How to Manage Your Vassals, Council, & Court in Crusader Kings 3

the primary character you play in crusader kings 3 is the ruler of a county a duchy kingdom or even a grand empire but even the greatest ruler is marked by the support of their ever-growing vassals and council one of the largest parts of crusader kings is dealing with the extensive relationship with your courtiers vassals and the relationships that can arise amongst them whether it's a rebellious faction a budding friendship or even a rival's plots of assassination your vassals will occupy a good time of your management in the game in this video today we're going to be talking about a wide range of subjects including your court and positions within it making your vassals happy outside of council positions choosing new vassals for newly conquered lands how to create stronger or weaker vassals rivalries friendships revoking titles and lastly factions since this will be a bit of a denser video please jump to the relevant point in the timeline or the table of contents in the description so you don't need to sit through every single point if you're looking for specific information and as always if you decide to pick the game up after watching this please feel free to use my link in the description you'll simply receive a steam key you'll go ahead and place directly into steam while helping to support the channel currently there is a 12 discount which should have ended a week ago so i'm not sure how much longer that will be going but let's get started on how to manage your court vassals and counselors in crusader kings 3. to start out we're going to do a quick overview of vassals and go into a little bit of the nuance behind them so we're going to hang out for the most part in the vassal menu here by pressing f2 jump over to the vassals tab now there are five different types of vassal feudal tribal clan theocratic or theocracy and republic so right now you can see we are a feudal government so all of our vassals that are feudal are covered by their feudal contract the feudal contract will dictate their tax and levy contribution to me their liege i can influence this using a number of situations and the feudal contract itself i think deserves its own video so we will go into that in detail in its own video but you also have special contracts that are unlocked through innovations as well as special rights you can grant to any of your vassals now your contribution level is locked in as a feudal government by this contract if i were say a clan government then the contribution is linked to their opinion of me from zero to positive 100 and the clan contribution is further influenced by my crown authority my higher clan crown authority than the higher base amount of contribution they have to give me regardless of their opinion of me and the other portion of this would of course be something like i don't know some other tribal one around here i can just click on yeah tribal which would be a fame based and the higher my fame the more contribution of levies and taxes that they will give to me their liege now the other one that's not marked on this list right here is theocracies and that is linked to your devotion level up here your level of devotion and the last one is republic and republic will always be the same amount it will always be twenty percent taxes and ten percent levies regardless of opinion or anything of the sort they have a pretty set in stone uh tax and levy contribution now in addition to this menu you also get the vassal limit down here this vast limit is going to change depending upon your chief title your main rank i am the king of sicily so you can see right here king plus 40 my vassal limit is 40. if i were to be if i were say a duke then my vast limit would be 20 or if i were an emperor my vassal limit would be 60. and great khan has its own as well i think greycon is like i think it's 80. i can't remember off the top of my head but great khan again has its own you've got the different types of vassals you've got your vassal limit but you probably are wondering what about your powerful vassals because you deal with this a lot right you get this little thing right there that says powerful vassal well your powerful vassals are your vassals that have the highest amount of taxes and levees that they contribute to you as well as realm size so taking a look here i am a king so i have five powerful vassals it's the same thing if you're an emperor you have five powerful vassals if you're a duke you have four and if your account you have three so real quick recap reversing that order counts have three powerful vassals dukes have four powerful vassals and kings and emperors have five powerful vassals again linked to the amount of tax and levy contribution the highest five will be the ones that will be your powerful vassals now as you can see i can scroll here i've got one two three four and five the note the little tiny fist here so the color of that fist dictates whether or not they are on your council and if they want a council position duke jordan he is on the council this ruler is a powerful vassal respects who expects to remain on the council well duke don't screw up and you will but duke hamelin over here mark hamill does want a powerful or wants a position on the council because he is a powerful vassal and as you well know probably by now if they are not on the council they will suffer a minus 42 opinion so it's important to know who these five or four or three powerful vassals are because you can then sway their opinion one way or another it's important to note too that a powerful vassal they have an innate penalty to swear or i'm swaying their opinion it's a little bit harder to do so the green and red fist will help you determine just at a quick glance who is on your council from the vassal menu itself and that 40 opinion can become a pretty big anchor especially when it comes to succession because remember your succession laws or any laws for that matter in this section are dictated by your powerful vassals if a powerful vassal as you can see here does not have a positive opinion of you is not terrified by you or imprisoned by you or anyone for that matter then they will not approve of you changing any succession or gender laws so you can you can imagine here why keeping your powerful vassals in a positive opinion is so strong for you even if you're not a clan ruler where opinion based really matters when it comes to how much they contribute to you so that's vassals in a nutshell that's your quick overview of them but in this section i want to talk about something that i think is really important and it has to do with those vassals it's essentially least holdings now this depends upon your religion in this case we are just christian catholicism and we have the theocratic doctrine meaning that temple holdings are leased out to their holders realm priest who then serves them as a theocratic vassal so this is important here because it can be it's really important to kind of determine how much money you get from them you can just simply hover over this your monthly income then hover over church holdings and it shows me right here that temples in my domain my personal domain are granting me 3.1 monthly income but the temples in my entire kingdom are only granting me 0.4 and we're going to go into how why this works or how this works let's bring up our council real quick and this is going to be our next section anyway but you can see that my archbishop he likes me he's pretty stoked on me he's got that that nice plus 76 opinion so the way that this works your realm priest gives you 0.5 taxes and one levy per opinion point above zero up to a maximum of 50. so anything after 50 is a wash at 50 he will give you 50 of the taxes of his least temple holdings and 100 of the levees of his least um temple holdings now those least temple holdings are any of these little bishops bishops bishop ricks that he has so this has 2.37 and 257 so he's going to give me 257 levies and he's going to give me half of this in taxes which is um i don't know one point this is 18 or whatever it is which is it is not that number just about though so that's what he's going to give me in taxes now this changes when you have a vassal who also has a bishopric and this is where it's going to get pretty confusing so just real quick hard and fast recap one to zero to 50 at 50 he's going to give me 50 of his taxes and 100 levies because he is my realm priest well the realm priest kind of acts as um almost like a an insulation between you and other realm priests so here's a vassal of mine um mark hamill as i've lovingly called him he himself has a bishop rick and we're going to click on this guy this guy has a 70 opinion of his liege so he's going to give his liege 50 of his taxes and a hundred percent of his levies but he also gives your realm priest 25 of his taxes and 15 of his levies this is the confusing part the realm priest will then take 50 of those taxes and 100 of those levies and give them to you so let me give you a drawn out example of this using actual concrete numbers so let's assume that um this bishopric made one gold and 300 levees well then the realm priest would give to me 0.5 gold and 300 levees but if this is a vassal's bishopric we're talking about let's say this one in specific and let's again use the same one gold 300 levees example so one gold is generated here and 300 levees are generated here well point two five of that gold goes towards the realm priest and 45 of those levees goes to the realm priest the round priest then takes of the 0.25 gold and 45 levies and gives me the ruler .125 gold and 45 levies the vassal in question here mark hamill then receives the remainder which is .375 gold and a 255 levies the the other 50 and 100. so that's a really confusing thing and i i took it very slow and broke it down as much as possible to help out right there but hopefully that gives you a really good example of how exactly your realm priest works into contributing both your taxes and your levies and why keeping him happy is so important let's go into your court and how to keep these vassals happy without directly giving them court positions so moving forward we have your council and the court so your council is divided amongst six individuals five of which or well depending on what your situation is four of which are going to be your vassals one will be an appointed archbishop depending upon your religion or if you're a religion that doesn't have it appointed you will select your chaplain and then your spouse so before we talk about these individual positions there are two things i want to talk about first are yearly events so if i hover over these you're going to see some possible side effects and you'll see green text red text or one or the other and that's dependent upon your overall skill so let's take a look at our steward his skill is 26. so if you have over eight skill you will get positive events and if you have under 15 skill you will get negative events so if you have under 8 you'll get nothing but negative events and if you have 16 or higher you'll get nothing but positive events let's take our spymaster for example she's got 13 so it's below the 15 threshold and above the eight so if i hover over this court action i can see that there are they are divided between two different colors green for the positive events and red for the negative events now these will occur every year and i just wanted to kind of bring these to your attention so if you go to do say increase development you can see okay well i only have positive events as my possible side effects or if i go to convert the faith in the county nothing but positive green side effects if this guy for example were like nine uh learning then there could be a chance that converting the faith just kind of has a mishap and it sets it back or drops a faith opinion so on and so forth so it is important to note those things now in addition you also have your landed characters and your unlanded characters i'm going to click on my marshall right now and it says boom unlanded at your court in palermo but i'm going to click on old count wilhelm here and you're going to see that he is landed now why this is important is that every individual in your court in your family even can get lifestyle experience you know you've got your lifestyle experience right here right you choose your lifestyle you get your perks all those cool things if you didn't know this your children you can determine their lifestyle at uh age six and then that becomes what they learn as they're going through their uh coming of age once they hit 16 they then become a full-fledged character right well if they are a landed character then they will continue to grow in their lifestyle so take for example again count william he is a diplomat he's got 21 diplomacy and it is banging let's click over here at the lifestyle family focus you can see he's got tons of diplomacy perks so one thing i want to just kind of tell you guys about or at least caution you towards when you have the issue of hey you know you've got powerful vassals that want court positions and maybe they're just not great at what they're doing so let's take a look at prince pandolf who is my direct heir well he'd be a really great steward but duke jordan is just the king right here right 26 stuart that's awesome it's double pandolf's but pandolf is going to be my future main character so subbing in pandolf in this position isn't necessarily a terrible idea my point in bringing this up is that if you have a powerful vassal that wants a court position and you're on the cusp of say like a civil war or some sort of bad situation putting them in a court situation or a court position isn't bad because these council positions are going to allow them to grow the specific amount of positions lifestyle experience now it's depending upon your primary title duke allows for a 10 bonus 15 percent for a king and a 20 for emperor so dick jordan here is just again just a powerhouse of steward he's got both of these these trees completely filled out it's because he's been in this focus for so long in addition to that if we take a look over here at uh this character r marshall every single character gets benefits for being in their position they get innate bonuses to what that position would lend towards for example hovering over prowess here i can see that the liege's marshall gives him plus three since he is my marshall he gets three so if you are the vassal of elige being in his court i'm sorry in his council will grant you certain benefits especially if you say the spymaster and you want to do hostile actions against him you get some bonuses but i wanted to bring that up before actually going into the council because it's a very huge portion of councils that i don't think enough of us realize especially look at the actual council positions it can be so easy to just choose well i'm going to choose the guy with the highest diplomacy skill here oh it just happens to be him well he's in place you can still build a very good counselor if you just keep them in the position over time they will build the experience and will become good counselors so outside of that your spouse is a very important counselor here because she will give you the aid or he depending on your situation will give you 50 percent of her skill value rounded down towards whatever dedication you make her so for example she is set to patronage right now her learning skill is 30. i'm getting 50 of that rounded down to 15 which is great because i'm the head of the sicilian culture so i'm getting her natural skill added into mine because my base is one my guy is just not smart but with my wife i am a little bit smarter so you can use this as you progress through the different options here right and the top one assist ruler will take 20 of all of her skills and give them to you very important and you can also swap into these when you're in the middle of a dilemma that says hey this is a diplomacy challenge and maybe you have terrible diplomacy but your wife doesn't before you choose your actual action you can jump into here select the uh i'm sorry select diplomacy and boom you get the benefit of plus three to your skill in this case for the diplomacy challenge a little cool trick you can use now moving down the line here all these characters are going to give you benefits to their certain actions depending on what they are of either 0.5 percent or 0.5 per skill per month or one or one percent per skill per month i'm not going to go into the actual breakdown and nitty gritty of all those but we're going to go a real quick overview of each one of the council actions just in case you didn't know what they did and how they're going to help you out starting with our archbishop here or any chaplain for that matter religious relations are going to increase your piety growth per month as well as your theocratic ruler opinion you've got the ability to convert faith which i think is pretty self-explanatory you also have the ability to fabricate a claim now if you have above a certain skill level you can actually rather than getting a claim on a specific county you get the claim on the entire duchy so there is a positive to taking a long time to fabricate these claims now with your counselor or i'm sorry your chancellor you'll be able to influence people's opinion you'll either be able to use foreign affairs and also grow your prestige per month every single character has a way to kind of grow one of your um your your income pools at the top um as well as independent ruler opinion now you also have the the benefit of shortening a truce so if you are say trying to conquer more land of someone you've already gone to war with putting them on foreign affairs has the chance of them actually shortening that truce and make it so you can jump back into war you also have domestic affairs pretty self-explanatory it's going to increase your direct vassals opinion of you for your steward you have increased taxes you have the ability to increase development accounting but it also reduces the construction time of buildings and holdings so that's important to know kind of some that's i don't think as obvious when you select this button obviously you're going to increase the development growth of something which also going to reduce the construction time you also promote culture you're going to convert a culture to the primary uh culture that you've selected here so the county changes culture to sicilian now with our marshall we've got three very important abilities here the first one allows you to increase your levy size garrison size and reinforcement rate so if you're about to summon up an army this is a really good one to just kind of bolster it real fast but then i like to switch almost always passively to train commanders because this reduces my minute arms maintenance let's bring up our military tab real quick i did the right button this time so it reduces this number right here very awesome very beneficial especially even when you're at war now backing looking back further at this you get a nice bonus to your com finding a new commander or night each month because you're either improving them or finding new ones because this is going to give us a 6.66 chance to improve or find new commanders and knights which is a really great way to bolster your night pool if you have a real strong marshal and of course one of the most important ones for your marshall is increasing county control this will also stop any kind of county corruption which is huge now another very pivotal agent or counselor is your spymaster you've got disrupt schemes which can help add to your hostile scheme resistance and help you discover other schemes you've got support schemes which allows her to give you bonuses to hostile schemes a sway action is not a hostile scheme so if when you cue it up in the little corner here if it's a dagger that's a hostile scheme action abduction fabricating a hook murder those would all be hostile schemes so it's important to just kind of know the distinction there but you also get a hostile scheme success chance increase as well so if you're going to murder someone pop into this mode first also you get find secrets and this one's pretty self-explanatory but five percent her skill level uh increases this to a total of 65 for her specific one but this really kind of sums up all of our counselors and their relative actions i think the most important point about this was at the beginning because i don't think a lot of people knew how those yearly events really work having a counselor at 16 or higher skill is what you ideally want to look for now outside of our counselors you also have your court and your court will grow in guests you've got your courtiers which are people that are currently residing within your court this would include your knights any unlanded counselors your court physician if it's not someone that's already in your family anything like that children stuff like that so your court is important though because this allows you to have your knights and vassals marry individuals within your court and people will visit your court if you have a small court and you have you're in a position where they can maybe get a county claim uh take an action on by you you have the ability to kind of use your guests to the best of your advantage either recruiting more nights getting county claims getting really strong uh potential for marriages or really good people that would make really great vassals which we're going to jump into a little bit here but take for example this character she's got humble which makes for a solid vassal because she's going to have an increased opinion of you and of vassals and it makes this character a little less likely to plot against you so now we've gone into court and counsel let's talk about those vassals that you really can't put on your council because you maybe have all the spots filled up by really good candidates or just in general pleasing your vassals vassal opinion is another one of the most important things to constantly be influencing and taking a look at when you're playing crusader kings 3 especially if you have a clan government where your levy and tax contribution relies upon it so let's take a look at duke hamlin here and let's talk about some ways you can influence your vassal opinion without directly just doing some of the more straightforward things but let's talk about those two real quick so you can right click on him and send a gift as of the most recent patch this has been increased three-fold it used to just be five opinion now it's 15 which is pretty much in line with almost every action we're gonna i'm gonna show you here depending on some of the other ones so this is a really great one if you just have the money and you're not greedy or shy anything that would cause stress from this you also have the obvious one to just simply sway them but you have some more personal actions you can take advantage of depending upon your lifestyle focus and the sexual orientation of yourself as well as the duke if you're male if he's female whatever the situation is you can try and seduce them and this would cause a situation where they're going to be a little bit better more in your good graces as it were but you also have the ability to offer a ward now duke hamlin here he's got too many wards as is but let me just use count william of fosia here to give you an example of how offering my grandson to count william to become the direct ward of increases his opinion by 15 because you know maybe they're ordinary because they're not on the council these are some ways you can kind of tick the needle forward a little bit now depending upon your lifestyle focus let me jump over here to lifestyle if you jump into diplomacy into family hierarch you get befriend and this one is very important it's one of the only ways to actually become friends with another individual outside of the random events that are created through feasts and so on and so forth so befriend is pretty huge because it if they're your friend they are going to be pretty amiable towards you they're not going to join any factions it's a real good situation overall they don't need to be on the council if they're your friend now in addition to that we also have some other ways that we can kind of take the needle forward here i can arrange a marriage between let me say my grandson and his daughter now this is going to cement things for one important reason i will be able to bring a alliance to the table here and he will won't have maybe the best opinion of me but he's going to be absolved from joining any factions against me so that's a way that you can kind of dodge the fact that he has a low opinion of you and if you're not trying to currently work on any succession law changes you can kind of skirt by by just having him as a alliance member because that way he's not going to take any direct action against you but keep in mind that a lot of those times a lot of times this can cause things to be inbred so be mindful of that now outside of that if you're feudal you have your feudal contract you can take advantage of now depending on who your actual individual is they might actually have negative opinions because of their feudal contract take count william he loves me man this guy's at 100 but he's at high feudal taxes and levies giving him a total of a minus 30 to his opinion you see that right there and right there but jumping back over here to wilhelm or hamlin you can see that we can give special rights to this individual or declarations that allow him to be a little bit happier so you know he is not on the council but he's a good duke i have no plans to remove him from being a duke so title revocation is he now has a protected title i can't revoke the title from him that's a pretty huge one gives him plus five opinion well you know he's also a really strong duke he's got a ton of soldiers well i'm gonna give him war declaration now he can go and do some wars without my necessary um permission or you know you can use some of the special contracts so all these things you can kind of help to knock forward things or knock forward his opinion a little bit you can even lower their feudal taxes and levies as another way to kind of boost this up if i push this into low levy contribution it's gonna account for five more so every positive feudal contract thing you do gives them five opinion i believe every negative one gives a negative oh it's negative 15 i thought it was negative 10. yeah just making sure here yeah so the the special ones will give a negative or positive five the taxes and the levies will give a positive or negative um as it shows right there opinion with a thousand negative 15 epidemic vassal plus five and plus five so using your feudal contract is another real great way to do things now depending upon your situation maybe you're in a real tumultuous one and you just need to knock down your crown authority plant authority will also really help you out with your vassal's opinion of you depending upon where it's at so if i'm at crown authority for absolute direct vassal opinion is 30 minus 30. so i can knock this down to 3 if i absolutely need to and it'll give me 20 more vassal opinion to kind of work with and kind of move around with you also can do the obvious one of hosting a feast or calling a hunt although calling a hunt will give you personal prestige there can be certain events and situations that will grant opinion to other vassals that might be joining you in that hunt now the last thing i want to talk about is titles when it comes to the opinion of your vassal depending upon who or what your vassal is they can get a lot of bonuses from being a say duke with now more lands by granting titles let's go ahead and take a look over here at the duchy of apulia we're just going to press grant title and i'm just going to click anything over here this is going to give him 40 opinion so he also leads a faction that faction's gonna lose some discontent which is great or he's part of a faction i'm sorry now there are other situations here where maybe a vassal is angry at you because that you have part of what is the ure part of their land so take for example this individual over here this is my son and imagine he were i granted him the duchy title of drakian well i own these two territories they are my personal territories so my son will say well i now have a minus 30 opinion of you because you have those territories and they are to your part of your a part of my territory so you can grant the titles of these two territories and it'll greatly increase his opinion of you so using titles is another great way to influence opinion and opinion is one of those things that you're always going to have to be moving the needle on little by little depending upon what the vassal situation is so now we've talked about increasing the vassal opinion of your well current vassals let's talk about how to appoint new vassals when you would do that and what some good traits are so probably one of the most asked things is how to appoint or how do you go about even choosing putting a new vassal into place so right now you can see that i am at nine of six total holdings this is loaded in right after the patch if i unpause the domain levies and taxes will jump up to 100 so if you see that it's just because i haven't unpaused yet and this is a brand new patch in place so if i press grant to it brings up all my list of people in the realm that i can select to become vassals now what's important to look at in this list is first the culture and the faith of the location you're appointing your vassal to if it differs from yours mainly the faith the culture can differ and it can cause some situations but the faith is always the most crucial one in my personal opinion you can really circumvent converting faith by simply choosing a vassal that has that faith now let's take a look here i'm going to type in charism ah so it looks like i actually have no vassals with this faith now let's take a look over here instead there's another location that i know has a different faith so we're going to type that in and i think i should have one vassal maybe more so i do have one vassal now this individual i can then appoint to this region because he matches up both faith and culture wise now before you do this though you need to look at some things because the important reason or the main reason you're doing this is because you're going to demand conversion from this new vassal and when he converts he's going to convert the entire county alongside him if he has multiple counties he's only going to convert the chief county that he rules directly the other one will have to go in time so let's look at this character's abilities real quick before we do this and this is important he's zealous so because he's zealous he's not gonna want to convert at all so you have to look at these things before you just go ahead and assign those vassals let's just go ahead and jump back over here to this location grant two and because we unfortunately don't have anyone of this religion i'm going to just show you all of my vassals and what i typically look for when selecting a vassal assume that the religion and the culture matches up if i can't match up the culture i at least get the religion so i can then demand the conversion and get it to flop over so there are a couple traits you want to look for trusting honest you know what i'll actually do a little bit more in order content i swear i can spell humble and honest now these are the four probably that i look for the most um there are also ones that are going to help you like craven that's a really good one to select but trusting and content are two traits that are going to prevent will not necessarily prevent but greatly reduce the chance of individuals being involved in a scheme against you and they'll have a naturally and increased opinion of you take for example here opinion of liege plus 15 intent opinion of liege plus 20. so an opinion of other content characters plus 20. so i like to appoint people to vassalage as long as they have one if not multiple of these traits probably in this order i would say this allows you to kind of let's just type in content real quick i think that's probably my favorite one to be totally honest not trusting so my nephew probably make a pretty good vassal he's generous he's content and he's diligent but you don't want to you don't want to put someone into vassalage that is ambitious especially ambitious or deceitful this guy's deceitful callous and content it's kind of weird it kind of conflicts itself but although i like content i would not select this guy because he has deceitful in there and he has callus in there um but you want to look away from things like um again ambitious deceitful vengeful things that naturally put people in plots against you because they will they get pissed off they're going to leverage that against you and try and take you out or or even worse when you go to do a succession they will try to gobble up more territory and become stronger vassals so in this situation where i've got three cities i would probably say okay well let's choose i'll do i'll order this by opinion probably and let's go ahead and do this guy because if i'm trying to convert faith i would want someone who has either a pretty good opinion of me or one i can flip very easily so we'll we'll give this guy this location and you know what we'll give this to same situation let's give it to this guy now this last location is important because it's the duchy capital of this duchy now i don't want to just simply give this to anyone i want to give it to either someone i want as a duke like my son or this guy be pretty good my nephew uh it increases my renown because he's my nephew he's part of my dynasty so it'll increase the amount of our now we're getting as a result of having dukes in dukel positions but important most importantly though is i'm going to assign this guy as this county i'm going to go ahead and also create a title here sardinia and we'll even just give it to this guy right off the great the gate a recent the duchy of sardinia so what i've done here is i've made someone my vassal he's already in a very commanding and easy good position right he's a duke this just increased my renown now because you can see we're gonna we're gonna have more dukes once i unpause um and most importantly he's easily controllable because he's a content diligent individual he's part of my family this all really helps you out but most importantly i didn't give him multiple counties so his actual direct power is relatively limited so by doing this yes all these guys are now his vassals correct but he himself only has one county to directly draw 100 of income and levies from that's really important to understand when it comes to selecting your vassals because if you give them for example um this character is my son in a future save i gave him all four of these lands because he's my primary heir so i've purposely set him up in a way that he is deliberately stronger than my other vassals in case there is an issue so if i go to succession and he comes to power he will have these direct lands as his and these direct lands as his already cementing him way above the other vassals on the power scale that's important because if you just simply assign people to vassalage they can actually overpower your son and they can easily or daughter depending on what the situation is and they can easily ramp up an independence uh scheme in the resistance factions so each one of these has a different connotation here but the liberty faction in this case is held by this guy so by doing that by empowering a very strong vassal you're basically giving him a power base to assault you other vassals and increase his own strength or your son upon or daughter upon succession so that's how i go about selecting and appointing vassals and what traits i looked for let's talk real quick about your friends and rivals and we will close our video out talking about factions friendships and rivalries are pretty interesting this is going to be a pretty quick section so we've jumped ahead further on my save here and you can see those bearings are created or those i'm sorry those duchies are created for my uh two sons now you've got some options here with your friends you can befriend them they can come about through random events they can come about through wars can create rivals all sorts of ways that you get rivals and friends so to take a look here we've got prince gee my brother and he is my friend and as my friend he gives me 60 relation bonus or 60 opinion in addition to that when he dies that's going to give me some stress it's like oh no my friend's dead no plus 10 stress now there is an evolution of this and hover over here a friend can become friends with a deep connection might become best friends now when you are best friends your character gets plus 120 opinion and they get plus 10 stress when the character dies of course now what's important about this is that a friend will never ever join a faction against you um just the same way that an alliance they'll never join um a faction against you so keeping people as friends or as terrified individuals through dread is important because it allows people to it reduces the amount of vassals that could possibly join your faction join factions against you now the other side of that coin is the rival system so for example this individual he hates me from all the wars we've been doing and this is going to give him let me just click on him a minus 60 to his opinion this evolves into a nemesis you can only have one nemesis and this is minus 120 opinion and both of these situations uh whenever your rival or your nemesis dies they will get a minus 35 stress to your character or it will grant you minus 35 to your stress but got to be careful here these characters especially this guy man he's vengeful this is a dude who's definitely going to try and do some hostile schemes against me if you're playing in any of the campaigns over here in northwestern spain you're going to deal with a lot of rivals and those rivals are going to have a lot of hostile schemes against you so if you do have a rival it's not a bad idea to keep your spymaster on disrupting schemes to make sure nothing's going to happen if someone asks if you want a rug that's a hostile scheme trust me because i have put that on my onto a friend of mine um deny the rug because you probably have a rival that's probably trying to kill you through the rug or some so on and so forth well not through the rug but it's part of the scheme so understanding friends and rivals is important because it can allow you to influence factions and give you an idea for who might be constantly plotting against you and you can kind of counter plot against them but now let's close this video out talking about some factions jumping over to another save we're going to talk about factions now there are five different types of factions the first one here is independence and you might know this if you've played any of the holy roman empire or anything of the such but this is a situation where all faction members want to become independent from their liege you have a claimant faction in which case a claimant wants to claim the title usually of the liege you have a liberty faction which you can see right here and this is a situation where they want lower crown authority a populist faction which is typically a situation where they want to create an independent realm because they're revolting against either a conflicting culture or a conflicting faith or sometimes both in this case right here it's both trust me and then also there is a peasant rabble so you've got those five different ones and you have to constantly find a way to navigate your way through these factions so for example here we have a bunch of vassals that can't join factions and there's a number of reasons why so if your character has a strong hook on another one they can't join a faction um if they are friends which i believe this guy is right yeah he's my friend they cannot join a faction if they're lovers which none of these people are they won't join a faction and if they're terrified of you they won't join a faction i believe is he terrified of me no he's just simply intimidated right now no one's this little guy is terrified of me so he won't join a faction regardless of whatever his situation is or if they're a child um in this case this guy's actually i think he's no i think this dude's a ward of mine either way they're children they can't join factions because they're children so how do you influence these factions and that's an important thing i think a lot of people really want to know about so for one this situation with your populist factions is typically because of a lot of county control and unrest and you can influence that by letting it go off as you so wish you know basically let it get to this little point of discontent it'll offer an ultimatum which will pretty much be hey we want um uh our own independent faction we want lower crown authority that's the ultimate they offer you you don't offer them one if you want it just to happen you'd say no i deny this they'll start up a individual faction war against you and you fight them and with the populists it's important to note where these locations are because that is where these factions will pop up across the map and what you can really do to fight against that is let it go off and then summon your army in between all of them and just kill them all one at a time because once you destroy a populist faction's army it's gone it doesn't retreat and recoup so you can navigate around populist factions by simply doing that or just simply increase their control another great way is to convert the culture in that location that should sometimes knock down support for the populists you're going to always deal with this as you increase your lands especially if you do it too quickly so don't be too worried about populist or peasant rabbles especially because if they do go off a lot of the time if they haven't gotten a good amount of support they won't even have enough to siege a city so you can take them out very quickly the liberty factions though on the other hand are very scary take a look at this one i've got 10 members in it and they are increasingly pissed off at me and on this list you can see i've got individuals who actually have positive opinions of me so it's not necessarily trying to get a positive opinion because this guy might be have brought been brought into this faction because of a hook so what your chief concern should be is focusing on the first individuals in these factions because this is ordered by their military contribution so number one here faction military power contribution is 24.8 versus this guy is 1.1 you can do some things here you can i can go up to this guy i can right click him and i can just slap him in prison it's going to succeed it's a 100 chance but this incurs tyranny which is a 20 opinion penalty this will eventually degrade over time so you don't have to really worry about it in the long run if you're doing it once or twice sometimes it's five sometimes it's 20 sometimes it's 10. using a hook will absolve you of some of that tyranny which is always nice and it always makes sure i'm actually using the hook will still have the tyranny but it'll always succeed that's the important thing now if i were to imprison this guy it is going to make it is going to remove him from the liberty faction um but there is a chance that this doesn't succeed let's go here prison 43 chance and if it doesn't happen then it's gonna go through the this this faction is going to revolt against me effects on the duchess she'll lose opinion all the duchess's family loses opinion to me imprisoning the duchess may incite the liberty faction revolt if she declines that there's again the percentage chance where she just says nah well i gain dread she loses opinion of me and it's a crime so i can now rightfully imprison her and then she will incite the revolt so if you're trying to get this to kick off let's see i i think i'll sid here in prison yeah 22 are you pressing prison right there that revolt kicks off and you just destroy the armies as you see fit but what you can do is once you have this guy in prison let's assume he was in prison right now i could right click here and revoke his titles that is going to reduce the amount of strength that he gets from being a large strong vassal and it also is going to reduce the amount of contribution immediately by 24.8 percent on the military power so factions are really tedious and you're always going to be kind of dealing with them especially as you grow quicker and quicker and quicker but trying to really kind of get a hold on getting proper hooks on people like the hook i've gotten on this little dude or befriending individuals like this guy right here or having lovers or terrified or or um children well not children here um can prevent them from being in factions and the most important thing like we talked about in the vassal opinion section is creating alliances with your own vassals if you have the situation to marry them off to people within your family that are maybe not as important cousins or or brothers or sisters that you can say okay well marry this person off just to try and solidify an alliance with a strong vassal removing them from the option of joining a faction against you so hopefully this gave you a really good idea on how to manage your vassals your count your your council and your court i know that there are still some questions you might have and i know this was a very dense subject there's so many things to go into and i probably didn't even cover everything in depth like there's the council portion here where you can hover over for your realm priest like i said earlier to see the taxes and levies i didn't talk about that a ton but there are some things here that we didn't go over and if you are still confused please go ahead and let me know in the comment section below i will answer you as fast as i can and hopefully another person will see it before i do and give you that answer as well but you should always really be looking at you're constantly checking on your vassal's opinion vassal's opinion and how you can really influence it and if you can't influence it enough how you can prevent them from doing anything serious to you outside of their hostile schemes which you can hopefully kind of root out through your spymaster assuming they're good enough but again hopefully this gives you a little bit better idea on how to manage everything as always guys thank you so much for watching here today don't forget to like subscribe comment below all that kind of fun action but have a good one and take care

Channel: ItalianSpartacus

Views: 137,481

Rating: 4.9458747 out of 5

Keywords: Crusader Kings 3 vassal guide, Crusader Kings 3 court guide, Crusader Kings 3 beginner's guide, crusader kings 3 tutorial, how to get started, noob, newbie, essential tips, tips, gameplay, campaign, lets play, live stream, new player, get better, crusader kings 3 gameplay, crusader kings 3review, crusader kings 3 pc gameplay, crusader kings III, let's play crusader kings, crusader kings 3 tips, crusader kings 3, campaign guide, court, vassals, courtiers, vassal actions, manage

Id: Ye4UM5yVPPk

Length: 49min 37sec (2977 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheItalian567]

Got another guide that was hotly requested on the channel: Managing your Vassals. One of the trickiest things that people seem to get hung up on is how to select new vassals - what traits, how much land to give them, what titles, etc. In this video we cover your council, vassals, and quickly go over courts (there's not a ton to talk about compared to the other two). As always, here's the Chapters within the video to see if it's even something you're looking for :)

• Vassal Overview
• Council & Court
• Increasing Vassal Opinion
• Choosing New Vassals
• Friendships & Rivalries
• Factions

Thanks so much for watching guys, and if there's anything you're confused on or still need help with, please feel free to let me know. More than happy to help - if... if I can haha.

[u/LukarWarrior]

I'm at work right now so I can't watch it all, but I'm curious. Do you cover any better ways to deal with crappy priests being assigned to you than just murdering them? I think Pope Gregorious might be getting suspicious about how the last five priests he sent me all met mysterious ends.

[u/Pewling]

Hell yeah, manipulative those nerds and cousins in the court!

[u/faronizer]

Really great content! I like how you dive below the surface (e.g. bishopric taxes) and highlight things that are not immediately obvious (e.g. lifestyle focus and "unlanded vs landed" or the relation between councilor skill points and the corresponding events).

[u/jailon_winnings]

Another terrific guide, man. Thank you.

[u/sephelutis]

Befriending is pretty good, not only cant they join faction, the AI also less likely to scheme against you, while you get tons of bonuses and stress reduction from diplomacy perks.

[u/leftoverrice54]

Had no idea that leaving my heir unlanded was doing more harm than good. Gonna always try to land the children that deserve it

[u/qftvfu]

Marrying off kids to faction participants was my takeaway. Useful way other than befriend/murder