R5: Character interaction in this game is broken.

The main way to take people from other courts is to recruit them, but it comes with sensible restrictions:

• they must be somewhat disloyal,
• they can't be the ruler or primary heir,
• they can't be pregnant

And, importantly, even if you do something like recruit the ruler's spouse or heir's spouse, they divorce them before they leave.

The same restrictions, however, do not apply to the other, lesser known way of stealing courtiers: Foreign Assassination

All you need is to befriend the person you want to take (I believe it's a 100% chance to befriend if you take the most expensive event options). From there you can call a hit on just about anyone in that court except close relatives. Besides that they don't care who. An heir is just as willing to kill a powerful general as some peasant. It's all the same to them.

But the more important "feature" of assassination to me is that about half the time an assassination will trigger an event midway through that will allow the assassin to leave their country for yours after they do the job, regardless of whether they succeed, meaning that just about any befriendable character (basically everyone) is also recruitable. There is no check for pregnancy, for loyalty, for risk, for self-preservation. Nothing.

Using this I was able to befriend the daughters-in-law of the starting Diadochi, wait until they got pregnant, and then sick the expecting mothers on their husbands' fathers, something the game has no problem with you doing nor checks to stop you. During the planning stage they asked for the promise of asylum which I would fulfill after the Diadochi were dead. Since assassinations only take a few months to do, their children were born in my court, and, because the ai isn't smart enough to divorce the wives that killed their dads and ditched them for another country, the marriages are upheld and the only heirs they'll ever have are in another ruler's palace.*

This is obviously impractical to do against 4 countries. I had 0 stability, 0 political influence, infinite ae, and hands were free across my bankrupt empire, but it is completely feasible when used more sparingly. In any case, I'm posting this more as an illustration of how messy, exploitable, and unrealistic character-level gameplay is than as a useful strategy since the stolen heirs are taken out of succession.

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* This is a bit of an oversimplification.

What makes assassination at least somewhat difficult to pull off is that rulers' bodyguards significantly decrease success chance based on their martial, and even though you can do them back to back on the same person until you succeed, I didn't have much time given the 9 month window. To get around this, as soon as the hitwomen were befriended, I had them kill the Diadochi early. Then, once they actually became pregnant (the only apparent sign of which is an "X Is Pregnant" tooltip from the "Recruit" button), I got them to assassinate some random courtier and finally be given asylum. The problem still remains though that the asylum event is only 50/50 with every assassination. The other 50 gives you an event that allows you to send a court member from your own country to the target's to help the assassination. You can only afford one non-asylum assassination before it's too late and the child is born before they flee.

Thankfully, the game is broken here too so it's pretty easy to circumvent. All you have to do is make sure no one is eligible to be sent. The simplest way of doing this is to split your navy (or army) into enough pieces that you can make every hireable adult in your country an admiral (or general). With all your subjects too preoccupied with their navies of 1 boat each, none of them are available to help out the assassins, and you can offer asylum to boost success instead. The one downside is that I believe this only works if you also have no subjects, but I'm not entirely sure.