Poor health genociding my courtiers.

[highsis]

I've lost 7 tutors to 'poor health' in 4 years.

It seems to be a 'cleaning' mechanics aimed at killing off courtiers without titles to reduce the size.

The problem is it's been killing every tutor I paid and brought to specifically teach my young ruler. This in infuriating.

How can I prevent this? I've exhausted most useful tutor resources and I spent, as one province count, over 100 ducats until I realized the game was intentionally killing off my tutors.

Also what's the exact rules for 'poor health' striking you?



What I found from a mod description of court size:


"The "court prune" (behind-the-scenes action where irrelevant courtiers are silently removed from the game) has also been made stronger: any 1 year old or older person (in vanilla is 40!) who is absolutely useless (e.g. no honorary title or council job) and unconnected to important people will be removed in courts larger than 1 person (vanilla is 10)."

Is this true? If so has anyone figured out the details?

What about married courtiers? Heir to other titles? Children of other rulers? Noble(not you)'s kins?

This would be absurd if all of the above characters get killed off by this poor health.

edit: To be exact, I lost 7 guardians of my ruler. Court tutor was someone else.

 

[Cuthuthulu]

Right click their portrait and toggle the character as special interest, It's the star icon. That should stop the game from purging the character.

 

[highsis]

Right click their portrait and toggle the character as special interest, It's the star icon.

Have you confirmed this?

 

[Mithradates]

I've noticed that my courtiers seem to be dying at a higher rate than before. In particular, when one courtier dies, their spouse usually dies two or three months later, having suddenly developed "poor health". While this can happen in real life, especially with really old people, it doesn't happen with such regularity, so it irks me a bit.

Personally I don't like the idea of the game automatically pruning away at my court just because it reached some arbitrary number of people. If I decide my court has too many people, I can just marry them off, refuse to let them marry within the court so they don't have as many kids, simply assassinate them, or use intrigue focus to manufacture reasons to throw them in the oubliette. Court size is easy enough to manage. I don't need the game killing my courtiers off automatically.

 

[highsis]

I've noticed that my courtiers seem to be dying at a higher rate than before. In particular, when one courtier dies, their spouse usually dies two or three months later, having suddenly developed "poor health". While this can happen in real life, especially with really old people, it doesn't happen with such regularity, so it irks me a bit.

Personally I don't like the idea of the game automatically pruning away at my court just because it reached some arbitrary number of people. If I decide my court has too many people, I can just marry them off, refuse to let them marry within the court so they don't have as many kids, simply assassinate them, or use intrigue focus to manufacture reasons to throw them in the oubliette. Court size is easy enough to manage. I don't need the game killing my courtiers off automatically.

You can actually ask them to leave, too.

 

[faiuwle]

The paragraph you quoted has nothing to do with this, this is a different type of pruning. The only thing you can do is keep your court size below ~50-60.

 

[highsis]

The paragraph you quoted has nothing to do with this, this is a different type of pruning. The only thing you can do is keep your court size below ~50-60.

My court size was about 40 when my tutors were murdered by the game.

 

[Rikissa]

The pruning doesn't affect player courts, the developers have stated as much. It only affects AI courts.

What affects a player court is the fertility malus you get after 30 courtiers. Any court with more than 25 people is also more susceptible to diseases, hospitals help with this type of mortality.

 

[faiuwle]

Pruning clearly affects player courts, as you can see from this thread. A dev has confirmed that the game reduces their health significantly and thus they die of "poor health". I don't know why you people keep trying to insist otherwise, except to gaslight other users by telling them their experiences with the game are fake.

 

[highsis]

The pruning doesn't affect player courts, the developers have stated as much. It only affects AI courts.

What affects a player court is the fertility malus you get after 30 courtiers. Any court with more than 25 people is also more susceptible to diseases, hospitals help with this type of mortality.

I think it does, from experience. I think poor health death is separate from the pruning the devs stated.

I lost 7 tutors in 4 years because my court was overcrowded and I didn't give the tutor any titles or council position. None of them had any diseases and they were not even old.

 

[highsis]

Pruning clearly affects player courts, as you can see from this thread. A dev has confirmed that the game reduces their health significantly and thus they die of "poor health". I don't know why you people keep trying to insist otherwise, except to gaslight other users by telling them their experiences with the game are fake.

Has the dev stated when the condition is applied and how much health is reduced?

 

[faiuwle]

No. But I've noticed that it is much more aggressive when your court size is in the 60s, and drops off below that, so I suspect the amount of health scales with the size of your court. Any dev is welcome to come contradict me.

 

[Kipman2000]

Doesn’t court tutor count as an honorary title? If it does the pruning shouldn’t affect court tutors according to the statement above

 

[Mithradates]

To add weight to the argument that the pruning does affect player courts, I'd like to point out that in my current campaign I have this recurring thing happening where I frequently receive a notification that some random 16 or 17 year old girl in my court, I think always lowborn, has died of "poor health". It just happened again a couple minutes ago. This is always someone I've never heard of. It's like the game randomly generates female characters to make up for the gender disparity in my court, and then immediately kills them off with poor health because their presence makes the court too crowded. It bugs me because, even in the middle ages, teenagers didn't just drop dead randomly. It's one thing when characters that are old or middle-aged die of "poor health", that makes sense, but when teenagers are doing it with clockwork regularity, that's different; it becomes clear that the game is just cleansing characters to reduce the population. This didn't happen in my last campaign that I played a few months ago; it's only become a thing in the current campaign that I started this last week.

My court is currently about 65 people.

 

[Rikissa]

You can check out the dev's responses here (keep scrolling down):
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-from-bad-health.1054394/page-4#post-23507075

To summarize,

a) The pruning mechanism in the game doesn't affect the player court.
b) Player courts have a separate mechanic where useless characters are given a health penalty, but it is not particularly severe. To be considered "useless", the character needs to not to have any titles, claims or relations to anyone. A tutor would not be considered "useless", thus he would not get any health penalty.

To this I add that

c) courts with more than 25 characters are considered "crowded" and more susceptible to disease, this is an additional mechanic. This threshold can be changed in defines.lua.
d) you will see more death messages if you keep a large court because more people = more deaths.

 

[highsis]

Doesn’t court tutor count as an honorary title? If it does the pruning shouldn’t affect court tutors according to the statement above

They were guardians specifically told to 'tutor' my ruler. Court tutor was someone else.

 

[DmUa]

Have you confirmed this?

- i can confirm that this doesnt work. I always mark my illegitimate children/relatives as special interest and they always die in about a year after maturity because of "poor health". Pruning or not, its a highly annoying game mechanic, not to mention that player court will be always crowded due to refugee shenanigans. And no, asking to leave is not a solution to court crowded by refugees, i typically doesnt have endless supply of free prestige to ask all those freeloader to leave. At first glance it could look that "bah its just 5 prestige, not a big deal". Well its not a big deal when you are "The Emperor of Catkind" or have to ask to leave 1-3 person, but it really scales when you "Emperor of Nothing, Ruler of No one" constantly have to "ask" whole freaking families of migrants to leave your court and then find that parents left their children behind because who cares about children, right?

 

[faiuwle]

You can check out the dev's responses here (keep scrolling down):
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/foru...-from-bad-health.1054394/page-4#post-23507075

To summarize,

a) The pruning mechanism in the game doesn't affect the player court.
b) Player courts have a separate mechanic where useless characters are given a health penalty, but it is not particularly severe. To be considered "useless", the character needs to not to have any titles, claims or relations to anyone. A tutor would not be considered "useless", thus he would not get any health penalty.

To this I add that

c) courts with more than 25 characters are considered "crowded" and more susceptible to disease, this is an additional mechanic. This threshold can be changed in defines.lua.
d) you will see more death messages if you keep a large court because more people = more deaths.

It definitely affects people with relations. Maybe not people with relations tobt g e player, but I would see this happening to people with lovers and friends and rivals, too.

Also, this device response clearly states that pruning happens in player courts.

 

[Savijari]

Check #2 of this excellent post:

Allright... new statistics!

Health and Death
A total of 4002 characters were observed (from age 16 to death) regarding their life expectancy based on health as the variable. Other variables, such as epidemics, assassinations etc. were eliminated. There were two sets of samples, one with a health value of 6.00 which is pretty much the highest base health any character can achieve without trait/event modifiers. The other set had 5.00 health, which is the average base health of males. All characters were males, but sex here is irrelevant, the only advantage females have is their average 0.5 higher starting health. They live longer because their base health is higher on average. I should have done a 4.00 health set (which is pretty much the floor) but this experiment was pretty annoying to do (requires to actually process 90 years ingame)

Findings:
1) There seems to be a flat 4.5% chance that a character will have a mortal illness irrespective of health. Ironically this percentage was higher for the high health group, but that is just statistical randomness I think.
2) This one is a bit difficult to understand. The game distinguishes between 3 types of "natural" death. In case of "Natural" death, the character just dies apparently without any reason. The tooltip on the skull icon also says this. Someone here on the forums or reddit, can't remember pointed out that the game has a "culling" system: it does a health check every once in a while, and kills off characters who cannot make the check. The check is per individual, that is why you see people with cancer outliving healthy characters. It was also found that there are age brackets. Characters who are killed by this random check and are below age 45 automatically get the "Poor health" reason instead of the "natural death". It is possible (though very unlikely) that a Ruler Designer character with a health of 20.00 dies in a year in "poor health". The third type, "Trait" are deaths related to the character having a trait that is used as an explanation for death. The culling is the same, but if the character has a health condition, it is given in the tooltip instead of "natural".
So, without epidemics, characters on average have a 0.6% chance (for 6.00 health characters) or a 0.9% chance (for 5.00 health characters) to develop a health condition on their own, without any epidemic and die from that condition.
3) Approximately 4.5% are killed of before the age 45 by the culling.
4) The average age of characters with 5.00 health is 63.8 years, 68% falling into the 62.1-65.5 year range. Median is 65 years.
5) The average age of characters with 6.00 health is 64.8 years, 68% falling into the 63.0-66.6 year range. Median is 66 years.
6) It appears, that 1.00 health translates to one additional year lived on average, BUT most likely this is NOT linear. I expect that characters with 4.00 health would live MUCH shorter on average than those of 5.00 or 6.00, not just 1 year shorter on average. This is because they are more susceptible to developing conditions on their own, not to mention they are very unlikely to survive epidemics.

NOTES
The experiment did not include child survivability. Much like in real life, taking child mortality into account, that 1.00 health would have made a much greater difference as low health characters are very likely to die before age 6 (this is hardcoded in the game, the culling system is harsher for infants and people over 70). My suspicion that a character with 4.00 health is quite unlikely to survive childhood.
The experiment also excluded epidemics. They cannot be really tested because epidemics are extremely random (when, where and which sickness occurs). My guess is that epidemics on average lower the life expectancy by around 10 years.

CONCLUSION
My unsubstantiated estimation is that life expectancy with Reaper's Due epidemics and child mortality should be around the age of 50. War and assassinations also need to be included, but again, they are very arbitrary. The conclusion is, that expecting your ruler to reach age 60 is not a good strategy. Make sure you have a competent heir ready to take over when your ruler hits age 45.
So, the value of the health attribute largely depends on where you rule. Rulers of coastal regions are much more susceptible to epidemics than those deep inland making the health attribute very valuable to them. If you are in the very middle of the HRE you can focus more on other attributes.

Note that the 'health check every once in a while' can hit anyone anytime. Losing seven tutors to it in mere four years is highly unlikely however, maybe there is something buggy.

Otherwise always try to have a court smaller than 25 people or whatever number your modded crowded_threshold_modifier is (mine is 45).

 

[Meneth]

Quick summery of how the code works:

There's three mechanisms to keep courts at a sensible size:
1. Pruning - This outright kills characters. This does not affect player courts. It does not kill anyone you'd consider remotely interesting (they have to have no parents, children, spouse, job, minor titles, claims, artifacts, society, consorts, lovers, friends, or rivals. That includes dead parents, children, or spouses)
2. Health penalty - This makes characters more likely to die by lowering their health. This does affect player courts. It does not apply to anyone with parents, nor anyone with a living spouse, a consort, a job, or an honorary title. It does not apply to children. It does not apply to character's of the court owner's dynasty
3. Fertility penalty - This reduces the number of children characters can have by one. This does affect player courts. It affect anyone who does not have a close relative that is landed, as long as there are at least 30 people in the court

So if you're having people die at a high rate, it is either #2, bad luck, or confirmation bias. The code will never outright kill someone in your court due to them being perceived as useless.