With a good marshal you can get over a +100% levy size in your castle. Especially extra castles in your capital, as your marshal can also increase levy size in a single county. Personally hold as many holdings as you can in these places. As an independent ruler, you get a 50% levy bonus in your capital county, and a 25% bonus in the rest of your capital duchy. Faction strength compares your troops to theirs, meaning just having a bigger army can increase stability. You also want to consolidate your own powerbase. New territory means new opinion boosts to hand out. External wars are also a good source of opinion boosts. Consolidating your vassals can be easier as well, reducing the number of vassals you need to improve opinion with, but it also means the impact of an individual vassal not being with you is much higher. Non aggression pacts also prevent vassals from joining factions, but long term the marriage ties lead to lots of vassals having claims to the throne, making it risky to rely too heavily on. If you can get viceroyalties, things become pretty trivial, just hand out viceroyalties to older people, and they'll die before the opinion bonus runs out, making everyone estatic for handing out titles to them. I forget the exact number, as it's been dropped several times, but a vassal won't join an increase council faction if they are above a certain opinion of you.You should focus high diplo characters, increase noble customs, hand out all your minor titles to your most influential vassals, get marriage ties, assign vassals to mentor your children, bribe them if need be. With an abolished council, vassal opinion is paramount. Spawn characters and make them loyalists if you are refering to the council DLC that does the politics stuff You can, it just gets harder the larger you get, but I have managed to keep a kingdom stable with an abolished council once before. You can't play effectively without a council.

Originally posted by al_x_ator2411:If you mean abolishing the council then you can only achieve it with loyalist councilmen.

Absolute rule law ck2