Cooking your heir's stats/traits / Divorce is Strong / Infertile old women
A few random observations I hadn't noticed anyone discussing:
Cooking your Heir
In my last run - I noticed as I was releasing Vassals - that my heir was an eligible choice. I ended up doing this with every heir all game to test it. Why would you ever put your heir in charge of a vassal?
(1) It starts their traits (1/10/25 year) cooking. By the time my ruler dies, my new ruler has 2 traits, and is well on the way to the third.
(2) Similarly their stats can start getting improved by events/parliament.
(3) If you're strategic - you might be able to use this to kill an heir. I had an heir on the border and that disloyal vassal was taken over. When it was fully annexed - the heir died (I think the game cleans up characters in this situation).
(4) Remove heir from consideration with inheritance - This worked 2/3 times I tried it. If you put your heir into a country with a different religion during the reformation - they'll seemingly convert. (Maybe an event triggers?). This let me weed out some bad heirs - if I stayed on 'same religion'
(5) Education of their kids (your grandson) - I'm not sure if they do expensive education. I was spamming them with money and trying to pull the kids back from court. But I think they did do expensive education. So that lets you not take the huge court cost hit. (Might need testing).
Divorce is powerful
I didn't realize how powerful this is as a Catholic - for just 20? religious influence and a diplomat. You can get a new wife for your ruler. I'd go through 5 wives routinely and have tons of kids. This let me fill my cabinet/armies/fleets with crown members.
If I saw some potential female ruler/heir elsewhere - I could also get a divorce, potentially change my succession laws and get myself a nice PU.
I imagine this with Favored Son is insanely powerful.
There's no debuff to doing this. You don't lose relations with the country, etc.
Propose Ruler and the power of infertile old women
Found this by accident too - I had a gifted daughter - so I did expensive education (planned to make a cabinet member). She had crazy 95+ stats. I was rejecting all the marriage requests - so she didn't leave my cabinet.
I noticed some large country had an Interregnum. So I could propose ruler. I tried the gifted female character (She was my rulers sister at this point). Because she was old - and had no kids. After she took over and died, my ruler was the heir as the brother.
After that in the game - I gave expensive educations to everyone. 'Take Vows' on a few candidates. Closest I got to repeating was the Teutonic Order. I was able to 'suggest heir' my 60+ year old brother. Didn't think anything would come of it because of their inheritance laws. But they formed a Monarchy and I was the heir. But the old bastard had a kid.
Cooking stats on your ruler through PU's
Similar to the old Fiefdom trick - if your ruler rules several countries, the other countries will increase their stats too. So your ruler can get pretty good stats over time. I kept some tiny PU's going so I could have them keep improving my stats.
Posted Feb 7, 2026, 10:55 PM UTC