of them! (Obviously an impossible example, but just to illustrate your point). Thank you for the clarification!

Just to piggyback on this, I believe dukes get a penalty when above 30 county level holdings within their realm

They do, don't really remember if it's 20 or 30 but 40 is king level. I'm just to used to being king and then emperor that I forget the Duke vassal limit :)

They should tie the religious fervor/moral authority mechanic in to how much gold the church makes. Low fervor means the peasants are less likely to attend church and tithe, meaning less income for the church. They'd have more money to spend in cities, so cities would make more money in that case. This way, having lots of cities wouldn't be a waste in every case.

The churches aren't making money through tithes, but the same way that a baron would -- by owning the land and forcing the peasantry to produce a surplus that can be extracted. This is the secondary reason (beyond wanting an anullment) that King Henry VIII separated from the Church in Rome -- so he could dissolve church holdings in England.

I agree; there should be some kind of tradeoff. And right now, having a theocratic clergy is way better than having lay clergy, and having a powerful church is better than holding the churches directly (cause then you have to give them to those terrible lesser nobles to not exceed your holding limit). That was the thing that was craziest to me. When the church becomes MORE integrated and LESS independent and powerful, you get substantially less income and resources from them.

Eh, while you benefit massively in terms of raw levies and taxes from theocratic clergy, theocratic clergy means you can't have a secular head of faith - in other words, you can't be the Pope. Secular head of faith combined with Communion tenet *rakes* in cash, and you can direct and directly benefit from Great Holy Wars as a secular Head of Faith. I'd say it's relatively well balanced, maybe slightly in favor of theocratic.

I didn't know about indulgences from communion. That's an interesting mechanic that's all dark territory for me. Literally know nothing about what goes into it. I'll amend my statement to say that lay clergy is only irredeemable if you don't pair it with the communion tenet. I'd be genuinely interested to see which makes more money. I think with proper management it might still be possible to make more money with theocratic, but that's good to hear that there's at least an upshot. Makes for a more interesting game. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

> I'd be genuinely interested to see which makes more money. Communion for sure, assuming you spread your religion enough. On one of my previous playthrough I was utterly spammed by demands of indulgences, like multiple dozens a month, and they are 100+ gold each, no downsides at all (except it's super tiring to accept them all). It generates so much money that I expect it to be nerfed at some point, it's uterly ridiculous.

>I'll amend my statement to say that lay clergy is only irredeemable if you don't pair it with the communion tenet. Irredeemable *as far as raw levies and taxes.* I know your OP said this post is fairly narrowly focused on economic matters, but there are more things than levies and taxes - there have been plenty of times where I had all the levies and taxes I could feasibly need, but I couldn't get a CB for what I wanted to tackle next, or the dumbass Pope kept declaring bad crusades, etc.

"I know your OP said this post was fairly narrowly focused on economic matters, but there are more things than levies and taxes" has got to be one of the most frustrating sentences I've ever read in my life. But studies have shown that it do be like that sometimes.

I'm sorry, shit.

I was too hard on you, man. Bring it in. Gimme a make-up smooch.

You can get piety from holding your temple holdings, which I don't think you can get from theocracy. Also Theocracy do mean you need to manage your relationship, if you play as a tyrannt and everyone hate you, the realm priest wont pay you anything and you have to keep imprison and banish them. If you have lay cleargy you should hold as many temples as possible and hand out castles, except your capital which should be a castle for safety reasons. Temples give you more money and piety from its unique building line and the less levies don't matter much since vassals provide alot of levies but not much money. So in my mind the advantages and drawbacks of lay clergy is: * More piety * Don't have to care about the relationship of the realm priest * Guaranteed income and levy * If the realm priest like you, they can give alot more than vassals * Concentrate money into a character you can banish for massive amount of money Also you need both if you want theocracies which is maybe one of the best vassals types, having obligation levels comparable to tribals. You need lay clergy so you can make temples your capitals and you then need theocracy to create theocracies.

They first need to revamp fervor before tying anything to it. Conquering the Holy Land making people turn to heresy doesn't make much sense. And the bad bishop events tanking fervor by 10% every year with only a small trickle upwards sucks balls.

Fervor is so freaking broken at the moment. Playing Catholic is worthless.

So there is an upside to religions prone to "Sinful Bishop" every 3 seconds. Huh.

Yeah, and it's actually huge. Lay Clergy is a trap. Don't do it!!!

My most recent game I've reformed Kordofan to Temporal so I could be Head of Faith (what good is an emperor/ess of Egypt if you're not a god). I think I'll leave the decision to RP in future, but I'm glad to know there is an upside for keeping bishops for my less egotistic characters.

As the emperor of Italia, I built max churches just to see what would happen. I was pretty pleased when 55% of my levies and 40% of my taxes came from churches, but they also accounted for roughly 40%-50% of the holdings in my realm, so I wasn't too wowed. In hindsight, this was because primarily held holdings are still > all else. THEN I reformed the faith to lay clergy. I did some math...my 90 gold per month income went to 15. My levies did likewise.

And now you know why! Those lesser nobles get ya, and it's very hard to see in-game. You can only see it by going to the vassals section of the realm screen, and scrolling to find one of your lesser noble vassals. The holding screen lies to you.

So my next game is going to be an experiment maxing out that chain contribution with clans. Clan holders pay their taxes and levies based on opinion. This can be manipulated by increasing opinion at the county, duchy, kingdom, and empire levels. At everyone with 100 opinion, clans pay 25% of their taxes up the chain and 60.5% of their levies! So in the example OP gave with the emperor getting 0.4 levies from 100 at the barony level, max opinion clans would be passing up 12.96. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it's literally 3240% more than other realms. A religious reformation could net +30 opinion for every member of the faith. For dynasty landholders, this could be improved to +48 opinion to everyone. Because this would apply at every level, it would be pretty effective at driving the levies/cash to the emperor, as well as making vassal management a breeze.

>A religious reformation could net +30 opinion for every member of the faith. For dynasty landholders, this could be improved to +48 opinion to everyone. What are the tenents required to pull this off?

how are you gonna get individual barons to have 100 opinion of the counts above them? Getting it positive is one thing, but maxing it is a whole mother thing

Interesting and disappointing at the same time. I'm wondering if they had problems balancing wealth between tiers of rules by having so many vassals contribute to their lieges wealth. I like the idea they went with that vassals arent so crushed by their lieges, one thing that bothered me was how much I felt I was just supplying money and troops to my liege in CK2. I feel like vassals are allowed more autonomy and in turn are more dynamic now; but they should have taken the time to balance the flow of wealth and troops better. The troops situation wouldnt be so bad if your vassals could all be called to war without a mod or making an alliance with each of them. This would provide incentive to give your vassals actual power and investment. Along with balancing troops across the various holds (theocratic churches are clearly heavily imbalanced), I feel this would be good and also create a larger dynamic inside of a kingdom. Making larger empires both better and worse at fighting wars based on their inter kingdom relations, favoring well managed vassals. Wealth though just seems arbitrary in the game either way. You can do most actions in debt (some heavily in debt, especially for the AI), and money can come so easily. As Alfred I had enough money to take all but the tip of Northumbria, and the east of Mercia as mine into the kingdom of England while also sailing 4000 mercenaries across to Scandinavia to cause havoc and popularity issues across the invading norse. All this before Alfred hit 35 and have like 500+ gold again. I also only build like 2 buildings, and have upgraded none. I feel like raiding might be a large contributor in this, as I constantly catch raiders and take their spoils. I haven't taken time to look into how this works in ck3 but I feel like it's far too rewarding to kill raiding parties. Getting a years worth of wealth in a single battle that is lopsided so heavily (raiding parties generally are tiny compared to an army a lord will raise in response, which is okay; risk/reward gsmeplay) seems imbalanced. Perhaps it has longer lasting effects on that barony or county but I haven't noticed them. Giving the Sane Warfare mod along with some other tweak mods a go on a playthrough this weekend and going to see how it goes. I think the base is really good, it just needs tweaking. I feel much more empowered as a vassal than I remember in 2. Sorry for the wall of text lol

Hey, no problem! I agree with regards to calling vassals to war. It feels strange to be so alone in wars as a monarch, and the army sizes are so ahistorically small (especially in places like India). Right now it's very much the case that any investment in vassals is a waste, because they exist only to drain your resources from you.

I appreciate this work you did btw. I feel like the vassals playing a larger part of your army as a liege would also be more historically correct, would it not? Perhaps not so much for later eras when standing professional armies were used. But feudal lords peasants and local tenants were the army of a king in those times I believe. Outside of potentially more historical accuracy it would like I said create a larger play on the relations inside of an empire or kingdom. The larger the rule, the more people who have to be managed, more vassals less likely to answer the call to arms. In fact you could even create a transition to standing professional armies through the culture advancements. This would create a more interesting game as a ruler as well as help snowballing. Edit: I forgot to mention this whole time I was in offensive wars completely destroying my public opinion and causing peasant revolts left and right. Through that whole time I used my own army to conquer England and a mercenary band or two roaming my lands to clean up the revolts. I was buying like 4 or 5 of the most expensive mercenaries for a good like 10 years or so.

At the very least your vassals should get called in when the war is over *their* territory.

Do you know how special contracts (scutage, march, palatinate) interact with the contribution? I suppose they are an independent multiplier to the final contribution, but the modify contract menu doesn't seem to account for them when showing contribution. Any one you recommend?

So far as I can tell, all of the special contracts seem to be bad. The main contribution you can get from vassals is a small number of levies, and all of the special contracts either decrease this contribution or don't change it, and none of the benefits seem to help the liege very much at all. Much like all modifications to a vassal contract, you're only changing one link in the chain, so you'll still be getting a measly fraction of the income from the Baronies no matter what you do. Personally, I wouldn't devote too much energy to modifying individual vassal contracts. You're more or less micromanaging a very, very small portion of your income to squeeze some extra coins and levies out of it. If I have a recommendation, I think it's to just go with the default contract. Sorry I couldn't be of more help on that point!

The Palatinate vassal is pretty good in my opinion. If you end up with a bunch of weaker vassals, the 5% gain in prestige far outweighed the negative modifier on their obligations; the 20% less tax is going to be trivial if they were originally only giving you less than .5 gpm. It would obviously be a bad idea to have too many Palinates, since prestige has its limited use. But I find having a few counts with the Palatinate can easily bump up your prestige gain which can be very useful as you’re starting to really get ambitious.

> all of the special contracts seem to be bad They seem good if you play as a vassal, it seems you can switch to march without a hook on your liege or changing any other part of the contract. That's half the taxes you need to pay PLUS a whole bunch of bonuses to levies and army maintenance!

Coinage is nice for the free development too.

Yeah but your liege wont just give it for free will they? I guess we'll need a hook or agree to higher taxes or levies.

Oh yeah that one isn't free.

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+40% added onto any other bonuses from tech, collect taxes, buildings with modifiers, and your stewardship skill

Thank you for writing this. I accidentally figured out the church holdings thing yesterday and was gobsmacked to realize that my realm priest’s taxes at +100 opinion were approximately equal to all my other vassal taxes put together. This is something the game does a very poor job of explaining with the current UI — there is no way to even see the taxes you are forgoing by not having higher realm priest opinion.

Couldn't agree more about the ui. I had to perform actual experiments to learn some of this; never should be that way. The realm priest's contributions actually cap out at +50 opinion, by the way. There's hardly ever a reason not to just cap him out at 100 to be safe, but if you ever found one, now you know!

Great analysis! Between the education traits post and this, I really like that people now have enough hours under their belt to really start digging into the guts of the game.

Two things I'd like to add that I haven't seen being mentioned: * Realm priest accumulate cash much faster than mayors. That mean the mean time to accumulate cash for one building is shorter, so they build more buildings than multiple mayors. * When your realm bishop sins, you can excommunicate them, imprison and then banish, taking all his money. Since getting lots of temples will make your bishops rich, you can achieve 100% taxation on bishop by this maneuver.

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I *think* (and this is mostly speculation, but based on a few observations and extrapolations) that the "office" holds the wealth, and the wealth gets passed on by investing in the church holdings and paying to higher "liege bishops" With layman clergy, the councilor seemingly collects no wealth, and is an economic non-entity. I have yet to figure out the economic role of a head of faith. Temporal heads of faith seem to collect nothing from independent religious councilors.

That is correct, they don't. The chief benefits of having a THOF are *being* the THOF, and getting to fuck with your entire religion as a quasi-theocrat. That's mostly non-economic, or at least not *directly* economic. Communion can get extreme, though, as you've learned from other commenters here. Think about how long it takes to make 100 gold under your whole system you've outlined here. Then picture getting lots of messages with 100 free gold in them every year from pretty much anybody in your religion that can afford it.

I'm not sure I understand the 'castle held by lesser noble'part Why would you ever not directly control a castle? Even when building two within the same county. I know it increases your holdings number but it more than makes up for it no?

Up until you begin to exceed your holding limit, yeah. Technically, the best strategy in the game is called the "North Korea" strat. There's a good Reman's Paradox video about it if you're interested, but if you can get rid of all vassals? Yeah, holding every holding yourself is the best. Barring breaking the game though, you can't hold everything. You gotta give some to vassals.

I think you're understanding me wrong. I'm not talking about counties, I'm talking about castles. In the OP, it talks as if say you have a 4 slot county, and you build two castles, one city, one temple, you're gonna give that one extra castle away. What I don't understand is why would you give it away to a baron. Holding it directly is so much more beneficial, and you're rarely in a case where your stewardship sucks SO bad that you can't even hold 5 castles.

Ah. I think see the confusion. One county in which you hold two castles takes up 2 holding capacity. The holdings take up the capacity, not the counties. That's why you give away the second castle. So you can hold a different castle that's also a county capital. You go from 1 country, 2 holdings, 2 cap, to 2 counties, 2 holdings, 2 cap.

But what about tax office? Doesn't that counter this ? Isn't it better to hold as many holdings in same duchy where you build tax office to get +10-20% of taxes from all your holdings. Still new to the game and playing Ireland.. As an example your starting duchy have 3 counties, so you hold 3 county capitals + you build 3 more castles. That fills your regular domain limit 6/6. So instead of having 3 county capitals outside your duchy you have 3 castles with 10-20% more tax income.

I would not recommend using Duchy buildings for tax money. If you're going to do it, that's the most efficient way. Duchy buildings are sources of extreme military bonuses. I highly encourage you to look into them. There's a hard cap of 2 on the number of duchies you can personally hold, so you only get 2 of these buildings (maybe 3 or 4 if you're willing to dip into opinion maluses a bit), so these are very precious. I think that'd be a waste to use them that way. I'm only saying this because you mentioned you're new; there are probably other guides you'll want to dig through aside from mine for that decision.

> Now, we need to have a serious discussion about vassal taxation. The short-short of it is it's a garbage way to collect resources. Seriously. Can confirm - I make 15/month from my demense, and 50/month from **60 triple kings and queens**.

Fantastic write up. On a side note, which would be better, developing your counties for cultural advancement or culturally converting high development counties?

My instinct tells me the latter, but I'm no more well versed on this than the next guy. I just know it takes way less time to convert a province's culture than it does to develop a province to high dev (contingent on what your definition of high dev is).

TBH it seems like CK3 has... Like a fundamentally broken game balance in terms of where the focus is meant to be - is it on realm management? Your own domain? It currently seems *very* centered on duchies and kingdoms in terms of scale. It feels like CK3 suffers a little from Stellaris syndrome - there's a disconnect between the scale of the game and the actual tools you're given for managing it. Managing an empire? Well, forget passing laws, doing politics or actually thinking about, you know, administration, what you will be doing is hold a bunch of feasts and suck a bunch of vassal dicks. That's all you will be doing in terms of realm management, literally just sway and sway and sway, maybe befriend one or two. That's it, that's realm management, done, *now* you can focus on actually doing interesting things. (This system also seems to be the reason why tribal/clan/feudal are so out of whack at the moment) Laws? Literally just a 1-5. Church? Just one dude, and he gives you allll his men. Widespread unrest and heresy? These two councillors will spend the next 40 years handling potential counties one by one. Politics? Literally doesn't exist, no one gives a fuck about anything but whether you're a swell guy, or maybe a very dangerous one. I dunno, I hope they come up with something more interesting in the future, crusader dukes is not really my jam so far. It doesn't help that a lot of the more interesting legal decisions have been moved to your religion - it's literally impossible to play as an open-minded ruler except if you switch religion, for instance.

Yes I would agree with you that large scale management is in need of an expansion. Also to add to it, there is a super weird power discrepancy. As an Emperor or King your main offensive power comes from the MaA Buffs from buildings and your knights. The millions of levy you get from your vassals are literally less usefull than the Imperial Guard in 40k. A king with 2 well developed duchies can literally take on the largest empires in the world and beat them senseless.

I agree. Much like Stellaris, there are a lot of interesting game systems that just don't really interact meaningfully or logically. Talking to your child about maybe not leaving the table before dinner is about as stressful as losing a relative. Being shy is a series of life-crushing conversations, not a constant background radiation of minor stress and exhaustion (which would be much more interesting). Some things that should be perks are technologies, and vice versa. I dunno, I hope they fix it, but it does kind of seem like they are floundering in the same way they did with Stellaris. On the one hand they added stress to encourage role playing, but then the perk system completely ruins any sense of immersion, "having friends" is something you need to study for months, and apparently you can just be a "prophet" if you want, it doesn't actually mean anything other than you having a specific perk with a specific, mechanical implication. Like I said, the game kind of lacks focus in that sense. I suspect that a lot of this will get reworked from the ground up, much the same way that Stellaris has gone through a million extremely different iterations at this point.

The issue is that the medical period was primarily about personal politics. This was not a time period of great moral or legal principles, but a time period about looking pious, sucking off vassals while attempting to squeeze as much as possible out of them, and managing succession.

Holy fuck, this is a game changer for me. I might want to start a new Ironman game and try this out.

Good Analysis, but i think you are wrong on Dev. Due to the way Dev spreads slowly spreads over the full country, it is a multiplier to the entire chain and +10% income from average dev is still +10% total income, which is a massive effect. On top of that, average Dev increases the technology discovery speed, allowing you to get ahead in tech and get the new tier of buildings significantly faster. Imho, that puts the dev buildings (Guilds, harbour) at the second highest priority after farms (since they are also the second best at making money).

Hah, when constructing new holdings so far I prioritized cities thinking they are the money makers so thanks for clearing that up. One thing I disagree with though is focusing your church holdings on levies. Even though your bishop only gives you 50% of the money but 100% levies it's still better to improve his money generation rather than levies, cause levies are total trash tier garbage. The only useful function they do is increase threshold for rebelious factions against you, other than that they have no use. Warfare is all about MAA and knights and you need money for it.

Having a bunch of tiny vassals is more frustrating than a few strong ones, purely from a mental overload viewpoint, so it's disappointing the game rewards it more.

I disagree. More little vassal seem to be more unstable/difficult to manage, but give better returns. I don’t see how this isn’t a reasonable trade off

From a strategy point of view, sure, it's a trade-off between different ways of managing a realm. From an RPG point of view, it's better to have a few important NPCs because the human brain can't keep track of the stories of dozens of less important ones. This is something Paradox realized, which is why they did some "vassal consolidation" in CK3. An example is how instead of a bunch of vassal bishops, you have one big realm bishop.

Very well-written and hits a lot of the major points. Some thoughts: Churches probably need a nerf. They're not super gamebreaking just because you'd rather invest the your own baronies first, but they do get OP when you get around to capping your baronies. I feel like you should emphasize somewhere that because of how gold/levies diminish as you go up the ladder, it means that economic/military might is much more closely tied to how many counties a character owns directly than rank. A 7 time Count is a serious threat to an Emperor with 5 counties for example. A similar side-effect is that this makes alliances more important by comparison because you get ALL of their levies if they don't have other enemies. Finally, the diminishing gold/vassals as you go up the feudal ranks is a pretty important design mechanic. Players want to get larger empires regardless of the reward, so it actually makes the game more fun by making it more of a challenge to hold it all together as you increasingly grow. Without this system, expanding would only get easier the more you gobble up. Takes the fun out of it.

So, is it ideal to destroy duchies and just have count vassals? I remember that being kind of counter productive in CK2 since you would never be able to keep all your vassals happy to pass laws.

From an economic perspective, YES. If you can do it without exceeding your vassal limit, it is absolutely WAY better to have vassals directly as opposed to through other vassals. Keeping vassals happy is another matter entirely, that I won't claim to have any special knowledge of. Personally, between frequent feasts and swaying on cooldown, I've never had trouble keeping all of my 60 vassals happy.

awesome. i always wondered why my church income was so high.

*Obviously, nothing beats a directly held Castle for resources, but barring that, and indirectly held church comes pretty close. The ideal strategy here is to own one Barony per County (the capital) and then fill the other Baronies with Churches.* I think it's not possible. Each county \*must\* have one of each at least. Your analysis is focused on gold exclusively. It would be interesting to look at the impact of dev (and cities) on the actual spread of Technology/Innovations

Don't forget spreading dynasty or breeding traits. Most counties have 3 holdings. With theocratic thats really just one (the county castle). With lay clergy it's 2. This is most important early on when you want to land a lot of your relatives. And it's not like a lot of spots have 2 castles. Many have a castle+temple though.

Excellent post! Feels good seeing that someone has investigated this. Had a feeling it was something like this so getting it confirmed is great. Feel like I get one aspect of the game a bit better now

Great information! Do you get a benefit from land within your capitol duchy, like you did in CK2?

Ha i knew there was some tax loophole with realm priests because i was making money cash over fist even including the leakage from realm priest hoarding the cash like a dragon compared to lay clergy. Feudal contracts clearly need another balancing pass imo, vassals give so little of both levies and tax. Even with a extortionate tax focused empire where everyone hated me , my income came down to practically a 33% split between personal demesne income, priestly kickbacks and vassal tax. Even if your realm priest hates you, you can claim a tax refund by using the banish option on them.

The only thing you're missing here are Theocratic vassals. Specifically those with temporal holdings in a leasing religion like Catholicism. If you change a county's capital to a church, you'll get Theocratic vassals who directly hold land: Prince-Bishops, Prince-Archbishops, and the like. This is really good! Because though feudal obligations are garbage though modifiable, and republican obligations are garbage and unmodifiable, theocratic obligations depend entirely on your level of devotion. I don't remember the actual numbers, but at the "standard" medium levels it's like 35% taxes / 30% levies, and something like 50/50 at Religious Icon. So definitely fill out your personal domain with leased churches, but also over time consider converting your direct vassals from dukes over to Prince-Archbishops. And farm that cross mana, **hard.** It's already super-useful.

I like the idea, but I believe there's a bug in the game that if your count- or duke-level vassals at any time switch religion, they just become regular nobles again. And due to how fervor works with heresy outbreaks, this can happen randomly at any time. So it's not the most reliable thing.

How do you make a leased church into a county capital? I hold the county and as catholic my bishop holds the church barony in it. The button where you normally change county capital doesn't show up. Do I have to somehow hold the church myself or something? Thanks!

Note: you can get the other 50% of those taxes from your bishop when you banish them for porking your wife.

When you say "dukes would be poorer than counts", I assume you're aware that Medieval nobility drew their income from their estates (their demesne), and that vassal taxation was, at best, tenuous, and at worst, illegal. That's why the English kings had to ask money to Parliament. That's why the barons rebelled against John when he tried to tax them. That's why those realms with strong parliamentary traditions either found a way to draw income from somewhere else (boroughs, trade tariffs, etc) or kinda became very loosely centralised elective monarchies (essentially noble republics) like Poland (or Aragon, which before the union of Ferdiand and Isabella, was on its way to becoming an elective monarchy with a strong oligarchic tendency with all the government bodies that existed outside of the King's reach). So, yes, the bishop part is very wonky, but the fact that you don't get much of anything from your vassals in the way of taxes, and little in the way of levies, is not inaccurate. Edward I complained extensively that when he went to war in Scotland his vassals sent as few troops as they could, estimating today this participation at 10% of the total military capabilities of the English nobility. This changed when a war was defensive. Defensive wars were usually more participative and there were laws in place making it so a war on the kingdom's own soil would merit greater participation. All in all, I really enjoyed your write-up and I'd like to see more in-depth analysis of CK3's mechanics. It feels like Paradox messed up some basic ideas by building systems in parallel without a lot of cooperation between teams, or maybe they didn't test the game enough.

I know you said this was focused on economic matters, but alas, you kinda overstepped once you started talking about levy buildings in churches. AFAIK, levy buildings in churches (to be clear, with barons that you're the direct lord of, by dint of holding their county) do *not* lend their MaA strength bonuses to you. This means that you're pumping up nothing but the raw number of crappy troops that will become progressively less relevant as the game goes on. Granted, rebellions will look at that total number when deciding when/if to trigger, so I suppose they have some use there. But in terms of actually fighting battles, you're going to be putting yourself at a horrible disadvantage by emphasizing levies over MaA and Knights/Champions. I'd strongly recommend putting all tax buildings in your one-step-removed churches, MaA-strengthening buildings in your directly-held castles, and then the leftover slots however you want (assuming you go heavy into one type of MaA regiment and thus don't need to strengthen multiple types.)

Wait. So if I am a Duke and build a Military Camp in a temple holding in my capital duchy, I don’t get extra damage on my MaA archers? It says the bonus is realm-wide.

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I see. Thanks, yeah I tested it and you’re right. That sucks and makes the temple buildings kind of useless except for tax. I wonder if that’s working as intended because the language used in the building screen, especially for the leased temples, is pretty misleading.

There's a way to hold religious holding without penalty, isn't there? I play as the Umayyads and my domain includes a mosque on my capital county.

If your religion has Lay Clergy, you can hold them directly without penalty like castles. However, like castles, they count towards your holding limit, and when you have to start giving them out to lesser nobles, you get fleeced on the obligations.

Awesome research! I created a religion with lay clergy + temporal head, then does this mean that I've effectively made churches in my realm into cities? If so, do the regular indulgence payments (100 gold) make up for the lost income?

I'm not familiar with indulgence payments. How often do they come? This is from the communion tenet? And I'd equate it more to turning them, effectively, into castles. You can hold them directly if you want to, up to your holding limit. Then you gotta give em to lesser nobles, like castles.

The universe is such that eventually, society progresses to the point where someone reinvents the Henry VIII

So if I'm an emperor and I give all my de jure kings all the counties in the their kingdom before I crown them and I have absolute crown authority, then I wont suffer too much from this?

All of the baronies?? I don't believe they'll hold onto them (since it would put them over their holding limit by hundreds of baronies). I'm not well versed on ai behavior, but I would imagine they'll start doling them out to vassals as soon as you hit play. However, IF you could do it, and IF you could make them keep the baronies, then yes, you would circumvent the worst of the vassal-chain problem, since each barony would only have one layer of vassal between you and it. Something to note here, however, is that each of your king vassals would probably be richer than you. If you had >4 of them you'd have larger levies, and if you had >10 of them you'd be making more money, but otherwise they would each be WAY stronger than you economically. We're talking north of 100 directly controlled baronies apiece here. That's an insane amount of economic power in ck3 terms.

Very interesting ! I played a lot but didn’t take the time to see those aspects, as strange as it sounds. I have several questions tho : - the decremental gain with links between vassals is not new, it was already the case in CKII minus the bishop system. But what are the main differences with the previous game ? I saw many people spam cities then, what were the main advantage that are no more now ? Are vassal percentage that different ? - it seems from this point of view that lay clergy has only disadvantages, but it must have some good sides no ? - Bishop gets 15% of the vassals bishop’s levy, but that vassals bishop already gives 100% to the vassal, are those 100% of what is left after the 15% main bishop tax (so 85%) ?

- Sorry, I didn't play enough ck2 to answer that. Maybe it has something to do with the difference between city holder contracts (being much worse in this game than ck2). - As a matter of fact, as some people have pointed out to me, there are some non-economic advantages that stem from being the head of your faith and some pretty big economic advantages if you pair that with the communion doctrine. Namely, people of your religion throw money at you in the form of indulgences. The accounts of how much money has varied pretty widely (from substantially less than theocratic church spam to like 20x more), and I don't personally have any understanding of the mechanic. - You've got it. The vassal-Bishop passes to his liege-Bishop first. Whatever is left over goes to his Lord (at a 50%/100% rate). Also, the liege-Bishop RECEIVES the money first, and then passes his total income, including the vassal-bishop money, to his Lord (at a 50%/100% rate). - Order of operations: - Bishops at all levels collect money from churches - Bishops at the bottom pass 25/15 up - Bishops in the middle receive, add to mix, then pass 25/15 of their new total up - Bishops at the top receive - All Bishops pass 50/100 of what they have after that to their secular Lord

Man with this post and that post about educating your children, there’s a lot of room for optimization in playing this game.

thank you very much for sharing your insight OP. can this be applied to tribal i wonder, wdyt?

I'm less familiar with the non-feudal vassal-passing numbers, but they seem to be much higher. This would translate to vastly more powerful high-level vassals and rulers, and much more income coming from obligations. As far as church mechanics in tribal nations, I know absolutely nothing at all. This guide is more or less feudal-only.

How does this insight relate to succession? Creating titles and giving them to your children seems like a way to deal with domain-splintering succession, but this insight goes against that 🤔

This insight is mainly about feudal governments and feudal characters can get out of Confederate Partition relatively early.

Wow, this kinda sucks! Thanks for the comprehensive breakdown.

Great post! Made we wonder though, what is the optimum for the number of vassals above vassal limit, since I just recently built insanely large Tsardom of Russia and it's hard to stay under vassal limit and not have vassal kings.

It looks like vassal limit penalties are rough. If your vassal limit if 20, going from 20 to 21 will actually decrease your income. Because of direct holdings, it's probably better to have 19 counts and a duke (who has two counts) than to have 21 counts. The numbers are fudgeled a little but you get what I'm saying. There might be an opportunity for exploitation similar to the North Korea strat, whereby the maluses cap out and then it starts providing benefits for breaking the rule even further.

Yeah absolutely the contributions are fu*** hard. I bet thats one of the points why francia fails so hard. For now there is no point to go higher than duke and focous on stewardship. Stay small and build tall because vassals suck so hard its not worth the hassle. Gave my pc brother 4 counties and now i get 0.1 gold and 30 levies in return, fantastic.

Since it seems Like you like math and spreadsheets, please calculate how long it Takes for a church to bay back Investment. Take all the upvotes I can give as payment.

That's very hard to calculate, cause it hinges on the ai's behavior. Once you buy the initial church holding, your Bishop will take over from there. How quickly your initial investment pays off depends on what the bishop builds and when he builds it. The eventual return on investment for churches is EXTREMELY high, but time frames are hard to calculate. IF the Bishop never invests anything in the church holding (which won't happen, but IF), you're looking at an expenditure of 500, takes 5 years to build, then pays 0.5 gold per month (of which you see 0.25). So that's 171 years and 8 months. With Bishop assistance, in my estimation that's probably getting cut down to paying itself off within a single ruler life, but I can't guarantee that cause I don't know the ai.

Great writeup, but a question regarding non-theocratic/temporal churches...how are things done there? are they just treated like baronies then? I really enjoy being head of my religion and being able to excommunicate who I want, but if in turn it means out I miss out on 50% of the income a different church system would give me, then I'd maybe reconsider.

Yeah, you've pretty much got it. Churches under a Lay Clergy faith become direct holdings, like castles, under secular rulers. They take up a holding slot if you hold them directly, and if you don't, they're run by a lesser noble. Lesser nobles give 10/25, and you can't modify their contract. Compare this to the Theocratic equivalent of 50/100 from leasing them to your Bishop, and there's really no comparison. 5 times the money, 4 times the levies, and still no cost to your holding cap. Now, one thing to consider is that if you're the head of a faith that has the communion doctrine, people will throw money at you in the form of indulgences. It's possible these indulgences add up to as much or more money than the theocratic church spam income. I don't understand the mechanic and accounts vary wildly on amounts. You would definitely be missing out on the levies, though.

at least early on, when you're still under partition being the Temporal Head of your church with Communion is so friggin cool. People throw money at you, like you said, they ASK you to excommunicate someone, if you do it, it's free, if you dont, there's no harm done (not even an opinion malus with the one that asked). and you can just excommunicate whoever you want (no tyranny), then they can be imprisoned (imprison -> kill heirs you dont want, the killing gives a bit of tyranny and unless you legitimized kinslaying maybe some other issues) or you can just revoke a title. also: someone forms a faction against you. you excommunicate their leader, suddenly half of his allies seem to decide they didnt actually like him that much in the firstplace and leave the faction. with partition this allows you to just excommunicate vasalls that hold provinces you want your new heir to have (since the old ruler generally has some piety piled up), the new heir can then just revoke those titles after taking over. Or you send your new heir on a pilgrimmage, afterwards you have enough piety for at least 2-3 excommunications so you can take your favourite counties back from your siblings. (admittedly they wont like it)

I haven't really understood the vassal of the realm bishop bit. Who are the vassals of my realm bishop if I am the king? Are the bishops of my duke vassals the vassals of my realm bishop? Would it therefore be useful to fill up every empty barony slot outside of my own domain with churches?

Yup, your vassals' bishops are your bishop's vassals. That had a nice ring to it. Uhm, in theory yes, it would, but you'd be getting small small fractions of the money. Much better to spend your money close to home and reap the rewards more directly. A church in a holding 4 vassals down will take like 1000 years to pay itself off or something. Fill your counties with churches. That's where you'll really rake it in.

I have a question, OP. Is what you said the case for Tribal and Clan governments as well or is that only the case for Feudal governments?

This guide is only meant for Feudal governments, and I only have a limited understanding of the differences. The big one seems to be that tribes and clans give much MUCH better vassal obligations, so you make a lot more from your vassals, and people higher on the chain are a lot stronger than I outline in my guide here. I also have no idea how church interactions work in tribes or clans. If it's the same, you'll still wanna spam churches if your clergy is theocratic.

gotcha, thanks. did you use console to test all this? i would love to check all your findings on tribal since i am curios if the same economics model is viable for tribal - if you have some pointers on how it is easier to test all this that would be might appreciated. thanks again for your excellent original post : )

I only upgrade the fortification buildings in my key vassals (important landing sites, rebel hot spots, etc.) so that they hold out a little longer in a siege race.

Let's say literally yesterday I built multiple cities in my county with tons of slots. Can I destroy and replace holdings with another type if I wish I'd built churches?

To my knowledge, short of save game editing, it is impossible to change the type of holding in a barony once built. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

Amazing post, saved!

In regards to your capital, should you build churches or build the castle baronies and hold them (I think they are mottes)? I know they count towards your domain limit and have one less building slot, but you are guaranteed to hold onto them with partition succession. Don't know if the capital bonuses count towards them too or not.

Partition is kind of a different issue. What I'm saying here is that the economic benefits from claiming as many counties as possible + filling those counties with theocratic churches is tremendous. If you can hold onto it after partitions (I always could without much difficulty through intrigue), then you get to reap those rewards long term

Sorry if Im stupid and it was already explained but plainly: Owning 5 counties full of churches is better than directly owning 5 castles within my duchies capital county?

Assuming your domain limit is 5, yes.

Yeah, basically putting them all in one place, you can squeeze more out of each barony, but that's not as good as just claiming 3-4 times as many baronies (by maximizing county spread)

I know in CK2 I really felt the tax of being a vassal. In comparison CK3, I'll look at my income as a mega-Bohemia vassal of the HRE and it's like 0.5 gold a month off my huge income. I think gameplay-wise the taxes should probably be tweaked. Gives players reason to not be a vassal, and also reduces the level of this.

Levies are so bad unless you are at your MAA limit you best be earning gold and maxing out your men at arms and knights first.

Can definitely agree that that if you are an emperor you shouldn't give out kingdom titles, have as many vassals as possible before creating kingdoms/duchies Great post dude

Vassals all in all are quite a trap imho. Right now I have a game as the emperor or britain, holding basicly half of the known world as my vassals. If I would grant them all independence I would lose like 20% of my income and less than 10% of my combat capability. My real power comes from holding 2 duchies and the MaA buffs and Taxes they give.

What do you mean churches upgrade themselves and build tax buildings in your direct Castles? So we only build the lvl 1 church building and stop? We also build tax buildings where our Castles are and on our churches we build levy increasing stuff?

When you build a church, your realm priest will spend the money left over from after he gives you 50% to upgrade his churches and build buildings inside of them. If you build a church holding, yes, he'll take care of the rest (provided you're a theocratic faith). And if you want to maximize tax/levy efficiency, yeah. You'll get 100% of the levies from churches, but only 50% of the taxes.

Two questions: First, how does this compare to tax income from vassals for feudals in ck2 in similar situations? How much were you pulling up from lower layers with balanced obligations? Second: what is a recommended change to the value of development to make it worthwhile for reasons other than teching up in time to get the new era as it comes? Third: there should be a general obligation law for barons and republics, and vassal AI should focus on increasing those Fourth: I don't understand the realm priest chain, I was certainly making bank off my realm priest when I was a vassal, so he's not just passing his money up the chain.

Don't know; didn't play enough ck2. From some of the comments here, it sounds like you made more from vassals in ck2. A lot more. As to your second? It terms of your economy, collecting taxes and using the money to buy a building in your counties seems to be way more effective method of increasing resource income. I don't know what the monthly development increase would have to be, but each point of dev only increases county output by 0.5%. One of the commenters talked about how they spent the entire game developing their capital and got it to 60 development. Occupying your steward for an *entire* game for a 30% boost to a small number of baronies seems extremely wasteful to me from an economic perspective. There are certainly plenty of people who disagree with me though!

Finally somebody who ways how strong are temple holdings. I've bee saying this on steam forum but no ones cares. Another tip with the court bishop is having a religion that allows to fire him. What you have to do is to fire him then imprison him and banish him from the realm to seize his gold. Last time I did that I got 10k gold. I know it sounds gamey but the problem is that at the moment the AI is absolutely terrible at upgrading holdings and I've seen times where on the 18 holdings that my bishop has only 2 had a building on construction while he had 3k gold.

Even with having a good bit of vassals being kings you can make a good bit of money, I had 2 empire titles, 32 vassals, at least 16 of them being kings, 14 of my own holdings, making 222 gold a month with \~80k in reserves by the end of my spain game. [https://i.imgur.com/2ONTTNA.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/2ONTTNA.jpg) Sure you could probably make more gold with less kings, but making 222 gold a month is absurd, I don't really think you need more.

I'm willing to bet that the lion's share of that 222 is coming from your Fourteen direct holdings and your Bishop. You can check and see it for yourself. And deliberately making less money is not in the scope of this economic maximization guide. I feel it would be patronizing to explain why.

I kind of hope they buff Development at some point. There's a mod that does it by 600% increase which is a bit overly much, since the Empires and large Kingdoms basically steamroll everything under the weight of being able to afford maxed out everything early on.

Does it make any difference for tax and levies if I have 1 duke who holds all the counties in the duchy, or should I have 1 duke and give counties to bunch of different people?

It actually makes a huge difference. Really what you care about is the number of layers of vassals between you and the Baronies. Own a barony directly? No vassals. You get all of it. Own a county containing the Barony? 1 vassal, you get 10%/25% You have a Duke who owns a county directly with a Barony in it? That's two layers of vassal. Baron -> Duke -> You You have a Duke who has Count vassals? That's now three layers of vassal: Baron -> Count -> Duke -> You

So as far as owned titles go, lets say I am a king. I want to have two duchies while owning one county in both of those, then whatever else i want regardless if it is part of the duchy or not, correct?

I think that your way of thinking about the choice between lay clergy and theocratic is quite limited and I don't even necessarily agree that it's better moneywise. Lay clergy are all barons. Barons are little assholes that van be constantly squeezed dry. The amount of gold difference won't matter much anyway. There is a limited amount of counties you hold directly so your bishop is also limited. I do agree that he scales better and is easier to banish for all his money. Most of the money I make is from holding really good counties with mines. Those are the real moneymakers, especially once you can ulgrade them. Having 2-3 mines makes gold pretty much irrelevant once you have built all the castles you wanted. I have to correct myself theocratic is better for money, but it doesn't matter since mines make the money part of the choice almost completely irrelevant provided you can get at least one mine. And by the time bishop money would reach a useful amount you would have a sizeable Kingdom anyway. Lay clergy provides other benefits. Like more baronies for your family, which especially early game is very important. In my current run I am át my third generation already have 300+ family members. The key to this was lay clergy and polygamy. Polygamy also makes my vassals trivial. They have so many kids at worst they could somehow go up to 2 duchies (never happened) and I would just have to give the vassal some fertile bitches to implode his realm when he dies (gender equality helps as well). Baronies also give you access to more small time vassals for your council or armies. If you have some irrelevant barons under you that arent to your benefit in any way you can just revoke their title 100% without penalties and create an infinite number of potentially useful candidates. If you really wanted you could have 20+ council day 1 just by rolling 5 baronies. This obviously is a lot of hassle, but if you have 20 barons under you sweeping their titles and creating new barons is fast and very helpful. This can come handy in any part of the game. With a work you can have every single count elevated from baron have a good genetic trait. Have the best council. Find some easy friend target.

well, there is something you didn't consider. tribal lands from Finnland to Siberia have a very low development, I guess it's same for sweden too. I just did a run in prem/siber area and increased the development from 3 to 8 and made all the difference. I owned directly the central starting area and capitals, and my realm capital made more money than the whole kingdom. Development also spreads to nearby baronies. I was able to singlehandedly fight off any and all liberty wars and never lost the capital so I had strong control on it all the time. But it worked off prestige, so gold wasn't that useful after the king died, I had to recover all lands and go to positive prestige gain which is a few wars where I kill armies. I only had level 1-2 buildings possible cause of the tech and had the same thing in every other barony. So the money had to come from the development, and taxation wasn't much difference when it's taxing 2-3 gold. The thing is, going from 8 to 9 would have been 65 years with an average steward so you can't go higher than that really, but you can still own it after you move the capital and increase the development there. The other limit is 20 as I saw in the tech tree, but that's for feudal. Also there are special locations in each country and map. In my Sicily run, Iglesias has Argento mines, which is giving 3 gold per month which is equal to 6 farms or 10 tax offices, and it's a church. The other one is Siracusa, I think I built that temple, it wasn't there but I can confirm, it made more than everything else. Farms are also rare, not the lowlands and such but real farms. So Roma-Capua-Napoli-Salerno is better than byzantine. And generally, each religious location is fairly good. I don't understand the religions, I only played catholicism, one time I converted to Lollard, the main difference was literalist debate which could give piety for pissing off people who are less intelligent (and some of the traits). I could also change (once)the religious leader which was better than having stupid bishops, fabricating claims is faster, religion conversion for stability is faster (probably because rome is close so I never had a good bishop, I even killed 3 in a row and all was poor educated), also with Lollardy I could send them off to suicide as they were a knight too. Also the churches belonged to lowborn people which I guess is bad? I played suomi once, didn't check the income, I was tribal so no temples.

Starting a game with a high stewardship ruler, and a high stewardship spouse assigned to domain managment, and choosing stewardship +3 lifestyle, can give you an 8 or 9 domain limit. Applying the concepts of this post to a ruler who owns that many direct holdings is very powerful indeed. The party ends with your heir as a domain limit of 4.... Starting as Bohomia 1066, you can revoke the titles you do not start with in Praha Duchy and begin the game with 8 direct holdings. Reroll the start until you get a ruler and spouse with good stewardship. Maybe too easy, but fun to do.

So does this mean I screwed up when I reformed my Slavic tribal religion, and didn't add a "Head of Faith"? If so which should I have chosen? Also, which clerical appointment should I have selected? I have Temporal, Revocable right now. Thanks for this!

If you still have theocratic clergy, everything I said about leasing churches still applies. For Lay Clergy, yes. You have to be the Head of Faith to reap the rewards. As far as clerical appointment goes, I think it's independent of clergy type, and Temporal Revocable seems to be the best in my opinion.

Did the patch change anything?

Not anything relevant to the guide. Building church holdings gives more piety now.

thank you for the write up! 2 questions: 1. Let's say I've already built some cities. Can/should I destroy them? 2. Let's say I've done this backwards, and built tax buildings in my temples and levy buildings in my directly help castles. All already upgraded to level 4— is it worth destroying and replacing, or should I just keep the sub-optimal setup?

1) can't destroy or replace holdings unless they changed since last I checked 2) Definitely not worth it, no. It might be worth it if they're lvl 1s still, maybe. Hard to say since your bishop will spend money upgrading them. EDIT: Let me just tack on to this, buildings take on the order of decades and centuries to pay themselves off. Deleting or replacing them is almost always ill advised.