What factors influence the likelihood of inheriting provinces?

[Lord_Nick]

I like marrying the princesses of venerable kings and scooping up 1-3 provinces from other kingdoms. Just wondering what factors I can influence that will increase the probability of me gaining a province vs. going to war?


I try to make the relationship as harmonious as possible by giving gifts of gold.
I try to avoid getting into too many "agreements" (Trade, Non-Aggressions, Alliance), but don't say no if the "target" asks for them. This way, my Kingdom Power doesn't get knocked down too much if they decline my claim.
I don't decline any requests from the target to break relations or attack other kingdoms. This avoids hits to my Kingdom Power.
If the target kingdom has multiple princesses, I've tried marrying all of them to my princes, but that didn't seem to help in the one example I can think of. See Epir AAR, married 3 princes to the 3 princesses of Jerusalem.
If I have multiple princes, I try to marry into multiple kingdoms, but have instances where all claims were denied.
Do the skills of my King or the target kingdom's Dead or Living King matter?
Is there some kind of hidden counter keeping track of how often I try to inherit kingdoms, which punishes me if I try to inherit too often?
Does my Overall Power score or Gold balance (they are related) affect the likelihood of the target saying yes? Should I try to maximize my Gold Balance when I think a target King is about to die?


I guess if I go to the effort and expense of marrying off a prince, I want to make sure I get something out of it instead of reduced Kingdom Power and war.

[Elvain]

factors that influence inheriting are:
1) agreements you have with the target kingdom
2) relations you have with the target kingdom
3) if you have land border with the provinces that are offered to you. If there is common land border, the probability is higher

unfortunately I can't tell you how is it in points 1 and 2 in vanilla as I don't remember when I played it last. But i think that the better agreements you have, the higher probability to inherit some land

I don't remember any evidence of other factors

[Lord_Nick]

Thanks for your response Elvain ... I think there must be more to it than that because I can think of examples where the conditions varied:

1) Agreements ... I've inherited provinces where I only had peace with the target kingdom, but been denied when they've been my ally (and my KP dropped from +5 to -2)

2) Relations ... I try to make mine Harmonious before the target king dies, so it's not usually a factor. Even so, I think the target kingdom remembers because I had a vassal with Harmonious relations declare war on me when I tried to inherit land twice in a row. They were also an ally.

3) I don't think land borders really matter except in choosing which provinces to offer you. I've inherited land on the other side of the map. They just gave me the provinces closest to me, or the ones that were the poorest or most troublesome for them (different religion, etc).


Do you think the "personality" of the target king matters? If he's expansionist, timid, peaceful, militarist?

[Angryminer]

We're talking about propabilities, not rules. That means with harmonious relations, an alliance and a big border your claim can fail, and with bad relations, no border and not even a trade agreement it can succeed. No one can tell you how the dice will fall, we can just tell you what is more likely.
Elvain's statement is based on the script-files that hold the modifiers of propability for each point Elvain wrote. So we can be quite sure that these are the only factors.

Angryminer

[Lord_Nick]

OK ... thank you both.