Requires at least Minimum Crown Authority to banish a vassal or Limited Crown Authority in order to have the ability to revoke a title.

When you are preparing for succession and your heir is groomed and ready, or if you suspect that your current character might die soon - just start revoking titles from vassals. Imprison them, even without cause, then banish them to take their gold and all titles. Don't forget to empty your dungeon of any imprisoned vassals that you already had.

Your whole realm will hate you for massive amounts of tyranny modifiers, excessive duchies, and oversized desmene. Good! Don't worry about factions, arrest and banish them too. Who cares if they assassinate you, your heir gets it all! If you become invaded, don't worry about vassal levy sizes due to negative opinion, seize more titles and they become liege levies.

And the best part... since your heir didn't do the banishing, they don't receive any of the tyranny penalties. Let your heir cherry-pick the best titles (fat, developed counties) and get opinion bonuses for awarding the leftover titles to new, high-stewardship, non-ambitious vassals without conflicting claims.

You can use the glut of titles to expand your [retinue army size] and to incur greater income penalties to drive down the cost of [inviting new nobels].

Caution: Using this strategy as a Christian ruler requires that you also manage the Pope's opinion carefully. Otherwise you can easily be excommunicated or have invasions authorized against you. See the Vassal Pope strategy or be ready to commit suicide.

A standing army that you do not need to levy is of tremendous value. Being able to position a major army poised to strike as soon as you declare war without needing to levy, consolidate, then travel is indispensable for forging a huge realm. You can use basic methods to increase your maximum retinue cap such as castle Training Grounds improvements and Military Organization technology levels.

But what I'm talking about here is exceeding your maximum... repeatedly and cumulatively. Give your heir a lot of titles and gold and the AI will buy him his own retinues. Whenever your character dies, your heir gets all of your retinues combined with their own. After doing this for a few generations of your dynasty you can easily get +100K and beyond in excessive retinue units.

Use the [Uber Tyrant] strategy above to mass a bunch of titles on your current character and buy up retinues to max out your limit. Give some titles & gold to your heir to get them started building their own retinues.

You can multiply the effectiveness of this trick by [Title Parking] and then murdering your nobels that are holding your parked titles.

Title Parking is when you give titles to:

• Important: An old (unlikely to reproduce heirs)
  
• Important: Childless (no direct heirs)
  
• Important: Sibling-less (no indirect heirs)
  
• Health & fertility penalty (Ill, stressed, etc.)
  
• Non-ambitious (avoid some trouble)
  
• Low intrigue score (easier to kill when you want)
  
• High stewardship score (so they do a good job with the holdings while they have them)

You give these nobles titles so that you can easily get them back as well as the accumulated gold, retinues, and holding improvements in the interim. It is a good way to park some duchy titles when avoiding the too many held duchies opinion penalty.

Use this strategy with the Exceeding your retinue cap strategy because the AI should develop the noble's retinues - which can be added to yours.

There could be a slight risk of your temporary vassal giving away some of their titles to create their own vassals - so don't overload their desmene.

There are times when you really do want brand new nobles instead of recruiting existing nobles from other courts. New nobles don't have any family which could make them suitable for eventual use in the Title Parking strategy. If your culture and/or religion is somewhat rare, you need these new nobels to assist in cultural conversions and are helpful for matrilinearly breeding females of your dynasty.

Once you have a large realm buying new nobles with the Invite Noble to Court intrigue menu option can become very expensive because it costs a multiple of your monthly income. In order to make this cost reasonable you will need to drive down your monthly income, at least temporarily.

Fortunately this happens when you are performing the Uber Tyrant strategy. After you've stolen gobs of titles, your oversized desmene penalty will reduce your income by -90% or more. Use this opportunity to buy a lot of new, cheap nobles.

Another good opportunity is immediately after succession (make sure to pause the game). Before income is recalculated you have an opportunity to buy up cheap nobles.

Accumulate info on plots throughout the entire game, manually ask to End Plot anything that concerns you such as plots to kill your favored heirs, yourself, and so forth. What you want here is to get dirt on any and all vassals. Keeping valid reasons for arrest in your pocket is extremely valuable in handling threats from Factions without gaining opinion penalties and making Faction Threats worse.

When you have a very large realm and an unstoppable army you need not worry about your vassals fabricating claims on your titles at all. They will never be able to muster enough troops to press the claim. So don't panic and keep this plot around for a reason to arrest them.

Don't waste your time playing whack-a-mole chasing the various armies participating in the crusade on your realm. Put your entire army onto ships and head straight to Rome (or wherever The Papacy ends up in your game). If The Papacy has a large army nearby you can let your army wait in the ships until they move on.

Assault (as in accelerated siege) each holding in Rome and bring the Pope into submission with 100% warscore in no time. Keep in mind that most holdings in Rome are non-castles so they do not resist assaults well anyway. With all enemy-allied armies heading to your realm, you shouldn't encounter any resistance.

You will end the crusade before some rulers ask to join it and far before most armies even arrive. An easy boost to your religion's moral authority.

When your character or heir gets married, you can collect a special tribute in gold. This is a significant sum that is based on a multiplier of your current monthly income. If you need cash and you're satisfied with the quantity and quality of your children, you can repeatedly kill/divorce your wife and remarry for a huge gain.

Obviously do this after you've removed any significant drains on your monthly income to maximize your gains. If you are maxed out on your desmene size/limit then be careful to maintain a suitable stewardship level with your new spouses. If you are relying on assassination to cycle through wives, try to select spouses with low intrigue.

Old ladies in your court that are useless as child guardians due to a poor trained skill are good candidates to use in this way. You can trim your court population and maybe help prevent some spread of disease while making marriage profits.

Raiding is a great way to soften up a county and its holdings just before an actual war. If you loot all the holdings, then declare war, your armies can insta-assault the holding and occupy it. Your warscore will shoot up very rapidly and you will win the war before the defender or any allies can effectively respond.

It is possible to Raid & Occupy at nearly the same time. Declare war. Move 1 army, in raid/pillage mode, onto the target county then move another army in normal mode onto the same county. The armies will combine their strength but the leading army (raid/pillage) determines what they are doing. Let this army loot all the holdings, then the sieges will automatically switch to occupation which will go very quickly as described above.

I like vassal Merchant Republics that can help stimulate income in my coastal cities. It is also fun, for me, to have a splinter of my dynasty in control of these republics. Give a coastal city to a non-ruler member of your dynasty to make him a Mayor. If/when possible, give them the county that contains that city to make them a Lord Mayor. Then give them the duchy that contains that county. This should create a new republic.

Combine this with [Dynasty City]

There's a way to give cities to your vassal Merchant Republic that will convert a city from elective to agnatic seniority.

During your usual conquests or if you do a lot of raiding/pillaging you will end up with children in your prison. A strange fact is that you are able to assign the guardian/mentor of your child prisoners. You can use this to convert their culture and religion as well as get them the trained skill that you want.

For captive boys, especially those with claims or in line of some succession, you might be able to use them to seed your culture in other realms and give you a diplomacy angle outside of your realm. You will have to eventually release/ransom them of course for that to work.

For captive girls, and if your culture/religion allows concubines, you can set them up to be breeding stock by getting them a trained skill in the diplomacy or stewardship lines like grey eminence or midas touched. This is especially important if they have titles that their children can inherit. In that case, marry them to your dynasty.

If your culture/religion allows taking concubines, then you should take captive women as temporary concubines on a routine basis. Women belonging to prestigious houses will give you a prestige award like +25 / 50 / 75. Cash in then set them aside.

Ambitious vassals like to expand their territory which can put them into conflict with you (their ruler). You can direct that aggressive energy to your benefit by having these type of vassals along your realm's borders. They sometimes expand your realm for you all on their own.

So long as you don't have Absolute Crown Authority preventing vassals from declaring war, they are able to conquer territory of your neighbors. Sometimes this happens anyway without you being aware of it. For example you might suddenly get an icon that you can usurp or create a title for a duchy, kingdom, or empire when you haven't been doing anything. This can be because your vassal did and now you are eligible.

It is nice for your vassals to be able to declare war against your neighbors especially when you're under a peace treaty. That way you can gain the realm expansion from the war without having to do it yourself.

If you have a vassal that declares war on a neighbor you can send the vassal some gifts of gold to help them pay for their war and buy mercenaries.

The steward's Collect Taxes job bonus applies to all holdings in the county that you control. So if you are willing to trade some of your desmene size from counties to baronies (monthly prestige difference - fewe), you can boost your income from multiple sources at the same time. The most you can hope for is a county with 6 holding slots as castles all controlled by you. The bonus would apply to the county + 6 castles = 7 sources.

Castles don't generate much income in the standard game, but numerous mods give you a lot more options for development of castle holdings.

There are some notable tradeoffs with this strategy:

• Much larger ??? levies (all the castles)
  
• Magnified monthly income (significantly more under some mods)
  
• Fewer ??? levies (due to fewer counties)
  
• Slightly less monthly prestige gain

Technology is so valuable early on that it is the best use of your spymaster. Rome & Constantinople are usually great spots to steal technology from. Any county that exceeds your technology is a valid target. The exact technology that is superior to your own does not seem to matter. Once your spymaster triggers the stolen technology event, the +50 technology points are randomly assigned to either the Military, Economic, or Cultural technology groups anyway. So if a county only exceeds you in a single cultural tech, you still might end up with +50 in military.

Behind the scenes there may be much more to the calculations of success - so it might still be best to target the most technologically advanced counties anyway.

If you want to keep playing as a child character and wouldn't rather become a different character further down in succession, then you will need to protect yourself. Every time your Regent changes and if their opinion of you isn't strongly positive, send them a gift. The new Regent is almost always just a simple courtier of yours and so it will only require the smallest gift of 20 gold to improve their opinion of you.

Having a Regent and Spy Master that like you are the strongest ways to keep yourself alive.

Having the Pope as your vassal is incredibly valuable to a Catholic character. You repeatedly:

• Request divorces for gold generation.
  
• Ask for gifts from The Papacy (the Pope is always filthy rich).
  
• Ask for title claims - far cheaper and faster than fabricating claims.

If you have the Pope grant you many titles under the control of the same realm, you can do a single Press All Claims CB to take them all in a single war.

Rome is a very valuable county so it is good to sieze that for yourself. Give your vassal Pope a title to some weak county safely away from other Catholic realms and work to get the Papacy capital moved there.

Exceeding your retinue cap strategy is very helpful in ambushing the Pope to install your anti-Pope because you can have a large army in-motion onto the Papacy as you declare war. Install a new Pope, drain his opinion with the above requests, then replace him and repeat the process.

Use the star to flag rival rulers so that you can be notified when major events occur to them such as:
Wars
Successions

Most of the time the star will automatically transfer to their heir. Every so often the heir is no longer the ruler (such as after a civil war) so you may need to review your starred characters every so often.

When playing as a Catholic, be sure to keep an eye on the Pope's opinion of you. At a minimum be sure to check his opinion every time you:

• Have a succession.
  
• A new Pope is elected.

It is a good idea to re-check the Pope's opinion whenever:

• One of your plots is exposed - such as murder (dishonorable modifier).

If the Pope's opinion if you is -20 to 40 it is sufficient to just park your Chaplain at the Papacy using the Improve Religious Relations job. If the Pope's opinion is very negative or isn't improving enough with just your Chaplain, send your Chancellor to the Papacy as well with the Improve Relations job.

Note that if you are making use of the Uber Tyrant strategy as a Catholic ruler, you should also either use the Vassal Pope strategy or be able to quickly force a succession with suicide.