it's common to have your lands fracture on succession and if you stick around i'll show you how feudal gerrymandering lets you avoid almost all succession problems now if your culture already has the primogenitor innovation you can go ahead and pass that law that passes everything to a single air but you won't have that most of the time for most games you'll probably have some form of partition succession where the game tries to give all of your errors equal inheritances now under partition if there's not enough top level titles to go around the game starts giving lower level titles like dutchies and counties to your heirs and that's when things start to get dangerous when you start to lose your counties you are placed into a very dangerous situation on secession you won't have that solid base of income in the levees to be able to support your war machine and you'll be left with a lot of difficult civil wars when your new air takes over there are a few tactics to handle partition successions to avoid breaking your realm into pieces the most common tactic is disinheritance now this is an adequate tactic but as you'll see it's not optimal so if you choose to disinherit you will see that you'll have to spend some prestige and renown and this can work if you have only a few errors and you're okay spending your dynasties hard earned renown it can be a quick and easy solution but it means planning your dynasty around having only a few kids what if you already have many kids or you want your dynasty to have many kids another approach is giving inheritances early this is a good option if you are a tribal or clan nation because you don't have many other options so you could choose to grant your air some early duchies so here you can see that i could grant them this duchy here if i don't wanted to and if i were to do this this would count as their inheritance and this early inheritance would mean that they won't take a more important duchy away from me again this is a tactic that can work really well if you're expanding quickly because you can conquer new dutchies build the titles and grant them to your heirs early on to ensure that they don't come after your main county titles later on but again this becomes intentable if you're dealing with inheritances with large titles like if your children are looking to inherit kingdoms or this is also a challenge if you have a bunch of kids because then you're gonna have to find a whole bunch of duchies to give to them if you're feudal we can use elective succession laws and rig elections to ensure that your primary error everything this is sometimes called gerrymandering if your counties are within a couple of duchies we can just set up those laws so if i were to look here i can add a feudal elective for 1500 prestige and in a feudal elective electors get votes based upon a couple of factors the main one is their rank emperors will get four votes kings will get three dukes will get two counts will get one in addition if you are a powerful vassal then you will get an extra vote for being an influential vassal now as you can see here um if you were to own your duchy in its entirety there would be no other electors and you could guarantee that your heir gets elected for the duchy succession but oftentimes you won't have enough stewardship to hold all the counties in your duchies or maybe you never owned all of them to begin with because of how you conquered it as long as you keep your vassals small enough that they can't out-vote you you can guarantee that your votes will win in this example here there are only five votes and i have three of them and so there is no way for me to lose this election and my heir will win so if i were to go through this example here and take my duchies i can go ahead and add the feudal elective laws to them vote for my player air and by spending this renown and managing to track how my vassals work i should be able to guarantee that my player air wins everything so if we look now i've completely cleaned up the succession for my dynasty now my son is going to get all three duchies in every single county that i have my other children will get nothing i have effectively created primogenitor early by using these secession laws and because of how i've structured these elections i can't lose even in this instance where you might see that there's a possibility of a tie the tie break goes to the ruler's preference so as long as you control the duchy title you can ensure that the duchy will go to you they have to have more votes than you and as long as you're careful you should be able to ensure that they don't get more votes than you if we take this a step further most vassals are feudal vassals their titles are inherited by their kids and also depending on their dynasty structure they might inherit titles that could mean that a count could settle become a duke or a king and have a lot more sway in the election we can prevent this by making the vassals be theocratic or republic vassals these are special vassals that don't pass their titles along when they die instead a new republic leader or a new theocratic leader takes their place and this ensures that nobody's going to be getting any titles they're not supposed to have and you can control the elections going into the future so i have a video out on how to make theocratic vassals but i'm going to quickly show you how to create a republic vessel because it's made much easier if you have a city then you will have a republic barony vessel and if you grant them county title they will suddenly upgrade into being a republic county vassal this means that the county will just get replaced with someone else who gets elected and you won't have any dynasty cropping up that starts coming together because of funny marriages or anything like that this strategy works really well with feudal electives saxon electives and tanistry electives you do have to be a little careful when it comes to other electives um so if i were to hypothetically have a scandinavian elective you may notice the voting power is based on the elector's domain development and capital popular opinion this makes it much more difficult to determine how many votes that people are going to get so you're going to have to be a little careful about scandinavian electives with clever use of feudal elective laws you can basically ensure that you're going to have perfect succession where your air gets everything even with confederate partition and having many many children keep these tricks in mind you should be able to keep your realm intact