The Roads to Power DLC introduces Administrative realms. An Administrative Realm (hereafter Admin) plays quite differently to Feudal/Clan/Tribal, especially as a vassal rather than the top liege. An Admin realm is divided into duchy-sized Provinces (or Themes) which cannot be owned, but instead have a Governor (Strategos) appointed by the Empire. Control of a Province will not be inherited by the child of the current Governor, but will be assigned based on usage of a Admin-specific currency called Influence. A character can only be Governor of one Province, so it is not possible for a character to amass multiple duchies in the way a non-Admin ruler might aspire to.

Except on the lowest level of Admin Authority (set by the Emperor) vassals cannot wage war on each other, nor on neighbours outside the Empire, except for one county at a time. So military expansion is not really a viable way to increase your power. Instead, you will seek to acquire Influence and judiciously use it to increase the dominance of your House. Intrigue and Stewardship will be the most useful attributes to pursue.

The Admin currency of Influence can be acquired in a number of ways: being a Province Governor, completing Governor tasks, being on your Liege's Council, alliance with Heads of Houses. These are a slow monthly trickle, but there are two more lucrative methods.

Set your Spymaster to Find Secrets at the Emperor's court. Almost every secret will yield the opportunity to Blackmail the perpetrator for 30 or 60 Influence, and a Hook. You could convert these hooks to gold using Steward: Golden Obligations, but you might find the hooks more useful to recruit people for your Schemes. If you run out of secrets to find at the Emperor's court, then look in your own court, or those of the largest vassals.

Acquire more Province Governors for your House. Each Governor of your House, who has positive Opinion of you, gives you +1 Influence each month. So get your House members into Governorships (more on that below) and then Sway each one to positive Opinion of you. Note that everyone in your House is getting the same benefit from each extra Governor, so for your House, it's more like +1 Influence per month per House member.

Influence cannot be inherited, so burn it before you die.

At the beginning, you are likely to be Head of your House and Dynasty. In an Admin realm, the House Head gets control of the family Estate, where you can build some extra buildings, including a Mansion which adds Influence. You can also create and maintain a House army.

The House Head role is inherited by your Player Heir. Unfortunately, if you have a Governorship (your Primary Title) and later your Player Heir gets a Governorship as well, then they are no longer deemed your Player Heir, because they cannot now be first in line to receive your Primary Title. Across generations, this tends to push the House Head role away from the strongest members of the House towards the youngest and weakest. This is a problem, because the House Head inherits the family Army, Gold, Estate and Artefacts, and controls the Dynasty Legacies.

Declining to give a Governorship to your preferred House Head heir doesn't really work, because your fellow House members gladly Invest in that person for a Governorship regardless, leaving you with the unpalatable choice of either losing your chosen Player Heir (when they become a Governor) or else wasting your Influence to counteract what your fellow House members are doing.

You might acquire your first Province in a number of ways. Perhaps you started the game as a Province Govenor. Perhaps you started as an Adventurer, and the Emperor bribed you with a Province to help him in a war. Perhaps you started as a Count and used your Influence to get appointed.

There is a sidebar to show you the list of Provinces in your Empire (the Byzantine Empire has upwards of 30). For each Province, you can see the current Governor and the candidates next in line for that Province, sorted by their Acclamation Score, where the highest Score will inherit the Province. There are several components which comprise this Acclamation Score: the stats of the candidate and whatever pluses and minuses have been caused by the Influence of others. Note that females (or males if you have gender roles reversed) get -80%, and children cannot be candidates.

Where the succession of the Province is contested, the Score of the leading candidate can be quite high (100+) and several hundred Influence would be needed to get your candidate into first position. Other provinces might have little (<20) or no competition, and just a small amount of Influence will get your candidate (even a female) into the lead. Deploying your female House members when you can, will be useful once most of your male House members already have Provinces.

Using up a lot of Influence on a Province where the current Governor is still young, may prove to be a waste, as it may be decades before that Province next changes hands. What we are more interested in, is Provinces which will change hands soon, and thus where an investment of Influence will pay off before being outbid by someone else. That might be because the current Governor is old and unwell, or because the current Governor is about to lose a Faction war with the Emperor.

Look through each Province to find Governors who are old (50+) and whose health heart has turned brown. If the leading candidate score is less than 70, you may be able to get one of your House Members into first place using less than 100 Influence. If there is no current candidate, then you can deploy one of your female House members as your candidate. You should be using a different candidate for each likely Province, so that when you win one, you are not wasting your investment in the others.

Keep an eye on any Faction wars against the Emperor, where the rebels and the Emperor have similar military strength. If the rebels look like they will lose, then you can expect the Emperor to imprison and revoke all the Province Governors who took part. Check the Provinces of those rebels before they lose the war, and again you may find Provinces where a small investment of Influence will get your candidate into the lead. Note that you may be able to ensure the rebels lose the war by entering it yourself on the side of the Emperor. Use your siege units to siege down rebel provinces far away from the rebel doomstack. You might also get some gold and ransomable prisoners from successful sieges.

Applying these techniques diligently, you should regularly be able to acquire more Governorships for your House, finding yourself only limited by how many adult male members of your House you have (one Province each!).

You should also be keeping an eye on the succession for the Provinces already controlled by your House. Where it is cheap to do so, you should ensure they will pass to another member of your House. Avoid the temptation to burn hundreds of Influence just to retain a particular Province, when there is a new Province to be had for a lot less. In terms of the Influence income, every Province is worth the same, so you don't need to get emotionally attached to any particular Province.

Outside of the Admin realm mechanics, to get a Claim on the Empire, you need to own 51% of the counties or be a descendant of a previous Emperor. The first is impossible within an Admin realm, and the second is only possible if you start within one of the relevant families, or else marry into the Imperial family so your later children will get a claim. Independence and Dissolution factions are blocked for Admin vassals, which is why the Byzantine Empire is so durable now, when you are playing as one of its neighbours.

Within the Admin realm mechanics, the amount of Acclamation Score needed to become Emperor will look ridiculously high at first. In addition to the candidate stats and Influence investments, the Score also includes the Powerful Family Rating, which is primarily the number of Governorships held by the House of the candidate. So Houses with more Governors need to spend less on Investments to get their candidates to the top of the list. Therefore your longer term plan to become Emperor needs to include acquiring a lot of the Province Governorships into your House (as above).

It is tempting to spend the Influence to get to yourself or one of your House members to the top of the list of Empire heirs as soon as you can. However, becoming Emperor is easier than retaining Emperor within your House. If you burn all your Influence to get there, then you will have no Influence left to ensure your heir will also be Emperor. Another member of your House might jump the gun on this, as they are also all getting the Influence benefit from the extra Governorships. However, as an AI character, they may not be able to successfully fend off any subsequent Claimant faction/war.

Once your House has significantly more Provinces than anyone else, then you will find that all the top candidates are members of your House, and you can use your Influence to make sure it is you at the front of the list. Once you are at the front of the list, a Murder or Abduct scheme by you on the Emperor, can trigger the succession. You can use your blackmail hooks to persuade people to help you, who would otherwise decline.

Because your number of Governorships is limited by the number of adults in your House, it is likely to be a third generation character who can make a successful play for the Throne. Give your third generation children an Intrigue Education, and choose Traits which boost Intrigue. You might find you are also giving yourself negative Opinion modifiers, but Sway can work around that. When you become that character, work down the Intrigue:Schemer perk tree. Propose yourself as Spymaster to your liege the Emperor (250 Influence?) to make your Schemes easier. With a little patience, you should be able to acquire enough hooks on people at the Capital to get your Murder/Abduct Scheme to 90%+ success chance, and 80%+ secrecy.

Once you are Emperor, you can choose which of your children to make the next top candidate, either directly via Investments or by making them Co-Emperor or Designated Heir. Because the Empire title is now your Primary title, whichever child (or other relative) is the lead candidate, also becomes your Player Heir.

You should carry on acquiring Influence, so you can fend off any competitors for the Throne. Once you reach something like 20 Governorships, you may find some of your House splintering off into cadet Houses, which crimps your Influence income a little. However, even the Influence income from 20 Province Governors should be more than enough to keep your House securely on the Throne. You just need to pay closer attention to who you now give Provinces too, as the cadet House names and shield logos will likely be very similar to your own. In the Character Finder, you can put your House name into the text search box, to avoid seeing the cadet Houses when filtering via Dynasty.

While you are a Province Governor, you won't find much use for your military, except perhaps to interfere in other people's Claim wars. I would suggest one unit of siege weapons in each of your personal army and your Province army, and enough infantry that you can take Castles far away from the main war action. Spending perks in Martial is unlikely to be a good investment.

On the two lowest levels of Realm law, you can acquire single Counties beyond the borders of the Empire, but even if you do, they will likely revert to the Emperor on your death, rather than go to your Player Heir. However, you might get a new vassal to boost your Council member choices.
Making a Liberty Faction to decrease the Realm law is usually a fruitless exercise, because the AI Emperor increases the Realm law level just as the Liberty war triggers, so even if you win, you are back where you started.

Once you are Emperor, more of the normal military options become available to you as Top Liege. You can Conquest against neighbouring Counties, and Duchies which are part of your de Jure. You can and should alter the Admin contract of frontier duchies, to Naval or Frontier, to allow or instruct them to attack neighbouring Duchies. You can use Holy Wars against different Faith neighbours of all sizes, but note that if you are playing in the Byzantine Empire, you don't get the Holy War options against Catholics because of the Ecumenism doctrine. You can evade these Faith restrictions by reforming/creating a new Faith, as described here, but note that you then become a target for Crusades from the Christian realms.

As Emperor, you get control of a lot of military regiments: perhaps 5 from your personal army, another 5 as the Emperor, plus 3 from your personal Province and 3 from the realm capital Duchy (Thrace). Maybe another 3 if you are House Head. You can also call on the Province armies of other Provinces than your own.

Once your House is secure on the Throne, you can build up the Empire and Thrace regiments, knowing they will pass to your Heir, along with your personal army. Building up troops in the Province you ruled before you were Emperor is less useful, as your Heir will likely bring a different Province with them, when they inherit.

You will have far more regiments than domain baronies to station them in. So prioritise the largest and strongest of your Regiments for stationing. This is likely to be your personal army (larger Regiments), the Varangian Guards (strong unit) and Cataphracts (strong units). Don't worry about stationing your siege units. If you intend to expand the Empire militarily then the Thrace castles are the priority for upgrading military buildings.

An Administrative realm suits a player who wants to play high rather than wide.

The Province mechanics mean that every vassal is a Duchy size vassal, and every new Duchy acquired, becomes another Admin Province unless you deliberately turn off the Admin mechanics for that new territory, by destroying the Duchy Title. Although the Vassal limit is greatly increased, the micro-management of Province succession does not scale well into a greatly expanded Empire. You cannot just assign a loyal Dynasty member as a Duke or King tier vassal and forget about it, like you would in Feudal; there will always be other Houses quietly using their Influence to usurp the succession of each Duchy/Province.

So aiming at Decisions like Restore the Roman Empire or Dismantle German Pretenders becomes a huge grind unless you deliberately turn off the Admin realm features, and use Feudal or Clan mechanics to expand.

Aiming at the Strengthen Bloodline decision is also directly hindered by the Admin realm mechanics. Even if you as Emperor decline to give titles to your children and grandchildren, so that they remain at Court and you can control who they marry, your other House members will happily Invest in those same children/grandchildren to get them Governorships. Once made a Governor, all the children of the new Governor move away from your Capital to the new Province, thus removing them from your Find Spouse scope. Those same children now refuse to be invited back to your Court because they are the vassals of the new Governor.

Because the war options are so constrained for an Admin vassal, there is a lot of sitting around waiting for events to fire. The Governance issues are few and far between. Unless you are optimised into Intrigue, Schemes take years to come to fruition. Most of your activity will be micro-managing Province succession.

The game clearly wants you to use more Schemes to progress your plans. However, apart from the Schemes to Depose/Murder/Abduct the Emperor, I didn't find any Scheme more useful than just direct Investment (+ or -) in specific candidates. Occasionally it might be useful to Slander a candidate for multiple Provinces, but it is usually the Player who is the target of such Schemes.

The Scheme mechanics themselves are less than ideal, in that you have to start the Scheme in order to see who can be recruited to the Scheme and how effective they will be. If it turns out that you do not yet have enough good collaborators to get the Scheme to the level of success chance and secrecy you want, then cancelling the Scheme blocks its use for 10 years!

The Chariot Races are interesting, but betting on them looks like a mug's game (just like in real life): almost all the options have expected returns lower than 1 (multiply success chance by quoted returns), so you are just throwing your money away. (The quoted returns include the return of your original stake.)

Overall, an Admin realm is a good choice if you like to play tall, love Intrigue schemes, or like the role-play aspects of the inter-House rivalries. It is not a good choice if your preference is to play wide, or breed super-powered children.

An Admin Empire could be an interesting scenario for a multi-player game, where each player starts as a different House on the same weak tier (Adventurer? Count? Weak Province?) and victory is scored by how many years your House controls the Throne of the Empire. This combines elements of co-operative and competitive play. Do we stitch up our House competitors even at a cost to the safety of the Empire, or do we prioritise defending the Empire even if it costs us relative to competing Houses.

This is a realistic parallel to the choice facing the historical Houses of the Byzantine Empire, and one which they eventually messed up in 1453.