Crusader Kings III – Factions Tips

Useful Tips for Factions

You can hover over their faction members in the faction screen, and see their ‘faction commitment’ to see a breakdown of what makes them want to stay a member. S

ometimes it is personality traits. My game rule on the hardest ‘instability’ setting gives them all something like a 50-point commitment, so even vassals with 50 opinion of me or more will still join factions.

Sometimes they just need a nudge. If you have lots of gold you can usually send a strong member a gift and it will put them out of the faction. Some have extremely low/borderline commitment and it isn’t always entirely dependent on their opinion of you.

Pro Tip:

If you have a vassal in a faction that has a high opinion of you that you feel there’s no logical reason why they should want to be in that faction, they probably are being forced by another AI to join the faction due to a strong hook.

That’s a good time to send your spymaster to try to find out what secrets they hold, maybe even get a strong hook on them yourself. You need a really talented spymaster though, to find those secrets as quickly as possible (and hopefully your spymaster isn’t the one holding the hook on them because they’ll probably be more terrified of your spymaster than you, which is another reason they’d want to stay in the faction).

My spymasters are almost always courtiers because a vassal spymaster can do a lot of damage to you, at their benefit, unless you’re certain they’re loyal.

I did this recently and found out that one of the faction members was a sodomite, even though he had 100 opinion of me he just would not quit the faction, and I’m almost certain the faction leader knew his secret as well. Once you expose their secret, any blackmail on them becomes useless (including blackmail by AI), so I exposed it and he left the faction.

There’s also somewhat of a delay for them to leave the faction (I believe it calculates monthly) so if you bribe someone to like you and they don’t immediately leave the faction, don’t panic just check again a month later and see if they’re gone.

If they are still there then there’s probably some other reason. Also if you are planning to expose their secret it’s probably best not to blackmail them first because blackmail gives a permanent -15 opinion for their lifetime, but exposure gives -30 but decays. Just kinda up to you what you want to do with the information your spymaster finds for you.