Duchy management stategy in CK3? (2024)

What duchy management technique are people using in CK3? I'm still running with the 'keep vassals' weak strategy and just giving a Duke 1 county in their dejure land and the rest to individual vassals. I remember in the past some advocated giving a Duke 50% of the counties in the de-jure duchy and the rest to individuals counts, or giving all land in a duchy to the duke so they develop better.

Is the keeping vassals weak strategy still the best way to go?

I like to make my vassals strong since your tax and levy from them depends on their own income and levies. I prefer it when dukes have a minimal number of counts under them. The more direct vassal holdings, the more money you make. The more vassals in between you and a holding, the less tax/levy you get from it.

Dread makes vassals non-threatening, and even without dread, diplomacy + opinion stacking pushes most vassals out of faction opinion range.

Prefer vassals with traits that add +liege opinion: Content, Humble, Trusting. Craven vassals are also always afraid of you, even at 0 dread.

It depends, if you want to be safe from uprisings weaker vassals are better, but if you want any decent tax income then you should aim to be as close to the holdings as possible, and that means vassal dukes should hold more counties directly. And you should avoid king vassals until absolutely necessary. It is also worth considering that dread has all but trivialized keeping vassals in line, if you're willing to abuse it. Even a child can intimidate vassals out of factions if they just have a few important prisoners to execute. Which means from an "optimal play" point I think aiming for taxes is better, which means powerful dukes with few counts under them and fewer king direct vassals.

All of that assuming you want vassals at all of course, since strictly speaking the optimal play is to get big and then seize everything for yourself, but that breaks the game so much it's not really worth discussing.