Tips to Deal with Powerful Vassals
Lots of ways you can fix this without giving them a council position. You can make them love you, you can make them fear you, or you can get rid of the problem by delegation/elimination.
One idea is to make them a vassal to another vassal who does like you or you have influence over – if you can. You lose a little income and levy but not a lot; you were only getting a percentage of both to begin with anyway. They then are your vassal’s problem to make happy and, if they do revolt – and win, they are still YOUR vassal that you can hand off to yet another vassal.
Another idea is to keep the unhappiness manageable. Watch the power/demand bars for factions and do what you need to do to keep them below the 50% threshold and timelines for making demands. Sway. Fabricate hooks. Befriend. Send gifts. Give away the artifact you never use. You don’t need to influence everybody in a faction, just focus on the powerful and get those that don’t completely hate you to change their mind. You want to keep them just shy of being powerful and numerous enough to be a threat. Increasing the size of your own military tips the scale here too.
Another idea is boost your dread. Unless they are brave, fear works for keeping vassals in line. Executing prisoners is an easy way to boost dread and a short war or outing secrets for people you rule over that don’t particularly matter are both ways to acquire prisoners.
Last, but not least, is simple murder. Is their heir more “manageable”? If you want to be “cheesy” about it you don’t even have to kill them directly. You just force them to be a knight, start a war, and send them out to fight without support until they die. Pick an easily beatable enemy that’ll want a white peace ASAP. I think PDX even pointed this method of dealing with undesireables out years ago.
Also if you have foreign vassals, you can learn their language to counter the cultural acceptance penalties.
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