Crusader Kings II Thread IV: Time to Create a New Title

[Aotrs Commander]

As Rockphed says, baron-tier vassals don't count towards the vassal limit. In general, having an extra county with vassal barons is better in every way than having a barony in your demesne. Barons never factionalize or revolt or even desire higher titles, so there's really no reason to keep a barony unless you're not above your demesne limit and don't have a county to replace it with.

I usually find that the tech benefits of having a demesne of widely-distributed counties are outweighed by the various "I want that county" vassal opinion penalties you might pick up. Really, for technology purposes, unless one of your demesne counties is Constantinople, any distribution of demesne is going to be inferior to just parking your spymaster in Constantinople.

As I am Rome, my spymaster is parked in, like, one of the vanishingly few counties of other countries thatr has a higher tech anything than me (which happens to be Tolerance, which I've deliberately not increased...)

My average tech (as of about 1090ish) is about 5-6 and 7 in a few selected techs, so I'm WELL ahead of most of the rest of the world. (On account, I think, of so many viceroylties...)

I usually pick two nice duchies (or even only one, if it's a really nice duchy, like Brugge), keep all the counties in those duchies, both duchy titles, and the kingdom title for those duchies, and I give all the other duchies in the kingdom to king vassals so they de jure drift out of the kingdom. After a hundred years, none of my vassals want any of my demesne titles. There's no reason to eat the "I want that title" opinion penalty if you don't have to.

That's basically my current set-up. I have just (after a long and tedious time of having to occasionally strip stuff off vassals and hand it back to the right vassal) about got Greece and Italy (the titles of which I destroyed early on) parcelled up and handed out to several kingdoms, leaving me with just the afirementioned duchies and some merchant republics.

I have recently become immortal, so I'm hoping that the long reign bonus is going to eventually make stuff like the opinion bonus not really matter much - and hense I'm starting to look as to whether to try expanding my domain (and basically by handing out some of the baronies and replacing those demesne slots with new counties further out (and thus making a new nexus to spread technology, since as I understand you tech spreads to your demesne fastest, even if its not adjacent to your capital).

(I've had my tech-spreading minions assigned to Rome (Constantinople is my capital) since near the start to give me to points of spread, but the empire is sufficiently big now I'm wondering whether I do just need some extra points.)