I'm glad to see that you've made it. Waging wars is not always good for the peasants that are sick of going and dying on your silly wars that provide them with nothing but it is also not very good for you; Your councillors, heir or possible heirs, friends and spouses can die, your character without an heir can bring you to a sudden game over by falling off their horse, your beautiful soulmate sister can die on siege or god forbid, your yummy face of jesus artifact can get stolen! If you want to avoid these stuff from happening you are at the right place my peace loving god fearing friend. Keep reading.

The peace is important in many ways that are implemented to game in later stages via DLC's (they were still important but not as much in my opinion)

1) Development, City/Castle Building, Control: This can also be called "ruling your lands" in short, i will go over shortly why these 3 things matter;
•Development : Development matters to improve your culture and get through ERA's, it is basically Tech in Crusader Kings III, by having more time to develop your lands, and build stuff that can improve the development might take time and solid income which you don't get while at war, i'll go more over that building part riiiiiiight now

•City/Castle Building: Now to be able to get a solid income from your lands requires you to be not at war since control that i will talk about in a little bit, the more income you get, the more investment you have that you can spend on your lands thus make more income, also you can build buildings such as Universities and Guilds to be able to get more development out of your land that will boost your culture, the other thing you can invest your money into is activities such as hunts, pilgrimages, university visits or when you actually want to make wars, you can have money in your pocket for merceneries which can actually win you wars without using levies even. Money is always good.

Note: Keep in mind to be able to get some buildings you will need the fascinations in your culture which requires time and development, if you are having issues with "oh but my culture is too big" you can diverge your culture to be able to have bigger avarage development since your diverged culture will be in your realm, thus you can just boost development of each county you have to be able to maximize your avarage development to unlock fascinations faster. I will make a guide about cultures if people keep upvoting my guides anyway.

•Control: When someone sieges your castle, that county's control lowers, that makes you get lower income of both levies and gold, which is quite bad, and to be able to get that sweet control level back it can take years and years, and considering not all the wars go good, you might lose control in multiple counties that could make internal wars, and if a ruler is not prepared for it it can result in a game over (not very likely but still), control level is very important in CK3, even your vassals control level must be helped as the ruler by the player.


2) Activities, more Roleplaying rather than unit spamming: Now, even if you're not a war leader ruler (which means a ruler that has more commander points so you use them as commander [leader of your armies]) it still doesn't mean that your ruler is fine to be not at castle during wars, why? Well here's why;
•Returning from travel: You might be winning a war even while returning from travel but because of the war the travel risk is highly affected, you might get captured, die or lose some travel party members (i hope its not your sister-cousin-soulmate that dies).
•Common RP matter, if you don't care about this you got me, but if you do who wants to be a ruler that leaves their realm at the time of war, i mean if my character is a craven yes sure but i'll still use the X button for the doubt.

And while you're not at war you can just focus on more activities, grand tours of taxation or income of opinion of your strong vassals, you can focus on intrigue of other realms to maybe place one of your kids on the throne (check my how to make empires without wars guide if you're interested in this), or go to holy lands for your holy duties, activities just overall add way too much Roleplayable scenarios and people actually seem to forget that this game is majorly RP, and it is quite fun once you get the hang of it. You can make grand weddings without thinking about the war and focus on the great events, make grand tournaments and enjoy a more "friendly" war than a real war.

Well there are more war types than i have sister-lovers in this game, if i have to generalize them i'd put them in 5 different types.

1) Offensive Wars: Offensive wars are declared by you for a claim or any other casus belli that you have on the person you declared war into. These wars usually make you gain counties, duchies or even kingdoms or empires.

2) Defensive Wars: Defensive wars are the wars that are declared on you, it can be the same as offensive as in they can declare a war on you through a claim that they have on your counties or duchies vice versa, it can be a claimant war for your primary title rather than a county etc.

3) Ally Wars: These wars are the wars of your allies that you have made through marriages or Diplomacy Perk that lets you make alliances despite the blood connection. The wars themselves could be Defensive or Offensive but for you, they are just Ally wars.

4) Holy Wars: These wars are declared on a differing religion for the holy lands by the Leaders of Faith, examples could be Crusades or Jihad. I don't include "holy war for duchy, county etc." as holy wars, i just consider them as Offensive or Defensive wars as every single ruler can declare them(they don't need to be a leader of faith to wage them).

5) Internal Wars: These wars are directed to ruler of a realm by its vassals, they might want lower crown authority, dispose the current liege, place someone else with a claim on the throne or many more.

Well you've made it so far and i haven't even talked about the main topic of the guide yet. How to stay at peace? Keep in mind its nearly impossible to NEVER wage war in a life time. But there are some key moves that you can make to at least guarantee lower amount of wars. These are;

• Having a liege : Having a liege means when people attack you, they actually declare on your liege, not you. Which means it's your lieges war to defend your titles. You can also join them of course, if you have a strong Liege like HRE emperor or french king, people will refrain from attacking you even if they have a claim on your lands. Please consider this is only accurate for characters outside of your realm. Other vassals of your liege may still wage war on you without your liege doing anything about it.

• Having strong alliences : Now this one both means no war and also yes war. Being allied to someone means that they can call you to their wars as well, so i'd prefer you find many allies with lower soldiers such as counts. That gives you more chances to maybe even inherit their titles but also they have a lower chance of being at war unless theyre independent.

• Requesting/Demanding Hostages : Hostages are not a 100% guarentee that someone will not wage war on you but it is a great way to at least kill some children if it does't work.

• Having a great army yourself : After all, If you have a big army, you can choose not to attack anyone and people will not choose to attack you.

• Converting : If you have a different religion that wants that piece of land from you, maybe converting to their faith will solve your issues since they won't be able to use the declare holy war against your titles.

• Scheming : If you have characters that have claims on your titles, maybe you can scheme against them to potentially kidnap them or kill them and then get rid of their claims that way. No claims no wars afterall.