I might have spoken too soon! My current run started out much the same way as my earliest runs, but the last several turns have been intense. One of my rivals was assassinated, almost every mood phase activity is fatal, from random garottes to dart guns to informal duels suddenly turning lethal with only a grandmaster skill check before failure. Even holing up privately in my bedroom to scribble notes is lethal. I'm not sure what I've done all that differently to the runs which were all completely peaceful. An imperial survey shows every elector almost universally having me as at least generally positive, with the exceptions being Zolot, Milan, and Radomil as hostile, and I've had them hostile before, too. Khdarr, Krovos, Ethexae, and even Lukomir only view me generally negative. I have Vahter, Lorkas, and Grojdana as advisors for the first time, but they've all been very friendly and previously didn't even need a personal quest to pledge their vote. I did open up Stoyan's personal quest out of curiosity before recruiting him as Science advisor, and so the elector child appears in the portrait while traveling this time around, but that didn't seem to have any effect otherwise. As far as delving into deeper plot, I only got as far as Zorana concluding it would be easier to become empress than steal away a certain large artifact, which I'm pretty sure I'd had happen previously, too. Not sure why I'm now dropping like I'm in OG LLTQ. Maybe I should compare the "winning" saves with Save Log in the History menu to try to work out what the heck might have happened!
bless I appreciate your willingness to help!! I did finally get a winning run but even then I'm not quite sure what I did so differently, and I barely scraped by on votes. I think part of my problem may have definitely been that I was not taking enough advantage of cabinet seats, it took me a while to figure out that I should be offering them to be people and who is best to offer to lol. I have only tried adopting the baby once, the rest of the time I have either declined or I've had enough history knowledge to send the child to be raised by the church.
My biggest issue I've run into is definitely the lethal mood phases, it can get you really boxed in as to what you can do. If you focus on physical stats then you can survive them and even have electors disqualified for trying to assassinate you, which could definitely be helpful in the final vote, but I haven't completed a full run this way yet as I prefer to focus on social and knowledge stats. The general strategy definitely seems to be focus on the votes you can get easily though, and offer seats to anyone who might be a little harder to convince/for the stats for future events. The main big kink I've noticed there is people's impressions of you can be very impacted by who you give seats to and associate with, so there's a lot of different factors to consider! I've taken a bit of a break since I finally got a completed run, but might do some more runs in the future to see if I can iron out some more solid strategies.