All my characters are dying from dysentery!

[Mycalle]

So about 100 years into my Small Iberian tribe game, and I noticed that most of my characters are dying, and dying young mostly from dysentery. Noticed most other countries all their great families have been hollowed out and barely have any children or women to marry under 50...

Not sure if this is a known bug but has anyone else been noticing this?

 

[Stars_and_Bars]

So about 100 years into my Small Iberian tribe game, and I noticed that most of my characters are dying, and dying young mostly from dysentery. Noticed most other countries all their great families have been hollowed out and barely have any children or women to marry under 50...

Not sure if this is a known bug but has anyone else been noticing this?

I can't speak to the dysentery issue, but the extreme aging of characters has been an issue since the very beginning to varying degrees. Characters are not having enough children to replace the existing population.

You can always scheme to marry one of your heirs to another family and that will generate a female character to marry for them, but that's just a bandaid over the real issue.

 

[Arthrodira]

It gets to a point where you start to wonder if any members of the great families are actually blood relatives. Seems like the only way any of them survive is through constant adoption

idk about the dysentery thing. speaking more generally on the rarity of characters marrying and having kids.

 

[Mycalle]

It gets to a point where you start to wonder if any members of the great families are actually blood relatives. Seems like the only way any of them survive is through constant adoption

idk about the dysentery thing. speaking more generally on the rarity of characters marrying and having kids.

Well are the dev's aware of it, I mean seems some people know this is an issue...
Hopefully it will get fixed eventually, this does not happen in crusader kings or atleast not in my experience.

 

[Daft]

Wash your hands! Wear a mask!

Seriously though, I've seen this too.

 

[Rabid]

I had a recent game where both of my male heirs died of diseases in their 20s, I had them treated several times, but they kept coming back...

I think the biggest issue is that treating disease is really damn expensive and most characters are unable to do it for themselves, there should be some way for characters to get medical treatment without having to be extremely rich

 

[Akbar The Great]

Marriage and reproduction have never worked properly, and the cost for seeking treatment is absolutely ludicrous, even if you're a wealthy nation, it can easily equate to a quarter of your annual budget, that's absolutely bonkers, it should be 25-50 at the absolute most.

Just look at the cost comparison with buildings, it's ridiculously unbalanced.

 

[Mycalle]

Wow, seems this defiantly is a known issue to many of us players. I will look through the bug report section, and if this issue hasn't already been posted, might start a thread for it. Might help put a spotlight on the issue for the dev's, so we may see it fixed in a a future patch!

 

[Decius]

I can't speak to the dysentery issue, but the extreme aging of characters has been an issue since the very beginning to varying degrees. Characters are not having enough children to replace the existing population.

You can always scheme to marry one of your heirs to another family and that will generate a female character to marry for them, but that's just a bandaid over the real issue.

It seems to me, that the devs limited the "natural" gain of characters via pregnancy/marriage to prevent a high number of characters, which might be an issue for the game performance. So you have often these random character spawns and adoptions to have enough characters for offices, but not too much characters beyond to save the game performance.

Imo the character limit for human controlled factions (important for the mulitplayer) should be somewhat increased and the gender distribution a bit more random aswell - currently the system tries to meet a certain ratio between men and women according to other threads. This can lead to rulers only getting daughters in monarchies (it could be also the other way round, but most of the time it's daughters -> issue of getting an heir because of an artificial system).

I understand that too many characters lead to performance issues and that's not great, but some special exceptions for human players are required in this part of the game. The AI doesn't care, if characters are spawned randomly when they are needed or if adoption is the main source of new family members for the ruler family instead of own children. But human players usually aren't pleased by such an artificial system. I guess a human player exception would make the game better regarding characters, but wouldn't harm the performance that much, if the AI still plays with the current "spawn when needed" system.


Edit: About the op topic: Seeking treatment needs to be cheaper or a scaling cost and a bit more efficient.

 

[-Stukov-MK VII]

Look it’s Mycalle you should play imperator mplayer sometime

 

[Mycalle]

Look it’s Mycalle you should play imperator mplayer sometime

haha... blast from the past. Thought you'd be to busy dominating the hoi4 MP community by now Stukov lol. Na, I'm getting to old for the meta, don't need all the stress thanks, ...Single player for me these days. Brings back memories though, we defiantly had an elite little hoi3 MP crew .... some great games, tense moments, and rivalry's.

 

[Kerham]

Yeah, and mentagra and whatnot. I went full of hopes to annex some neighbour small tribes and out of 4 lots of prisoners could barely churn out 5-6 characters younger than 40 and a couple of babies. Luckily, there are plenty of characters appearing out of thin air, but there's always this one family which simply dies out and is scorned because not enough members with jobs etc.

 

[Ultimatum357]

Yeah, and mentagra and whatnot. I went full of hopes to annex some neighbour small tribes and out of 4 lots of prisoners could barely churn out 5-6 characters younger than 40 and a couple of babies. Luckily, there are plenty of characters appearing out of thin air, but there's always this one family which simply dies out and is scorned because not enough members with jobs etc.

I've had the same issues, yeah. I'm pretty sure it's just the game trying to trim off characters, since pretty damn consistently I'll have young children gaining Dysentery and/or Depression, which is rather annoying as actually healing them will cost a lot of money, not to even mention the fact that during the time that they're being healed, they won't be gaining any stats.

But really, this all just boils down to the fact that mechanics created for the actual characters and Great Families are rather out of date by this point. This issue with diseases and illnesses constantly afflicting characters just adds onto it.

Though my main gripe with characters is still the fact that most of them turn out completely mediocre, so giving actual jobs is a pain because their stats are painfully mediocre. Then there's the fact that actually trying to tutor your children still doesn't seem to yield all that decent rulers. I feel like the percentage chance should be raised further for stat gains whether it be prior to age 12 or after.

 

[Emre Yigit]

The following may help, at start and as the game develops. In defines:

BASE_NR_OF_CHILDREN_PER_COUPLE = 3 BASE_FERTILITY = 0.15 MAX_FERTILITY = 0.25 MIN_SIZE = 12; #below this size the family will look desperately into adopting minor characters MAX_SIZE = 36; #above this size the family won't look into adopting minor characters anymore IDEAL_CHILD_PER_FAMILY = 6 COURT_SIZE_CHILD_PENALTY_THRESHOLD = 180 SUBTRACTION_CHILDREN_COURT_SIZE_PENALTY = 1

As for tutoring children, build the relevant wonder add-ons and it'll help.

 

[Ultimatum357]

As for tutoring children, build the relevant wonder add-ons and it'll help.

This is good advice, but actually building the wonder and working your way to the relevant technology for tutoring children will take a fair amount of time, not to even mention the amount of money it'll take to build said wonder.

 

[kpaw]

Well are the dev's aware of it, I mean seems some people know this is an issue...
Hopefully it will get fixed eventually, this does not happen in crusader kings or atleast not in my experience.

Crusader Kings has/had the opposite problem, with the number of characters getting out of hand and everything grinding to a crawl late in the game (I have played only a moderate amount of CK and am certainly no expert). With Imperator they tried to pre-empt that, but clearly it worked a bit too well.

It's a difficult balance I think. Too many characters is almost more of a problem than too few, since the game does have solutions of adoption and creation of characters through event., even if those solutions are imperfect.

Even a small increase to character survivability and/or reproduction rate has the potential to snowball. As a simple demonstration, imagine that the system is balanced so that characters have an average of 1.5 children by the age of 30, giving almost 10 generations during the game's time frame. For 1000 characters at game start, they would have 1500 children, who would have 2250 children, and so on. You'd reach almost 58,000 by game end, not including existing characters who don't just die when they have had children. Increasing the average birth rate to 1.6 per person gives you almost double that, around 110,000 in the final generation.

I know these numbers are very rough and ready, but it just demonstrates how a relatively small tweak can have an significant impact. I do agree that it's not quite right at the moment, though.

 

[Emre Yigit]

This is good advice, but actually building the wonder and working your way to the relevant technology for tutoring children will take a fair amount of time, not to even mention the amount of money it'll take to build said wonder.

I agree, though wonders are surprisingly cheap compared to Great Temples and suchlike.

 

[Emre Yigit]

Crusader Kings has/had the opposite problem, with the number of characters getting out of hand and everything grinding to a crawl late in the game (I have played only a moderate amount of CK and am certainly no expert). With Imperator they tried to pre-empt that, but clearly it worked a bit too well.

It's a difficult balance I think. Too many characters is almost more of a problem than too few, since the game does have solutions of adoption and creation of characters through event., even if those solutions are imperfect.

Even a small increase to character survivability and/or reproduction rate has the potential to snowball. As a simple demonstration, imagine that the system is balanced so that characters have an average of 1.5 children by the age of 30, giving almost 10 generations during the game's time frame. For 1000 characters at game start, they would have 1500 children, who would have 2250 children, and so on. You'd reach almost 58,000 by game end, not including existing characters who don't just die when they have had children. Increasing the average birth rate to 1.6 per person gives you almost double that, around 110,000 in the final generation.

I know these numbers are very rough and ready, but it just demonstrates how a relatively small tweak can have an significant impact. I do agree that it's not quite right at the moment, though.

True, but:
1. IR tends to snowball and families are (in essence) at the national level not the settlement/province one, unlike CK
2. I have yet to see a lecherous 90-yer-old with 25 children in IR.
3. Conquered families get killed, so there is wholesale pruning going on all the time.
4. New countries spring up very rarely and even more rarely from within the old (unlike in CK where there's a constant ebb and flow), so new great families are most uncommon.

That being said, I agree that it could very quickly get out of hand.

 

[Akbar The Great]

I've had the same issues, yeah. I'm pretty sure it's just the game trying to trim off characters, since pretty damn consistently I'll have young children gaining Dysentery and/or Depression, which is rather annoying as actually healing them will cost a lot of money, not to even mention the fact that during the time that they're being healed, they won't be gaining any stats.

But really, this all just boils down to the fact that mechanics created for the actual characters and Great Families are rather out of date by this point. This issue with diseases and illnesses constantly afflicting characters just adds onto it.

Though my main gripe with characters is still the fact that most of them turn out completely mediocre, so giving actual jobs is a pain because their stats are painfully mediocre. Then there's the fact that actually trying to tutor your children still doesn't seem to yield all that decent rulers. I feel like the percentage chance should be raised further for stat gains whether it be prior to age 12 or after.

Yeah, I've had depressed babies. It's ridiculous. The tutor thing is a waste of time, you might get a 1 point upgrade in one of the skills, and that's it. You adopt carachters after conquest and what do you get? 2 old men over 60, and you check their children and they all died during the war, so what's the point?

If anything the game should be giving people who can breed.

To me, the CK angle has always been the games weakest feature and it still is. It just does not fit the rest of the game, it belongs in a RPG like CKIII. The whole system is uninvolving, tedious, and opaque. There's no fun in it, it's a chore to manage I'm tired of looking at endless rows of old spinsters while i'm left with very few children to replace them.

If the game cannot handle great families reasoanble breeding levels (due to performance issues no doubt) then the system does not belong in the game, and it's not fun casting your eye over a horde of mediocrity every time a position comes up.


I've never believed the character system brought much to the game and I still don't. It's strength lies in it's future as a civilization builder, not as a CK-lite.

 

[kpaw]

True, but:
1. IR tends to snowball and families are (in essence) at the national level not the settlement/province one, unlike CK
2. I have yet to see a lecherous 90-yer-old with 25 children in IR.
3. Conquered families get killed, so there is wholesale pruning going on all the time.
4. New countries spring up very rarely and even more rarely from within the old (unlike in CK where there's a constant ebb and flow), so new great families are most uncommon.

That being said, I agree that it could very quickly get out of hand.

Yes some good points there.

I won't pretend to know loads about the inner workings of the game, but (considering the points you made) it seems like it ought to be a reasonably straightforward change to bump up fertility rates and take disease rates down a notch without character numbers snowballing too much.

I vaguely recall seeing something about how marriage rates are deliberately restricted? Clearly it's working a bit too well at the moment, but it must be a bit harder than I imagine to alter.