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[Mini]

Type of holding (castles tend to have more and better troops than cities or churches), upgrades in said holding (some of which also effect the quality of the troops raised), whether the holding is in the capital county or capital duchy (none < duchy < province), martial skill of the person owning the holding, any extra modifers on the holding (stuff like recently conquered). If the person raising the levies isn't also the person owning the holding, then laws and relations. Then also mercenaries can be hired if there's enough money.

So if you have a mediocre martial score and three provinces, but two of them are recently conquered and the last is mediocre then you'll very likely have less troops than someone with good martial skill who has a single province that is well developed.

[Majestic7]

Plus mercenaries, don't forget mercenaries. In small wars they are usually a game changer that decides the war, if the other party just has enough money to hire a group.

[umiman]

All the CK2 DLC up to and including Conclave is on sale at 66% off here. I just bought Horse Lords and Conclave from it.

https://www.wingamestore.com/search/?SearchWord=Crusader+Kings

Steam keys, yadda yadda.

[Putnam]

pcgames5off as a coupon will get you 5% off ($0.25, woo)

[Loud Whispers]

Plus mercenaries, don't forget mercenaries. In small wars they are usually a game changer that decides the war, if the other party just has enough money to hire a group.

The AI also tends to considerably hoard their wealth whilst players tend to spend their wealth as quickly as possible on infrastructure development in order to secure a greater late game advantage

[Grim Portent]

What I'm often surprised by is that a high income Emperor can often run out of things to spend money on in their own holdings. Once you've hit the maximum number of holdings in your own counties and have hit your personal holdings upgrade peak you've got nothing much to spend cash on until your next tech advance, which often takes so long you've got several thousand in the bank.

[Man of Paper]

So Skingrad has acquired the Imperial Isle as well as Applewatch through marriage. A war in their holdings north of the Imperial Isle gave me the opportunity to expand into their territory, using a province I inherited from a marriage as a staging ground. The Colovian Estates, once a massive looming force to my north-east, are embroiled in a constant state of civil wars. Currently two different forces, each supported by one third of the Colovian provinces, are vying for the throne. I have used the opportunity to invade their Kvatch buddies, leaving them with only two provinces for now.

My second ruler of Anvil had himself three daughters, all raised in similar fashion, but each of them went different professional routes. One is a mage, one is a barbarian, and another is a crafty diplomat. The mage was set to inherit the throne when my ruler and his lover had themselves a son. The bastard was legitimized, and at the age of six was crowned when his father passed of an infection. So far the bastard has lived up to his family name by decimating armies that march to battle him and his forces. It's amazing how devastating a few well-timed spells can be.

EDIT: Also of note, the family has had a set of elven armor as well as the Iceblade of the Monarch passed from leader to leader. The family as a whole is also very adept at magic, which may be helping in trouncing my mostly militant-by-manpower neighbors.

EDIT 2: Here's an odd coincidence! My current king is Pelinal the Lionheart. So early on in his career some mystery woman comes to the court stating that she'd like to serve me. Nobody really knows where she came from, but all my nobles are like "Bro don't do it". So I do. She makes a lot of things awesome, not to mention being one of my greatest warriors and commanders (the only better in the kingdom are in my family). Skip forward about 15 years and I decide to google Pelinal, as it's familiarity was bugging me. At the same time I also look at Ahetotis (the badass's name) and see the title "the Shezarrine". Google that too, since it's awful close to Nerevarine and I wanna know exactly what kind of badass she is. Lo and behold I find that a Pelinal Whitestrake is a suspected Shezarrine. Neat!

[Descan]

What I'm often surprised by is that a high income Emperor can often run out of things to spend money on in their own holdings. Once you've hit the maximum number of holdings in your own counties and have hit your personal holdings upgrade peak you've got nothing much to spend cash on until your next tech advance, which often takes so long you've got several thousand in the bank.

Then you start upgrading your vassals holdings so that they can better serve you via money or troops.

Or start building cities everywhere.

There's a lot you can spend money on.

[ZeroGravitas]

What I'm often surprised by is that a high income Emperor can often run out of things to spend money on in their own holdings. Once you've hit the maximum number of holdings in your own counties and have hit your personal holdings upgrade peak you've got nothing much to spend cash on until your next tech advance, which often takes so long you've got several thousand in the bank.

Then you start upgrading your vassals holdings so that they can better serve you via money or troops.

Or start building cities everywhere.

There's a lot you can spend money on.

Nah, there really isn't, especially when most things just provide more gold (like building more cities and upgrading holdings).

You could upgrade every vassals' holdings and spend all your money, but levies become pointless once you have 20-30k in retinues, so there's really no point to upgrading vassals at all. They can't "better serve you" if they're entirely superfluous.

And you hit the zero gold ROI on vassals faster than you do on your own holdings. With your own holdings, you invest X gold for Y income, multiplied by Z. Z is almost always positive and quite high, since it includes whatever your stewardship bonus is, your steward's collect taxes mission, plus any other global income modifiers you might have (trading mission from WoL focus, decadence bonus, etc) With a vassal's holdings, you're already talking about a negative multiplier for Z, because taxes merely give you a percentage of income. And then factor in that the AI is terrible at optimizing its stewardship and basically picks random results in events, so it's never going to have other good income modifiers. In short, it becomes increasingly likely that spending 200-500 gold on a vassal's Castle Town upgrade is never going to pay for itself before the end of the game.

[Rolan7]

There's this great event sequence, I think it's a Patrician one related to gardening, where you can build a fountain.  For an absolutely obscene, possibly scaling, amount of gold you can have it run with wine.

[Putnam]

EDIT 2: Here's an odd coincidence! My current king is Pelinal the Lionheart. So early on in his career some mystery woman comes to the court stating that she'd like to serve me. Nobody really knows where she came from, but all my nobles are like "Bro don't do it". So I do. She makes a lot of things awesome, not to mention being one of my greatest warriors and commanders (the only better in the kingdom are in my family). Skip forward about 15 years and I decide to google Pelinal, as it's familiarity was bugging me. At the same time I also look at Ahetotis (the badass's name) and see the title "the Shezarrine". Google that too, since it's awful close to Nerevarine and I wanna know exactly what kind of badass she is. Lo and behold I find that a Pelinal Whitestrake is a suspected Shezarrine. Neat!

Shit, you can get a Shezarrine? That's amazing. Shezarr is, of course, the Cyrodiilic pantheon version of Lorkhan. I'm reasonably sure Tiber Septim was one as well, though he isn't shown as such in-game.

[Man of Paper]

Yeah, man. Stats were crazy, too. Lowest stat was Stewardship at 17 before she died. She wound up educating all my children. Three of my daughters became warriors without equal (save each other), the fourth daughter was flimsy but wound up being a top-tier magistrate, and my son/heir/now current ruler has some pretty nice stats. Now he's being taught by some normal scrub though.

[Putnam]

Wait, sorry, Tiber wasn't one, just Talos. Rather, the Stormcrown, Ysmir Wulfharth.

EDIT: No, wait, Hjalti was Shezarrine. So was Wulfharth, and Arctus, and Talos, and Tiber Septim. Which is which is difficult to say.

[Grim Portent]

Spending money on my vassals usually winds up being pointless. It takes very little time once I hit Emperor tier to have personal levies + retinues that can crush anything in my path that isn't also an Emperor. Which basically means the Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantines and the Caliphs. I occasionally splurge a bit on vassal relatives so they don't get ousted by their own vassals, but by and large I prefer to leave them weak and without my aid so they are less inclined to rebel due to the differences in levy size.

[EuchreJack]

Spending money on my vassals usually winds up being pointless. It takes very little time once I hit Emperor tier to have personal levies + retinues that can crush anything in my path that isn't also an Emperor. Which basically means the Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantines and the Caliphs. I occasionally splurge a bit on vassal relatives so they don't get ousted by their own vassals, but by and large I prefer to leave them weak and without my aid so they are less inclined to rebel due to the differences in levy size.

Try expanding into Tribal/Nomad lands and "colonizing" them.  That is a real money sink.