Tribals have to call their vassals into war like allies, meaning your vassals can decline sending troops to fight for you if they don't like you. Tribal holdings use prestige instead of money to upgrade their tribal holdings. If you are tribal you can choose to become either a merchant republic or a feudal realm depending on the decisions you make. Christians/Muslims/Indians start as feudal, the rest will use the new tribal system. Retinues have been nerfed (250 instead of 500 )

For example if you're being plotted against you can go into hiding (which will make you safer at the cost of negative diplomatic modifiers). They are getting rid of the assassinate button entirely while making plotting to kill someone through intrigue more interesting. I managed to catch some of the live stream. I Imagine you'll still be able to play Empire level rulers without having vassal kings, but you'll end up with some dukes who have equivalent power to a small kingdom. Imagine if you had someone working for you who lived 600 miles away, and the only way to check up on their work was to ride a horse. A king was physically distant from parts of a massive kingdom, and would have trouble keeping tabs on subjects, and would not develop the personal relationships with local nobility that are necessary to develop the interpersonal loyalty feudalism relied on. Having a duke rule part of your Kingdom meant that the vassals in that area had a local executor of the King's will (and authority). I'd see it more as being having too many direct vassals limits the authority you can have, rather than authority limiting the number of direct vassals you can have. While it is true that the French 'Empire' did not have vassal kings, it did have Dukes ruling duchies that are the size of some of the CK2 'Kingdoms' (Duke of Brittany, Duke of Tolouse) Quote from: Vactor on August 27, 2014, 01:59:04 pm I disagree, I think this brings the gameplay more in line with historical reality.

Crusader kings 2 over vassal limit