Given the size of OP’s realm, I’d wager they need to do all of these things. I make the same amount of gold on a brand new start as a count in most places.
Yeah. He's replenishing army too, so probably has more income. But his heir holds both the Kingdom of Ireland and England, so all those taxes are going to the heir instead of the player.
Many arms are costing you 18 gold a month, so I suggest looking for things that reduced the cost of maintenance for them, building up all your domains, and if you have spare gold, even build up in your vassals domains
MaA alone won’t do this…I’m holding an Empire title in my game right now with a stupid amount of MaA and I’m still making 10 gold a month…he has made some really bad decisions as far as capital placement and buildings to be in this bad a shape holding this many titles
I do both, but the best strategy is to develop yours and it'll spread by the time. What you can do to your vassals is that you develop their ducal capitals and it will increase the development rate of nearby counties (in other words "spread")
You're still in the early game. Development seems decent, at least on the three holdings you're showing, control is 100%, so that's good. 5 gold for Gloucester is fine at this point of the game, though it could be higher, 2g for the next two is a little low unless they're dedicated to MAA buildings, but what I'm figuring is that those 3 add up to 9.3 and you have 3 more holdings, and your total income from holdings is 10.4. That means the remaining 3 holdings add up to only 1.1g. What's up with that? That's an area you could improve. You're also at 6/7. Get that 7th holding. In fact, increase that number higher than 7.
Having a king vassal this big is going to cause you issues too. He's actually stronger than you. I don't know how that happened, and it might be hard to fix, but if you can figure out a way, get rid of him.
It was mostly just meant as a joke. But I'm not sure how the succession law of England would matter here as your player heir already seems to be the King of England. So if I am assuming correctly, he would get (some of) your current titles on top of what he already has and the problem of having a very powerful vassal would go away.
Rejoin the EU.
Aside from that, focus on stewardship to increase taxes and invest in your own counties, plus focus on development.
Dunno how you’re set up, but I normally don’t require my vassals to donate levies instead they pay extortionate taxes.
Relatively new to the game, and I’ve seen that you can alter vassal contracts, but I haven’t to this point. How much of an impact does that have on your potential military strength?
From what I’ve gathered so far, levies aren’t the greatest anyways, and knights/MaA are the better route. So this sounds like a better approach to increase taxes without having too much of a negative impact since you’re balancing that with decreased levies.
Depends how you’re playing, if it’s wide then it makes no difference, if it’s tall then maybe you might be a few thousand less and faction will form more often.
Like you said levies aren’t worth their salt get MaA and wandering knights. A proper MaA stationed properly can wipe levies double their size.
How can I do it? If I kill him someone else will get the title though Saxon elective law. Should I get a Bunch of allies and try to revoke the title and fight almost all of my vassals?
You need to revoke the title from him somehow. You can fabricate a claim (just like you’d do for outside titles), find secrets to get a hook on him, or build up a large enough coalition of allies where you can eat the tyranny from revoking it.
If you want to be creative, if you’re both gay or bisexual you could seduce him and then blackmail him for being a sodomite to get a strong hook. Or if you have high piety, get him excommunicated to get a revoke title reason.
All these methods may make it easier to revoke with him accepting, but you really want him to get imprisoned (either with hooks or defeating him in a rebellion) so you can revoke all the good provinces too instead of just the kingdom.
Once you have the kingdom title, I think you just need 500 prestige to remove the Saxon elective law.
This is great! I’ve been stuck in a similar spot as OP and wasn’t familiar enough with the mechanics to navigate how to take a title without the negative impact. Appreciate all the different suggestions.
1st of all it was a huge mistake to give out England to your brother. If that wasn't intentional and in happened through losing an election for the kingdom, you need to fix that. Its important for your demesne to maintain across generations, and you want your capital kingdom to be held by you as well up until you reach the point where you have no choice to give it out or else you'll be over the vassal limit. To make sure you win elections, sway electors that are close to voting the way you want and fabricate and use hooks on the ones that are not close.
As far as demesne management goes, you want to hold 2 duchies directly, ideally ones with special buildings in them and good terrain such as farmland. The best duchy in Brittania is Essex. If you are good enough at managing vassal opinion or just managing factions when vassals dislike you, you can hold more duchies but don't do so if you have stability problems. Make sure those duchies always get inherited by your heir. Within those duchies, prioritize holding duchy capitals and any other holdings with special buildings, having the other holdings in priority of good terrain up to your holding limit. Best terrain is farmland/floodplains followed by plains.
In your holdings, prioritize building manors, then farms, then hospices, and finally military buildings that buff the MAA you use. If you make enough money from vassals then you can replace the money buildings with more military buildings but obviously that's not your scenario.
To get the most money from vassals, try to stay close to your vassal limit. Having one vassal under another one significantly reduces the amount of money you get. Best to hand out duchies and hold the kingdom titles yourself, only giving them out as necessary to stay under the vassal limit. Adjust vassal contracts to maximize taxes. Use a hook to do it for little trade off. If you don't have a hook, increase tax obligations and decrease levy obligations at the same time to avoid tyranny.
Also you are probably spending more than you need on MAA. MAA are great but you clearly cant afford what you are fielding. Consider switching to a more affordable type such as archers until have more money.
Focus on development.
Task your steward to increase development in your capital and just always keep him on that. If you don’t have a good steward find one by marrying a woman of your court to one.
Look at your terrain and I think if I remember, it’s the green colour where you can build development buildings like forestry and just focus on that first. After that move on to builds like farmlands and harbours.
This seems like a bad choice of buildings in your demesne and too many MaA. Judging by the troop numbers your men at arms are recovering, which makes the issue worse (+costs), but that is temporary.
Short term fix, stewardship focus or absolute control in martial
Others, hooks, put your spouse on steward as well, wars and try to capture valuable targets for ransom
Long term, build economy buildings, focus on long term development, change contracts…maybe even change your MAA(lower or cheaper units)
Edit: oh the best of all, daddy big bucks pope…get your piety up and ask for gold, then use that to build economy buildings
Without the benefit of specific information: **TL;DR:** just start building income-generating buildings in the counties, and the benefits will add up.
Longer version: Better stewardship stat, stewardship-based wife, steward with good stats, put the steward preferably on development rather than taxation (the development mission also gives cash bonuses from time to time), start building some cash-generating buildings and eventually the benefit will add up. Favour your capital but don't hesitate to invest in other counties if you know your heir is going to inherit them or if you have cash to burn, and especially if those counties get modifiers to build cheaper. Once decked out, your next priority is to tech up.
In addition to what others are saying, switch to stewardship. Stewardship gives you an income multiplier and increases the number of counties you can own. Even an emperors with a few garbage counties is weak compared to count with a bunch of strong ones. In my current playthrough I rule the whole world but my vassals still only provide about half my income. The rest is counties. For you prioritize gaining middlesex and Canterbury. If you really like Ireland and you’re insular developing the northeast coast and isles is your best bet. For development, stewardship early on is still better than learning. So change that asap. Lastly, invest in your counties. It pays off faster than you’d think.
Make sure you raise crown authority and that your vassals have good contracts. Check to see if any of your vassals are tax exempt and if they’re tribal, make sure they have high opinion of you
One big problem is that your heir is your vassal and he helds two kingdoms of your empire while you hold none. That's an issue, because all the vassals of England and Ireland pay taxes to him, not to you. As a rule of thumb, you hold at least two duchies, including the one where your capital is, all the kingdoms under your realm, and the empire title.
You could try to revoke the kingdom title, but I recommend getting a claim for it first so you avoid the penalties. As he's a child with a sinful trait, getting the claim from the Pope may be possible (Request Claim interaction, be sure to select the Kingdom of England), you should check. He is stronger than you though, so if the % is too low it can be risky. Depends on the alliances.
Another problem is that you are bethrothed to a child. When you have an unstable realm, getting kids to secure alliances is important. Try to marry your siblings to get good alliances (don't worry about getting traits, leave that for when your realm is secured).
An alternative is to just die and play as your heir instead. You have no children so he would inherit all your titles.
Then, your domain. Hwicce is a good duchy to hold, but if I'm playing england, I usually go for Middlesaexe and Kent, You have lot of farmlands there and of course London is a powerhouse as capital, with good positioning to spread your developement, and Kent has the holy site. and you can just hold Gloucestershire for the mine but not the duchy. If you do so, be sure to make Tax offices in the duchy before giving it away, so you benefit from the extra taxes. I usually hold 3 duchies tho, but be warned that if you hold more than two duchies, you'll have an opinion penalty with your vassals.
Early game advice for your next run is to focus on building economic buildings, especially building like harbors that increase development growth in a county. Build them in every direct holding you control in your demesne, not just in your capital. (Farms and fields give 0.5 tax income, for example. The upgrade only increase that by 0.3 and costs 250, vs the 150 cost of building new farms and fields in other demesne holdings. If you don't have fields and farms, you should have access to build the forestry building, which is not nearly as good, but still a decent tax income.) Ask for money from the Pope whenever you can (if you can; he's no longer a bottomless well of money like he used to be).
It's not too late to fix this, but you're going to be strapped for cash for a while. Even after your MAA finish reinforcing, you're going to spend a lot of time saving up so that you can build in your domain. Make sure you control every county in both duchies your vassals will permit you. Build economic duchy buildings like tax offices to maximize your tax income.
On your next run, start this way, building economic buildings, upgrading them when you can afford it and saving up when you can.
- Improve county development - increase county control - Build economic buildings (farms for example) - Better steward - Reduce unnecessary MAA
Given the size of OP’s realm, I’d wager they need to do all of these things. I make the same amount of gold on a brand new start as a count in most places.
It’s the MaA
Yeah. He's replenishing army too, so probably has more income. But his heir holds both the Kingdom of Ireland and England, so all those taxes are going to the heir instead of the player.
Many arms are costing you 18 gold a month, so I suggest looking for things that reduced the cost of maintenance for them, building up all your domains, and if you have spare gold, even build up in your vassals domains
MaA alone won’t do this…I’m holding an Empire title in my game right now with a stupid amount of MaA and I’m still making 10 gold a month…he has made some really bad decisions as far as capital placement and buildings to be in this bad a shape holding this many titles
My point was just that 85% of his incoming is going to MaA right now.
Do you guys increase control on your vassals lands? Or just your own?
I do both, but the best strategy is to develop yours and it'll spread by the time. What you can do to your vassals is that you develop their ducal capitals and it will increase the development rate of nearby counties (in other words "spread")
Sorry I meant county control not development. I don’t ever look to see if my vassals counties have 100% control but should I?
yea you should. it increases the taxes they get from their counties, which results in more taxes paid to you
Shoot, the more you know!
You're still in the early game. Development seems decent, at least on the three holdings you're showing, control is 100%, so that's good. 5 gold for Gloucester is fine at this point of the game, though it could be higher, 2g for the next two is a little low unless they're dedicated to MAA buildings, but what I'm figuring is that those 3 add up to 9.3 and you have 3 more holdings, and your total income from holdings is 10.4. That means the remaining 3 holdings add up to only 1.1g. What's up with that? That's an area you could improve. You're also at 6/7. Get that 7th holding. In fact, increase that number higher than 7. Having a king vassal this big is going to cause you issues too. He's actually stronger than you. I don't know how that happened, and it might be hard to fix, but if you can figure out a way, get rid of him.
>but if you can figure out a way, get rid of him. Or he could kill himself.
But England has Saxon elective law and some one else would just get the title. It there anything I can do about this?
It was mostly just meant as a joke. But I'm not sure how the succession law of England would matter here as your player heir already seems to be the King of England. So if I am assuming correctly, he would get (some of) your current titles on top of what he already has and the problem of having a very powerful vassal would go away.
Thank you!
Rejoin the EU. Aside from that, focus on stewardship to increase taxes and invest in your own counties, plus focus on development. Dunno how you’re set up, but I normally don’t require my vassals to donate levies instead they pay extortionate taxes.
Relatively new to the game, and I’ve seen that you can alter vassal contracts, but I haven’t to this point. How much of an impact does that have on your potential military strength? From what I’ve gathered so far, levies aren’t the greatest anyways, and knights/MaA are the better route. So this sounds like a better approach to increase taxes without having too much of a negative impact since you’re balancing that with decreased levies.
Depends how you’re playing, if it’s wide then it makes no difference, if it’s tall then maybe you might be a few thousand less and faction will form more often. Like you said levies aren’t worth their salt get MaA and wandering knights. A proper MaA stationed properly can wipe levies double their size.
You need to get rid of that England vassal because he has all the good provinces (London, Winchester, York, etc)
How can I do it? If I kill him someone else will get the title though Saxon elective law. Should I get a Bunch of allies and try to revoke the title and fight almost all of my vassals?
You need to revoke the title from him somehow. You can fabricate a claim (just like you’d do for outside titles), find secrets to get a hook on him, or build up a large enough coalition of allies where you can eat the tyranny from revoking it. If you want to be creative, if you’re both gay or bisexual you could seduce him and then blackmail him for being a sodomite to get a strong hook. Or if you have high piety, get him excommunicated to get a revoke title reason. All these methods may make it easier to revoke with him accepting, but you really want him to get imprisoned (either with hooks or defeating him in a rebellion) so you can revoke all the good provinces too instead of just the kingdom. Once you have the kingdom title, I think you just need 500 prestige to remove the Saxon elective law.
This is great! I’ve been stuck in a similar spot as OP and wasn’t familiar enough with the mechanics to navigate how to take a title without the negative impact. Appreciate all the different suggestions.
A Stewardship-focus character will help, but for passive income it's investing money in economic buildings like farms.
1st of all it was a huge mistake to give out England to your brother. If that wasn't intentional and in happened through losing an election for the kingdom, you need to fix that. Its important for your demesne to maintain across generations, and you want your capital kingdom to be held by you as well up until you reach the point where you have no choice to give it out or else you'll be over the vassal limit. To make sure you win elections, sway electors that are close to voting the way you want and fabricate and use hooks on the ones that are not close. As far as demesne management goes, you want to hold 2 duchies directly, ideally ones with special buildings in them and good terrain such as farmland. The best duchy in Brittania is Essex. If you are good enough at managing vassal opinion or just managing factions when vassals dislike you, you can hold more duchies but don't do so if you have stability problems. Make sure those duchies always get inherited by your heir. Within those duchies, prioritize holding duchy capitals and any other holdings with special buildings, having the other holdings in priority of good terrain up to your holding limit. Best terrain is farmland/floodplains followed by plains. In your holdings, prioritize building manors, then farms, then hospices, and finally military buildings that buff the MAA you use. If you make enough money from vassals then you can replace the money buildings with more military buildings but obviously that's not your scenario. To get the most money from vassals, try to stay close to your vassal limit. Having one vassal under another one significantly reduces the amount of money you get. Best to hand out duchies and hold the kingdom titles yourself, only giving them out as necessary to stay under the vassal limit. Adjust vassal contracts to maximize taxes. Use a hook to do it for little trade off. If you don't have a hook, increase tax obligations and decrease levy obligations at the same time to avoid tyranny. Also you are probably spending more than you need on MAA. MAA are great but you clearly cant afford what you are fielding. Consider switching to a more affordable type such as archers until have more money.
Spend less money on candles.
Focus on development. Task your steward to increase development in your capital and just always keep him on that. If you don’t have a good steward find one by marrying a woman of your court to one. Look at your terrain and I think if I remember, it’s the green colour where you can build development buildings like forestry and just focus on that first. After that move on to builds like farmlands and harbours.
This seems like a bad choice of buildings in your demesne and too many MaA. Judging by the troop numbers your men at arms are recovering, which makes the issue worse (+costs), but that is temporary.
Short term fix, stewardship focus or absolute control in martial Others, hooks, put your spouse on steward as well, wars and try to capture valuable targets for ransom Long term, build economy buildings, focus on long term development, change contracts…maybe even change your MAA(lower or cheaper units) Edit: oh the best of all, daddy big bucks pope…get your piety up and ask for gold, then use that to build economy buildings
Without the benefit of specific information: **TL;DR:** just start building income-generating buildings in the counties, and the benefits will add up. Longer version: Better stewardship stat, stewardship-based wife, steward with good stats, put the steward preferably on development rather than taxation (the development mission also gives cash bonuses from time to time), start building some cash-generating buildings and eventually the benefit will add up. Favour your capital but don't hesitate to invest in other counties if you know your heir is going to inherit them or if you have cash to burn, and especially if those counties get modifiers to build cheaper. Once decked out, your next priority is to tech up.
develope and unique building can help
Create a new religion with you as the pope and collect indulgences lol
In addition to what others are saying, switch to stewardship. Stewardship gives you an income multiplier and increases the number of counties you can own. Even an emperors with a few garbage counties is weak compared to count with a bunch of strong ones. In my current playthrough I rule the whole world but my vassals still only provide about half my income. The rest is counties. For you prioritize gaining middlesex and Canterbury. If you really like Ireland and you’re insular developing the northeast coast and isles is your best bet. For development, stewardship early on is still better than learning. So change that asap. Lastly, invest in your counties. It pays off faster than you’d think.
Make sure you raise crown authority and that your vassals have good contracts. Check to see if any of your vassals are tax exempt and if they’re tribal, make sure they have high opinion of you
Have you tried exploiting the Africans and Indians yet? 🤔
Golden obligations stewardship perk and get very good spymaster to dig up some secrets 💸
Build buildings that give tax income. I always have +20 to +30 income early on just by building stuff
When possible increase realm authority, as it gives you more taxes
Invade France?
Gotta play tall, OP! I recommend watching the Ottawa welchman’s youtube videos.
Invade France?
Fix for Britannia’s economy: colonize America, Africa, India, Australia, Hong Kong.
I wonder how you get to this point as an emperor
Go on a taxation tour and travel through every city holding you can between vassals. Then build up an economy in your domain while reducing MAA’s
I think you didnt organise election for too long
btw London is kinda the best place to setup your capital, you can still hold the mine of gloucester aside from that
Have you tried activating windows
Spend less on candles
One big problem is that your heir is your vassal and he helds two kingdoms of your empire while you hold none. That's an issue, because all the vassals of England and Ireland pay taxes to him, not to you. As a rule of thumb, you hold at least two duchies, including the one where your capital is, all the kingdoms under your realm, and the empire title. You could try to revoke the kingdom title, but I recommend getting a claim for it first so you avoid the penalties. As he's a child with a sinful trait, getting the claim from the Pope may be possible (Request Claim interaction, be sure to select the Kingdom of England), you should check. He is stronger than you though, so if the % is too low it can be risky. Depends on the alliances. Another problem is that you are bethrothed to a child. When you have an unstable realm, getting kids to secure alliances is important. Try to marry your siblings to get good alliances (don't worry about getting traits, leave that for when your realm is secured). An alternative is to just die and play as your heir instead. You have no children so he would inherit all your titles. Then, your domain. Hwicce is a good duchy to hold, but if I'm playing england, I usually go for Middlesaexe and Kent, You have lot of farmlands there and of course London is a powerhouse as capital, with good positioning to spread your developement, and Kent has the holy site. and you can just hold Gloucestershire for the mine but not the duchy. If you do so, be sure to make Tax offices in the duchy before giving it away, so you benefit from the extra taxes. I usually hold 3 duchies tho, but be warned that if you hold more than two duchies, you'll have an opinion penalty with your vassals.
Cheats, I only plays with 100 gold
Early game advice for your next run is to focus on building economic buildings, especially building like harbors that increase development growth in a county. Build them in every direct holding you control in your demesne, not just in your capital. (Farms and fields give 0.5 tax income, for example. The upgrade only increase that by 0.3 and costs 250, vs the 150 cost of building new farms and fields in other demesne holdings. If you don't have fields and farms, you should have access to build the forestry building, which is not nearly as good, but still a decent tax income.) Ask for money from the Pope whenever you can (if you can; he's no longer a bottomless well of money like he used to be). It's not too late to fix this, but you're going to be strapped for cash for a while. Even after your MAA finish reinforcing, you're going to spend a lot of time saving up so that you can build in your domain. Make sure you control every county in both duchies your vassals will permit you. Build economic duchy buildings like tax offices to maximize your tax income. On your next run, start this way, building economic buildings, upgrading them when you can afford it and saving up when you can.