There's an absolutely massive problem with all cognatic primo, which is that vassals very quickly consolidate into single very powerful ones. If you take away gavelkind succession, the only way for the player to manage their vassals is to be constantly revoking and redistributing land. The AI is quite a bit more efficient at constantly revoking land than the player is, especially sinc it's a lot of really annoying busywork.It's intentional. With some cultural exceptions, all Feudal (and subtypes such as titles Duke-tier and lower are restricted to Primogeniture. It's my personal setting for succession laws that I've run with for months, and decided to upload because I've found that it solves many of the AI's shortcomings. There's a few reasons I went in this direction:
-Primogeniture helps to preserve the interesting bloodlines and dynasties unless their lands get revoked or conquered.
-Reducing border gore. Gavelkind and Elective Gavelkind are massive contributors to border gore. Primogeniture as a winner-take-all succession law sidesteps this.
-Lore-wise, primogeniture appears to match up better with lesser realms in TES than most other succession laws.
-Gender laws notwithstanding, the only way to force a succession law as the default succession law is to make the other types unavailable.
-AI vassals love to push succession laws like Gavelkind and Elective and give enormous priority to those factions. If those laws are disabled, they won't form those factions, period.
-Narrowing faction options makes the AI more likely to push dynastic title claimants and push for council power. From a lore perspective, that seems a lot more credible than people starting civil wars over gavelkind and elective succession.
The main exceptions to the rule be the Reachmen, Skaal, Orcs, Tang Mo and Kamal, all of whom can use Open Succession (rule by might), and the Tang Mo can also use Elective without rank restriction.
Note that kingdoms and empires can still use the other succession laws.
Gavelkind tends to split lands up over time. Primo tends to gather them all together. Both lead to boarder gore, since one scrambles land and the other causes random land all over the place to end up under one ruler. As for dealing with factions, you can deal with that in other ways than just blocking them full stop. All the joining weights and requirements are modable, I've worked with them. It is a bit annoying, since there's an awful lot of them, but it can be done and have a much more engaging experience in the end.
EDIT: Forgot to specify this is a problem with absolute cognatic primogenature, since the mixed sex of the rulers leads to a lot of rulers getting married and their children inheriting both of their titles.
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