Which is incidentally what I hope it will be in CK3, without any kind of 'you are unique just because you are HRE' mechanics, like that imperial election in late CK2.
By and large, agreed. What set the HRE apart is how it failed to centralize, unlike the other states of Europe, leaving it in a remarkably loose confederation of states, electing their monarchs (though still largely along dynastic lines!). Further, the imperial title sets the HRE apart from other states, with the more intimate role the Pope played in acknowledging the status of the Holy Roman Emperor as just that, rather than merely being the King of the Romans. That being said, though, yes - other than these points above and maybe some that I am forgetting, the HRE was not all that different from the early histories of several of the other monarchies of Europe.
That's not really how it works though. What you're describing is basically how the ERE worked in CK2.
The only perspective from which this could be true is that if you were completely ignoring everything besides the fact that it was feudalistic.
Zeeland, you'd only have to fight that county's holder, plus their allies and liege. Then, with time, new tech, the passing of laws, etc., a liege could slowly centralize their realm, which by the end of the game would give them the ability to call other vassals (that would not normally be implicated in the conflict) to any war.
Exist a mod about this in CK2, basically when there is a war the liege calls the vassals, but they choose whether to join or not, each one even controls their forces, it is up to them to choose whether to join their army, but unfortunately AI does not know how to deal with it right, as much as a vassal hates you sometimes he joins in, and that happens when it’s the other way around, he doesn’t deal with distance either, that is, if the HRE’s Kaiser declares war for Zeeland, he’ll be 99% sure that the states of italy and bavaria will help, there is nothing that limits culture and religion or distance, it is unfortunately broken.While we're on the topic of giving special mechanics to the HRE à la EU4, I'd like to make a suggestion/request based on the reverse line of thinking: take the way the HRE works in EU4 and use it to model Feudalism in CK3! More specifically, use EU4's mechanic for dealing with external attacks against vassals of a realm.
In Europa Universalis 4, whenever you attack a member of the HRE, you have to deal not only with the polity you're attacking and its allies, but also with the Emperor (i.e. the liege of the realm). It always struck me as odd that EU4 (which portrays the early modern period) has a better mechanic for representing this aspect of Feudalism (even if it's only for one country) than CK2, which ended up working a lot more like a modern, unified state.
Now, I'm not a middle ages historian, so please correct me if I'm wrong but, as I recall, the protection given by a liege to any one vassal did not include the participation of the other lords of the realm. As of CK2, all wars are total wars between two or more states that throw every vassal into the fight, no matter the scope of the casus belli, or who is being targeted and for what title. Apart from being ahistorical, this creates bizarre situations like the infamous WW0 between France and the HRE that always happens one month into the 1066 start.
Adopting a more EU4-like approach could fix this, as well as improve on other areas of the CK experience. So instead of being forced by the game rules to always attack the top liege of your target's realm, you'd be able to directly attack your actual target. Instead of having to fight all the lords and ladies of, say, France just to take...
So, to recap, this could make it all a little more historically accurate, but also make way for some general improvements to the game: the security of a vassal's holdings in any given realm would hinge a lot more on the liege's capacity of providing protection to them; you wouldn't see weird, anachronistic medieval total wars; and you could tie it into a realm-centralization mechanic, something for which I and a few other people have been clamoring since CK2.
What say you?
Yes, but it's not really about having to call your vassals (like tribal realms work in CK2) instead of just getting everyone automatically onboard. It's about limiting the scope of the fights and being a little more historical by making the average war take place between the attacker + willing allies VS the target + allies and (direct) liege, as opposed to every landholder of one realm against every landholder of the other.
I suggest compromise:
