Suggestion: One emperor per religion.

[Willem IV]

I would suggest that you only can create an empire when there is no emperor from your religion/heresy.

There is some historical ground for that, the Orthodox Russians claimed their imperial title only after the fall of Constantinople. Having only a Catholic Holy Roman Emperor, a Orthodox Roman Empire, a Shia Persia/Iran and the Sunni Caliph, and of course the Tengri Genghis Khan for most of the Time period.
With the exception of some Spanish king trying to claim to be emperor, but that wasn’t recognised outside his realm.
And the Latin Empire was more a usurpation of the Roman Empire

 

[Pannonius]

That would railroad the game too much.

 

[Atalvyr]

It would also create some incentive for powerful rulers to separate from the main church, which would be interesting.

If you rivaled the HRE in power and the pope would not acknowledge you as an emperor, I could see certain rulers not wanting to accept that.

 

[wielkicien]

While you are technically right regarding historical situation - in game it would be just unreasonable decision, that would mean arbitrally restrictions for player actions aka taking fun away from us.

 

[MrNewVegas]

There shouldn't be one emperor per religion, but from a flavour perspective the only christians who are called "Emperor" should be the HRE or the ERE.

 

[Ezumiyr]

It's a bit tricky, because in CK2 we have empire-tier titles, which isn't the same thing as actual historical titles, and we don't know yet how many "tiers" will be in CK3.

I think it would be ok if we would have no limits to how many titles of the last tier we have, but for example in the catholic world, the Pope would only accept to give the title of emperor to one ruler at a time... unless you create an antipope to do so.
For other parts of the world, empires are just the name we gave to large states. And the Latin Empire for instance only used "empire" because in that region it was the name given to the ruler for a long time.

It's important to understand that CK2's way to make the distinction between dukes, kings and emperors isn't necessarily valid everywhere at everytime. A Caliph, a Khagan and a Maharaja aren't just localisations of the word "emperor", they are different things, and the holy roman emperor is a different thing from the emperor of the romans.

The best thing to have is different, unique mechanics for each state big enough to be considered an empire, with their own ways to handle succession, titles distribution, armies, internal wars and religion.

 

[Metanetwork]

There shouldn't be one emperor per religion, but from a flavour perspective the only christians who are called "Emperor" should be the HRE or the ERE.

The Bulgarian Empire coexisted with both of them, and so did the Serbian Empire.

After the sack of Constantinople, three different empires claimed to be Byzantine successor states: Latin Empire, Empire of Trebizon, and Empire of Nicaea.

 

[Willem IV]

The idea behind this, is that you indeed create your own religion or destroys the title of you opponent. Then you're free to create your own.
Khagan, Maharadja means basicly Great King, so something above King. While Shahanshah and basileus tōn basileōn means king of kings.

In my humble opinion a claim (Trebizon, Nicaea) doesn't mean you are an emperor. While the monarch of the Bulgarian Empire was a Khan (King level)

 

[Joel M Bridge]

Emperors and Empires were a tricky thing in the Medieval ages so like in Western Europe there was only one of her which was the Holy Roman Emperor no one was going to be declaring themselves I think it looks really silly and no one took him seriously like in Spain. I mean literally the Holy Roman Emperor made Kings that's the level power they had an understanding of their place in Christendom. Similar with the Eastern Roman Empire. What I would like to see if you can declare yourself and for your title changed to it but you won't actually have the rank do you have to work on being recognized or overthrow the previous guy. You got to understand too in Western Europe people weren't trying to centralize like they were in the early modern. That wasn't a thing on her mind it was pretty much how much look like a badass warrior can I look like. Also the Western idea Emperor of the Eastern idea of Emperor very different. In the East to years this mysterious figure in a centralized government in the West he's like this King of Kings Warrior figure he doesn't have to go in the bath lies the entire Western Europe. Because technically they know he's the emperor he's the theoretical protector of the church. So it's pretty much how much can he protect themself guardian and perpetuating the church and being this Warrior direct King like figure. A great book can your curious is the heart of Europe in really goes into this.

 

[Pyoro]

Railroading is bad, but it'd be interesting if there were a CB for it, so that other Emperors can interfere if they don't approve, or if you haven't gotten special permission by the Church.

 

[Michael Bachari]

Emperors are way too common in CK2.

In medieval Western Europe the emperorship was very much associated with being the defender of the faith, more specifically the Catholic Church.

Also in the Muslim world the emperorship was very much associated with the caliphate.

Though I think the emperorship should become more like a titular title and not be a stepping stone towards world conquest like it is now.

You should want to become emperor, because of the social status it brings, but it should be also difficult to hold, because other rulers are now even more jealous!

I don't mean the moment you become emperor you should get a very hard time, but it should indeed be difficult to retain it over multiple generations.

 

[Metz77]

Railroading is bad, but it'd be interesting if there were a CB for it, so that other Emperors can interfere if they don't approve, or if you haven't gotten special permission by the Church.

It would be interesting to do a mechanic like the crowning mechanic added in Holy Fury, where you can get the highest tier title, but if you want to be called "Emperor" you either have to get the pope's blessing or do it without his assent and possibly get excommunicated.

 

[Pyoro]

While we're add it, I feel like there should generally be more of an interconnected effect of gaining new titles. CK2 "simulates" this somewhat by having you pay Prestige and such, but it still feels like you basically can proclaim yourself whatever you want as long as you fulfill certain conditions.

But that's not how titles work; there never was a "Oh, you own a few counties now? Fine, declare yourself Duke now." system. It should be faaaar more reliant on what your liege allows you to do, and what other powerful figures think of you. No Duke is going to like that there's now another Duke around. That's one of the reasons you got that messy HRE system that shows that real-life politics are never as neat as "tier 1: count, tier 2: duke, tier 3: king ...", instead you get a princely count or a margrave or the infamous business about being "King in Prussia" instead of being "King of Prussia" and some of those titles were more important and prestigious than others and so on and so on.

I don't think CK3 needs to replicate this mess (although it'd be interesting ^^), for the sake of clarity it's probably fine to keep stuff in simple tiers, but it should try to replicate the enormous difficulty of climbing through those tiers, and how it required skilled diplomacy to achieve, not just some arbitrary realm-sizes. Even stealing titles in wars was pretty tricky business unless you could be sure that there wasn't anyone around to do anything about it.

I think it could enhance the "early game", when you struggle and scheme to try and become a Duke, and later a King, by potentially opening up more roads and requiring you to solve a few more problems.

 

[Metz77]

While we're add it, I feel like there should generally be more of an interconnected effect of gaining new titles. CK2 "simulates" this somewhat by having you pay Prestige and such, but it still feels like you basically can proclaim yourself whatever you want as long as you fulfill certain conditions.

But that's not how titles work; there never was a "Oh, you own a few counties now? Fine, declare yourself Duke now." system. It should be faaaar more reliant on what your liege allows you to do, and what other powerful figures think of you. No Duke is going to like that there's now another Duke around. That's one of the reasons you got that messy HRE system that shows that real-life politics are never as neat as "tier 1: count, tier 2: duke, tier 3: king ...", instead you get a princely count or a margrave or the infamous business about being "King in Prussia" instead of being "King of Prussia" and some of those titles were more important and prestigious than others and so on and so on.

I don't think CK3 needs to replicate this mess (although it'd be interesting ^^), for the sake of clarity it's probably fine to keep stuff in simple tiers, but it should try to replicate the enormous difficulty of climbing through those tiers, and how it required skilled diplomacy to achieve, not just some arbitrary realm-sizes. Even stealing titles in wars was pretty tricky business unless you could be sure that there wasn't anyone around to do anything about it.

I think it could enhance the "early game", when you struggle and scheme to try and become a Duke, and later a King, by potentially opening up more roads and requiring you to solve a few more problems.

I think it would be a good addition to require positive relationships with the king or with the other vassals of your realm to be able to ascend to a duchy, and either positive relationships or considerable Dread to ascend to a kingship.

 

[Nyrael]

There shouldn't be one per religion, but Catholic and Orthodox should have one "True Emperor" who has special bonuses and interactions with the Church (and whose status of True Emperor can be stolen by another Emperor).

 

[Metz77]

Actually, while we're on the subject of empires, historically they didn't tend to have kingdom titles below them at all (with a few exceptions). It's possible to establish this in CK2, but I think it would be interesting to make it default, where if you create an emperor-tier title the constituent kingdom titles are automatically destroyed.

This would also play into the other thread floating around about how there should be mechanics for blobby empires to dissolve more easily — without the ability to easily establish vassal kings, it will be hard for emperors to stay under their vassal limits (going by CK2 rules here) and so will face opinion maluses and on death they'll be more likely to lose parts of the empire.

 

[Metanetwork]

Emperors and Empires were a tricky thing in the Medieval ages so like in Western Europe there was only one of her which was the Holy Roman Emperor no one was going to be declaring themselves I think it looks really silly and no one took him seriously like in Spain.

"No one" is a huge assumption. Some Europeans rulers took the title anyway, such as the Caesars of Bulgaria and Serbia.

 

[sumdood]

No, but I do think an Empire should be a special title, not just another tier on top of king after you accumulate a few kingdoms. The HRE , Byzantines, and Mongols were all empires in name, but what that name meant was completely different for each one.