A plea for a return of genetics

[RhoDaZZ]

Whether the people of the day understood what was happening was irrelevent. The fact is that genetics played a historical role in things.

We are supposed to play as "the [noble] people of the day", are we not? I think the simplest solution to this would be to include genetics but to hide stats from all characters that are not within your court or family and who has not been spied upon (Realistically: those you haven't made diplomatic exchanges with, but this would require a tedious system not suited for gaming).

So that's not completely realistic either of course, but it gives the real effects of genetics (however small they may be) while at the same time preventing powerplaying, leading to a line superhumans within 100 years of the/every game (who wouldn't want to get an advantage when all you need is to marry the right people and have some luck? - Lifelike randomness is much more fun imo).

 

[Nick B II]

3) Cycles? It is a stat. It's not tested every cycle. It would be accessed when a child is born, and it would be accessed with stats raise naturally(to make sure that they don't exceed/fall beneath the natural minimum and maximums). I can't see that having a huge drain on system resources.

Ah, here's the problem. I have not been clear.

A processor cycle is what happens when the computer does anything. If you're accessing stats you are burning processor cycles at several steps -- a minimum of three, first retrieving the stat from RAM and move it to the processor cache, second when the processor calculates whether to change the stat, and third when you move the new stat back.

Any system relying on parental stats is gonna increase the number of processor cycles by adding two numbers to the equation. If you're looking at an entire lineage you're adding at least 4 four more (for grandparents), and possibly many more (4 grandparents plus, 8 great-grandparents, plus 16 g-g-g-parents, etc.). With more data to take into account your calculation step is also necessarily more complex, and uses more processor time.

Note that while any one set of calculations in this system is trivial, the fact is there are hundreds or thousands of kids running around CK2's map. Which means you're probably gonna have to calculate 3-4 of these per game-day, in addition to all the other crap the game has to deal with.

I had a similarly complex solution to the problem of names. It would have created a random name-list for every baby born, based on the cultural name-list, plus dynastic name, names of prior holders of the dynasty's titles, plus names from super-prestigious contemporaries. It would have been very realistic, and allowed for interesting possibilities like Henry II's resurrection of the Saxon name Edward for Edward I. It would also have ensured that Jean I of France was not followed by John I. But it would also have required calculating a new list for every kid born...

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As for the Medieval people and lineages, they probably would have understood genetics intellectually, but that doesn't mean they applied it to their personal lives.

For example in genetic terms a lowly serf who managed to buy half his home village probably has pretty good genes, whereas the Carolingian Dynasty (who dropped roughly three tiers in the centuries before 1066) probably doesn't. But I doubt anyone would have considered it "good breeding" for a nobleman to marry his heir to the serf's daughter, and damn near everyone would think marrying into Charlemagne's family was "good breeding."

Nick

 

[Jasonkp]

With or without genetics, I think it would be great if stats were hidden from characters not in your court or realm. No matter which part of this debate you find yourself on; it makes great since not to have a dossier sheet on every single character in the game. A spy or diplomatic mission would be a good way to reveal some of this information, as long as it wasn't free/limitless. I hope, more than whatever else we talk about here, that something like this is implemented.

 

[ZhugeKongming]

Are you joking? Mendel? The 'father of genetics?' Used the principles of heredity (the inheritance of traits) to develop the concept of the discrete unit of genetic information? He never used the word 'genetics' or 'genes,' he studied inheritance. To say that genetics and inheritance are unrelated is absurd. I recommend you read up on the subject, if you want to call my statements 'spurious.'

I didn't say they were unrelated. Please read my posts more carefully. I said they weren't the same thing.

Personally I've always thought that Mendel never deserved that title. Darwin or Wallace have just as much claim to it--that is to say, none. Studying heredity without knowing its mechanism is virtually useless, from a scientific standpoint. (This is part of why many of Mendel's discoveries were later shown to be incorrect.) Also, modern genetics doesn't derive its intellectual lineage from Mendel at all; we wouldn't even know about him if it weren't for the rediscovery of his work decades after he died.

And... I don't know why you're talking about a 19th century Austrian monk. What does this have to do with the Middle Ages? Are you claiming that medieval people had Mendel's level of understanding about heredity? They were even more wrong than he was.

And yes, the examples I cited are the basic folk understandings that have been around forever. They are sometimes wrong. Two blonde parents are very likely to have blonde children. That doesn't mean they always will. But that doesn't make the observation any less valid.

This is a modern folk understanding of heredity, yes. I'm still not sure I believe that it's a genuine medieval belief. Assuming they even noticed, medieval and ancient people were just as likely to ascribe such things to the environment, cultural customs, or even the intervention of God. There's a passage from Herodotus (echoed in some medieval chronicles I've read) where he claims that people in Egypt have thicker skulls because they shave their hair and expose their heads to sunlight.

Believe it or not, people were capable of observing patterns before science came along and gave the concepts names and detailed the mechanisms by which those patterns occurred.

Yes, of course. Many ancient peoples kept extraordinarily accurate star charts. That doesn't change the fact that virtually everyone who existed before early modern times was dead wrong about basic things like heliocentrism, the nature of stars, astrology, etc.

Some individuals are having difficulty with the differences between heredity and genetics. Well the short answer is that genetics is just the scientific study of heredity. They are, in effect, the same thing. So when I say that people had a basic understanding of genetics at the time, you could also read that to mean they have a basic understanding of heredity, wrought with misconceptions and errors as well as grains of truth.

They are not the same thing. You could spend your entire life studying the biochemistry of genes, and guess what? That would be genetics. Heredity is only one part, however important, of the study of genes--which is what genetics really is.

 

[Harle]

I had written a response to the post above this but I hit the wrong reply button and lost it. Which is frustrating, and this will be brief.

First of all, genetics is simply the biochemical mechanism of heredity. You can't have heredity without genetics, and genetics causes heredity. They are, in effect, the same thing. Any argument to the contrary is simply arguing semantics, and as someone who has studied a fair bit of biology and genetics, I'm just not interested in arguing over niggling semantic disagreements.

Two, Mendel's work was vital. Yes it was lost and then rediscovered, but it wasn't rediscovered -after- genetics had been explored; his experiments were the key piece that set off a revolutionary way of thinking about heredity as a function of genotype versus phenotype, and if you don't think that's foundational in modern genetics, then you don't know anything about genetics at all. Suffice to say, the biology faculty at my university disagrees with your notion that Mendel's work was useless.

I brought up Mendel to draw the very obvious link between heredity and genetics. He was, after all, that took the concept of heredity, which is a concept that has existed in documentation for close to two thousand years, and set off the scientific study of heredity; ie, genetics. I thought this was clear.

Finally, it doesn't really matter, y'know, to me whether the people of the middle ages had some basic understanding of heredity, or whether they thought that people were liable to give birth to baby pigs. It really has no bearing on whether or not I think that a genetic component to attributes has a place in the game. I would like the game's engine to be as historical precise as possible. If the players want to manipulate it that is their choice. If they choose not to, that is also their choice.

 

[Jasonkp]

As I understand it, genetics was cut out because it resulted in all of Europe evolving into superheroes by the end of the game. So if they can work around that problem, by all means, bring it back.

The 3rd post of this thread.

Genetics, in the form of a weighted percentage, will lead to an upward curve of the "intelligence" stats; a game-breaking feature.

 

[Harle]

Because their implementation was broken. The system I suggested - which is completely unrelated to the system they used - couldn't possibly result in the same thing. Since every character would be an average of their parents(give or take a point), given a fairly random selection of marriages, the distribution of stats at the end of the game should have close to the same average that the distribution of stats at the beginning of the game had. I haven't sat down and done the math on it, granted.

What would throw it off is if high-stat characters have a disproportionately large number of children compared to low-stat characters. Not something I think the player alone could put much of a dent in.

 

[Jasonkp]

It seems an awful lot of work and processes to put into a game when the end result is about the same as it was in the beginning. What's wrong with the system already in place? It seems to produce the same end results, while keeping it much simpler.

 

[Harle]

It doesn't sound like much work at all, compared to many other things. It's very a very simple equation. Did you even look at it? When someone is born, you average the hidden stats of the parents, apply any modifiers, give a small chance of +/-1, and it's done. The attribute would only be checked when a character gives birth to a child. Since it's hidden from the player it wouldn't even need to be fetched in menus when browsing. It would be accessed exactly once for every child a character has, and once every time the character increases or decreases an attribute during childhood decisions(to check whether they have hit their ceiling), and I'm sure that could be achieved more efficiently as well. Now I'm no programmer, but if the game is handling scads of information and details being accessed all the time, a stat being checked zero to (however many kids a character has) and a handful of times during childhood, in their entire lifetime, doesn't sound like much additional burden. Surely many other stats are being checked all the time.

As for 'producing the same results' that is like saying that genetics may as well not exist in real life for all the impact it has on people. Any system whereby traits are passed on is going to differ dramatically from a largely chaotic system. And you make it sound like the system I suggested would have a negligible amount of control, which just isn't true. You would have to use your head and make an estimate based on available information about a character, but that's not the same thing as pure random chance.

In a game like this, even a small amount of control over events is better than no control whatsoever.

 

[RedRooster81]

Harle, you've come up with what I think is a good system, but the biggest concern that I have is processor speed. The numbers were are dealing with is 1000 provinces, a maximum of 8000 baronies, each with their own court, and then we don't know yet how many landless characters will have children. That's a lot of kids. I know Nick has pointed this out already, but I thought it worth repeating.

If you ever played the DVIP mod for CK1, you are familiar with the education events that that mod adds. They essentially truncate a child's traits if they are above a certain level (I haven't looked at the event coding that closely so I can't speak with authority). Now, you could conceivably create a mod for CK2 that does what you are suggesting, but I'm a bit skeptical whether it will run too well on my PC. I run EU3 just fine, and I think that CK2 will run okay, but I wouldn't want to push it too hard. Maybe you have a top of the line machine, but I would not assume the same capabilities for the average user (I don't want to debate about specs, just pointing out a limitation on the community that we're dealing with).

But enough nay-saying. I think that your ideas are pretty cool. I could not think of a way to do max and min on stats, but you've worked up a conceivably good system. Do you have allowances for gaining stats over time, that is, improving your military stat if you are a late bloomer? Maybe you are a complete idiot at stewardship at age 20 (in CK1 terms a stat of 6), but you work hard and improve your skills so by age 30 you are a much better, say deserving a stat of 12 or 13.

 

[Nick B II]

It doesn't sound like much work at all, compared to many other things. It's very a very simple equation. Did you even look at it? When someone is born, you average the hidden stats of the parents, apply any modifiers, give a small chance of +/-1, and it's done. The attribute would only be checked when a character gives birth to a child. Since it's hidden from the player it wouldn't even need to be fetched in menus when browsing. It would be accessed exactly once for every child a character has, and once every time the character increases or decreases an attribute during childhood decisions(to check whether they have hit their ceiling), and I'm sure that could be achieved more efficiently as well. Now I'm no programmer, but if the game is handling scads of information and details being accessed all the time, a stat being checked zero to (however many kids a character has) and a handful of times during childhood, in their entire lifetime, doesn't sound like much additional burden. Surely many other stats are being checked all the time.

One of the great perils of a software project is that people will have all these great ideas that won't take many resources individually, but add up. It's called feature creep.

In CK1 each character had 16 chances to gain a stat: one every birthday until they were an adult. Your idea adds one calculation at birth, and one each time a stat goes up. Since CK characters seemed to average 6-7 in their base stats we're probably talking about a 7-8 calculation increase per character. And there're gonna be tens of thousands of characters.

That could be trivial. It could be a game-breaker. We don't really know because we don't have the source code handy.

As for 'producing the same results' that is like saying that genetics may as well not exist in real life for all the impact it has on people. Any system whereby traits are passed on is going to differ dramatically from a largely chaotic system. And you make it sound like the system I suggested would have a negligible amount of control, which just isn't true. You would have to use your head and make an estimate based on available information about a character, but that's not the same thing as pure random chance.

In a game like this, even a small amount of control over events is better than no control whatsoever.

That's actually part of the idea I object to.

In this game you should only be able to control things your RL counterpart would not have had control over when absolutely necessary.

Because their implementation was broken. The system I suggested - which is completely unrelated to the system they used - couldn't possibly result in the same thing. Since every character would be an average of their parents(give or take a point), given a fairly random selection of marriages, the distribution of stats at the end of the game should have close to the same average that the distribution of stats at the beginning of the game had. I haven't sat down and done the math on it, granted.

What would throw it off is if high-stat characters have a disproportionately large number of children compared to low-stat characters. Not something I think the player alone could put much of a dent in.

Key words: the player alone.

If the the player gets no advantage from breeding why include the feature?

If he gets an advantage the AI has to breed for game-balance reasons.

Nick

 

[WelshDude]

It allows them to if they so want. If they don't want to breed, then they don't have to because the Ai won't. If they do, then they can.

Also, remember if PI don't mention breeding ingame, then only the small percentage of people who read this thread would know about it. For the rest, they would probably see that capable people's children were capable, and think this was only natural, since two clever people are likely to have a child cleverer than two idiot's child. That doesn't necessairily happen in real life, and it wouldn't necessarily happen in the game, but it's likelier, and thus more realistic.

And remember, you might not know exactly what your wife's strats are.

 

[Nick B II]

And remember, you might not know exactly what your wife's strats are.

I just watched Video Dev Diary #3. There were no hidden stats. There's been plenty of speculation that there should be hidden stats, especially for people who live far away, but all the evidence is that if we can see a character we'll know her stats.

Granted the stat displayed is likely after traits, but if you really want to breed it's not that hard to remember the modifiers from traits and figure out the base stats. Heck in CK1 they helpfully put the modifiers in the tool-tip, so you didn't need to remember them.

Nick

 

[WelshDude]

I just watched Video Dev Diary #3. There were no hidden stats. There's been plenty of speculation that there should be hidden stats, especially for people who live far away, but all the evidence is that if we can see a character we'll know her stats.

Granted the stat displayed is likely after traits, but if you really want to breed it's not that hard to remember the modifiers from traits and figure out the base stats. Heck in CK1 they helpfully put the modifiers in the tool-tip, so you didn't need to remember them.

Nick

All the character seen there were in Sweden (the nation King was playing as) and so where in the same court as the player, so they shouldn't have been hidden anyway.

Besides, you may remember this, I see you posted in it four months ago or so?

 

[Nick B II]

All the character seen there were in Sweden (the nation King was playing as) and so where in the same court as the player, so they shouldn't have been hidden anyway.

No they weren't. At 1:08 he zooms to England. Most of the characters are from the Royal Court, but Duke Leofwine of Bedford is also displayed. At 1:45 the French Lady from the COunty of Vexin is front and center. The HRE and the Byzantines also get face-time.

Besides, you may remember this, I see you posted in it four months ago or so?

The dev comment on that thread is classic Paradox: intriguing, but impossible to interpret with any certainty.

I think you'll be very happy about how this works in Ck2

This response is part of a thread started by somebody who wanted to search for brides by stats, in the midst of a side discussion about whether betrothals are possible. The second post in the thread is about hidden stats.

Given that betrothals were confirmed (Video DD #1 IIRC, Doomdark says relations can be affected by broken betrothals), and that Video DD #3 shows plenty of people with stats, I'd have to say hidden stats are not in the current version of CK2.

Nick

 

[BrotherJayne]

Genetics

Couldn't find this elsewhere:


Will CK II have genetics for traits determination? Whichever patch it was that removed this feature in CK I was incredibly disappointing

 

[Wilsonrtf]

Hidden in the second forum page...

 

[ziamatt]

There are some traits that should be genetic. Traits like harelips and lisps don't just randomly pop-up in a child and then go nowhere. Even if they had been recessive up until that point, there's still a good chance it will be passed onto their children.

Perhaps hidden stat-changing traits could even be done the same way. These traits shouldn't be huge bonuses. On average they should only subtract or add a point or two into a category, and maybe more rarely could offer larger changes to stats. Then it's a matter of random chance when passing it on.

I guess what I'm saying is genetics isn't a terrible idea, as long as they can be harmful as well as helpful and don't usually have a huge impact in any case.

 

[Rambo]

You resurrected a zombie.