Find a character with 0 intrigue from your court or somewhere.

You could just revoke all their titles, which would cause a hell of a lot of stress and conflict, or you could do something easier which we’ll detail below: This means getting rid of all your vassals.

Transition to the North Korea strategy after you’ve gained an Empire title.

Don’t dish out kingdoms willy-nilly, and if you have some big dog vassals, try to revoke these titles with the Limited Crown Authority unlock. In various parts of the world, these may be called despots, sultans, mansas, khans, shahs, maharajas, gyalpo, prince mayors, serene doge, wali-maliks, viceroys, or exarchs. This all adds up to quickly ramp up your level of control when you take over new lands. Also, pick the Authority focus in the martial lifestyle tree, and go down the ‘Serve the Crown’ perk route. If you have some Renown, unlock the first two dynasty legacies in the ‘Law’ path, as these give you extra Control growth. Since you’re taking over a massive amount of the world, you’ll want to do as much as you can to avoid annoying your subjects.

You’ll also want to switch Religious Attitude to Pluralist. You want to have the Clerical Tradition switched to Lay Clergy, as then you’ll be able to hold temples directly rather than through the church, giving you extra gold and piety. You can set up a new denomination of your faith and choose the tenets under which you run it. Basically, start as you usually would - expanding and not being too rash. Do this until you have 10 times the number of counties in your realm as you have in direct holdings. This way, you’ll get 100% of your domain holdings’ output at first.

Begin by playing as normal, keeping your holdings under the limit for the time being.

So, how do you actually pull off this strategy? Follow these steps and we’ll have you covered. You can also get other benefits such as almost unkillable men-at-arms, allowing you to completely dominate the world without having to worry about uprisings. However, in normal feudalism, gold and levies are split between vassals below you to the point where the top ruler barely sees any of the actual cash, so it's not as severe a penalty as the game would have you believe.īeing over the domain limit can ramp you up to a -90% penalty to both taxes and levies very quickly, but if you have a ludicrous amount of land anyway, this barely even matters. The domain limit is a mechanic that tries to discourage this, as it severely penalises you for going over the limit.

So what is ‘North Korea’? Basically, you ignore the existence of vassals, titles, and everything the game wants you to care about, instead directly holding everything yourself. There are a few steps you’ll have to take to pull off this strategy, and full credit to YouTube channel Reman’s Paradox for an excellent video run-through of how it all works. How to do the North Korea strategy in CK3

Ck2 create new vassal