In my playthrough for Norway, I have England invaded. There are quite a few Saxon dukes that time to time have plots and give a reason to arrest them. Usually, the arrest chance is low and when I try to arrest they riot. So before the arrest, I bring my retinues and levies on their lands so when the revolt I deal with them very fast and with low army losses. Time-to-time, other dukes join them, but still that's only very few against the whole realm and usually they are easy to defeat.
After a successful suppression of the rebellion, I put the rebellious duke in a prison and can revoke ALL of his counties and titles whily it is only that duke who is unhappy. Nobody else cares as he is a traitor. Usually, suppressing the rebellion is easy and dukes have lots of lands to make many other dukes happy or even create new strong dukes.
I can repeat this again and again. Sounds like an overpowered strategy to get rid of dukes that are against you and keep the rest very happy. The only drawback I can think of is that it takes time to deal with rebellion which you might have spent inviding new lands outside of your real. But often you are threatening and have to wait for defence pacts against you to dissolve, so that's fine.
Is there anything I'm missing which would make this strategy bad? Sounds like I can just disable 'auto-stop' for plots and use that for my advantage…?
Best Answer
You are correct. This is a valid strategy for controlling your realm and keeping vassals from getting too uppity. It's also an opportunity to replace the Saxon vassals with Norwegian ones who won't get an opinion penalty for you being foreign, or to land your sons.
Dealing with little rebellions like this means you're less likely to face bigger rebellions later.
The downside, as you've noticed, is the cost of the retinues and levies. Having your levies raised costs gold and so will replacing retinue losses. Using vassal levies too much will annoy your vassals and make things worse. This is gold that could be spent on other things, such as buildings, holdings, or really expensive crown jewels.
This also relies on not having an empowered council. If your council gets to vote on imprisonment, title revocation, or title grants, they will make it much more difficult.