All My Courtiers Are Dying

[eclecticonic]

Courtiers. Let's talk about 'em.

I've been trying lately to breed the best council a count could count on. So I knock on every door in the realm to catalogue the most stat-nubile young ladies (hum-yeah, dem STATS) in order to marry up every courtier I have. Then there's a baby boom, and I rub my hands waiting to see what they'll grow up to be like in 15 years.

But within a year or two, one by one, my courtiers start dying. First a bishop, then some random nobody, and then INEVITABLY the hot streaking chancellor who's been fabricating on all my neighbours. I'm stuck with a court full of single dads and widows and orphaned children. Instead of a council of uber-mench I'm stuck with a bumbling set of 4's to 8's.

I've seen this a bunch of times now, to the point where I'm thinking it almost must be a deliberate game mechanic to limit the size of your court... does reaching some kind of limit up the mortality rate? Anyone know for sure? I once had like four important courtiers die in the space of six months; it was nutty. I was wondering if I had a 20-int elusive shadow serial killer on the loose. I seem to get to somewhere around 30 (for a count) and the population begins to plummet.

 

[Dragatus]

The game does indeed try to limit the size of your court to 30, though I didn't know it actually kills off courtiers directly. I thought it just reduced everyone's fertility and made disease more common.

 

[Tumultuosus]

Your court is dying out? It's the dream of every CK2 player that has faced the scourge of norse peasants inviting themselves to their banquets!
What was the size of your court? Can we reproduce your "experiment"? Have you found a new mechanism?

 

[jruderman]

I tend to have a court of 200-300 characters after a long rule. Courtiers with no parents, no spouse, and no council position "die of poor health" within weeks. Other courtiers, such as claimants, seem to survive just fine.

 

[Rags17]

I like big stats and I can not lie
You other brothers can't deny
When a courtier walks in with a double digit stat
And a Genius trait
You get SPRUNG !

 

[machina79]

Yeah. RNG kills em after 30. You can change it in the defines.lua BUT it applies to all courts, not just player, and so slows things waaaay down.

 

[Walkaboutout]

Might be meaningful to note here that those restrictions do not apply to merchant republic patrician's courts, if I recall the discussions of this change correctly back when it was made.

 

[jruderman]

Yeah. RNG kills em after 30. You can change it in the defines.lua BUT it applies to all courts, not just player, and so slows things waaaay down.

How many AI courts actually have enough characters to exceed the limit, much less exceed the limit by so much that it heavily affects the health of courtiers? I think the AI only tries to arrange marries for certain courtiers -- maybe close relatives and dynasts.

I might do some measurements to see how many courtiers exist after 200 years, with and without the limit.

 

[jpinard]

Is there some way to protect your best peeps if you're in danger of going over?

 

[tului]

You a Tyrannicon fan OP?

 

[orochi2k]

They need a define player courtier number separately from the AI ones
It may provide a fundation from where it helps build a more interactive RPG experience within realm which we currently lack of so that we may have something actually to do when waiting for our threat level goes done or even just quit from painting the map.

 

[GalenZ]

I currently have a court of over 1000 people, all breeding quite nicely, after over 200 years of play.

But yes, I'm aware of the tendency for the game to kill courtiers. If you look very carefully at the wiki and change logs, you'll note that a few releases back, they specifically installed code to kill unmarried lowborn courtiers very aggressively - they die of 'poor health', often within days of inviting them to your court. This totally screwed my play style at the time, as I loved inviting all the high-stat courtiers I could find, and keeping them as a pool of potential breeders.

However, all is not lost. Under the new system, the rules are simple - only noble courtiers can survive without being married; unmarried lowborns who were not born in your court have very short 'use by' dates stamped on their foreheads. So, when going on a courtier inviting spree, only invite nobles to your court, while marking interesting lowborns as 'special interest'. Then, once you have all the nobles in hand, marry the interesting lowborns to existing members of your court.

In the rare case where a lowborn won't accept a marriage but can be invited, then invite the lowborn, but *immediately* marry him or her to someone in your court. If you want to marry two lowborns, then you can invite them at the same time, and *hope* the first one survives long enough for the second one to arrive and marry; you probably have a 90%+ chance of that working.

This also means that when a lowborn's spouse dies, the loweborn will tend to follow very quickly. I solve this problem by setting message options to do a popup whenever anyone dies, at which point i immediately look at the dead person's spouse. If that person is lowborn and I want to keep him/her, I marry him/her off again immediately. Waiting even a few days can be too long!

Following these rules, I have avoided the lonely lowborn death plague, and managed to build my court up nicely over time. Yes, people still die at inconvenient times, but generally from old age or being sick or depressed, rather than for no reason at all.

Hope this helps!

 

[Vigor]

what a horrible game mechanic. I have been deliberately breeding a staff of educators because my vassals have poor judgement. Here I am 3 empires, my court was recently diminished substantially when I took too much land too quickly and smallpox pops up in my capital and everyone is dying. My pool of generals that I trained up from children... dying. I can't protect them all. I can't protect a small fraction of them.

Here I was wondering if there was some way to protect the uninfected courtiers and wondering how my luck could be so horrible as to have smallpox erupt in my capital when I have 1000 counties. If it had started anywhere else I could have braced for impact. Married young women to far away old men. Landed some people. Married young men to old women. Dumped good people I could spare in the courts of vassals so at least someone would benefit from my work...

Why. Why would they do this? It seems this game is designed to wreck any intelligent decision you could make, not by other characters making good decisions against you, but by arbitrary coding. This game has earned the arbitrary trait.

 

[Kurblius]

what a horrible game mechanic. I have been deliberately breeding a staff of educators because my vassals have poor judgement. Here I am 3 empires, my court was recently diminished substantially when I took too much land too quickly and smallpox pops up in my capital and everyone is dying. My pool of generals that I trained up from children... dying. I can't protect them all. I can't protect a small fraction of them.

Here I was wondering if there was some way to protect the uninfected courtiers and wondering how my luck could be so horrible as to have smallpox erupt in my capital when I have 1000 counties. If it had started anywhere else I could have braced for impact. Married young women to far away old men. Landed some people. Married young men to old women. Dumped good people I could spare in the courts of vassals so at least someone would benefit from my work...

Why. Why would they do this? It seems this game is designed to wreck any intelligent decision you could make, not by other characters making good decisions against you, but by arbitrary coding. This game has earned the arbitrary trait.

Sounds to me it's working as designed. Disease outbreaks were devastating back then, and more likely to happen and happen worst in highly populated areas. If you really wanted to protect your courtiers during the outbreak you could have moved your capital, or failing that you could have appointed the most essential courtiers as commanders and stationed them with retinues far from the capital.

Edit: I see that you necro'd this thread... the mods hate that...

 

[Chlodio]

The initial idea of courtier reap is good, but it's merely a symptom of the real problem. How about not generating random lowborn characters in the first place?

 

[faiuwle]

The game generates them for you. Anyway, the big courts usually come from all of your commanders, councilors, and family members. I never have just 30 random characters, and regularly ask the randomly generated characters the game gives me to leave.

 

[Tryvenyal]

I just wonder... How many "castles" in the 11th centery could house 1000 noble coutiers? I mean, that´s probably far more than the number of peasants/serfs/lowborns in the castletowns.. except for the very big towns/cities?

 

[WJS]

Yeah, a court of hundreds/upwards of a thousand would be so incredibly expensive! That's a lot of pies being baked every day, after all.

 

[mr. MeeM]

First; I didn't believe this. Now, I do.

 

[DarthKitsune]

If you're not opposed to being a known murderer, then I think you know what to do, OP.