Vassal fief ownership mess

[Arkyll]

I have been "king" (elective) for a good decade and I have noticed how little power I have in general.
Particularly over who I get to give my conquered fiefs to.

The game seems to generate 3 whole clan options after a fief is taken based upon....???
This really isnt clear at all.

And consistently the same 3 useless, recently defected, low tier, small family clans are the options.
These same clans are constantly forwarded over clans that really ought to get their hands on another fief.

This tier 4 clan recently joined my kingdom and for some reason gets dibs on 6 fiefs and counting.

eeeee hosted at ImgBB

Image eeeee hosted in ImgBB

ibb.co

Whereas this long-time, loyal clan since the start has been stuck on 2 fiefs the entire time. They have never shown up in an election.

rrrrr hosted at ImgBB

Image rrrrr hosted in ImgBB

ibb.co

My problem is why I cant chose or have any influence over the election choices in the first place as I assumed the monarch had and would have.

Instead, the game is playing as the King instead of me. I am not actually choosing who I think should rightfully own the fief, the game is.
I dont want to give these same 3 clans a fief at all. I want the ownership of land to be proportionate to the size, power and loyalty of clans.
If the game doesnt have these variables in-place, then let me decide this manually.

 

[KingEroc1st]

proximity plays a huge role. not having a fief makes them a priority also. but basically you can only vote and not influence who gets to be in the 3.
so to simplify things this is how i do it.

-first i take a town, make my kingdom. and hire a bunch of mercs, call a big army and go on a sieging rampage. conquering all the towns and castles i want to have personally. at this point i have no vassals
-then, i conquer another 2 castles or 1 town. and use it as bargaining chip to get a powerful tier 5-6 clan to join me. if i'm currently at war with their faction they'll keep their holdings as well. now i usually pick the vassal i want before sieging the town/castle close to their holding, so their new place is next to their old. (optional, i sometimes take even more land and give to the same vassal)
-i rinse and repeat this process a few times, expanding my kingdom and vassal numbers, all the while maintaining relative integrity of territory ownership.
at first, all the holdings will go to you. then when you have 1 vassal clan, you have to vote between the 2. and when you have 2 vassals vote between 3, then the voting candidates starts to get out of control, but within control if you set it up properly and have your vassals farther apart from each other while their own holdings are clustered together.

another method is keep everything yourself by conquering only things neighbouring your territory just snake forward and gobble up real estate. then just gift towns in the back to vassals at a later time.

 

[King Harlaus The Fat]

I agree. I don't know what was wrong with the Warband system, you could hand out fiefs to lords who were deserving. In my playthrough, my clan is literally one of the clans with the least influence because we don't have many fiefs, just because our clan doesn't show up on the voting screen.

 

[Apocal]

https://forums.taleworlds.com/index.php?threads/issues-being-granted-a-town.427276/post-9503857

With the new patch the fief election formula has changed a bit, so I figured I would update everyone on what has changed. A couple new variables were added, and some of the old ones were tweaked. Here's the new Merit Score equation:

• The Clan Tier Bonus has not changed.
• The Total Clan Strength now properly subtracts out the garrison strength of the captured fief from the faction ruler's total strength, which will lower the faction ruler's bonus by a small amount.
• The No Fief Bonus has not changed and is still 30.
• The Capturer Bonus has been reduced to 30 (from 50).
• The Ruler Bonus has been reduced to 60 (from 100).
• The Poverty Bonus is now added when clans have < 30k gold. The less they have the bigger the bonus up to a maximum of 30. The exact formula to determine the bonus is [30 - (Clan Gold / 1000)], so if a clan has 20k gold they get 10 points, if a clan has 10k gold they get 20 points, etc.
• The Player Bonus is a flat 30 point bonus that only applies to the player clan.

The Player Bonus + Capturer Bonus now equals the bonus that the faction ruler gets from the Ruler Bonus, so those will cancel each other out if the player captured the fief.

Unfortunately, the issues with the newly captured fief being included in the Distance Factor calculations, and the value of the captured fief being included in the total value of all the clan's fiefs (meaning it gets counted twice for rulers), are both still present.

I don't know what the status of that issue is, whether it's intentionally being kept that way, or if it was just forgotten about. Keep in mind that these two factors somewhat balance each other out, since the value of the captured fief will reduce the faction ruler's Merit Score, while the distance factor will increase the Merit Score. [Fixed with a recent hotfix]

Here is a link to the equation as it was in 1.4.2 as a comparison.