Byzantine Emperor married a lowborn like 5 years after he turned 16 in my most recent game.
Betrothal- is it a cheese tactic? Because AI doesn't ever do it?
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Byzantine Emperor married a lowborn like 5 years after he turned 16 in my most recent game.
How does breaking a betrothal give you legitimate claim to everything the other party owns? For example Philip II Augustus of France didn't get claim to crown of England because Richard I of England broke betrothal with his sister.
Yeah a strong claim on titles is too much. There should probably be a CB for it though, maybe to force the marriage to commence anyways.
Yeah, haven't seen a lot of lowborn betrothals in my current game for duke-tier and higher (Barons tend to, I think, and I suppose counts might, but I don't pay much attention to them.) To my immense frustration though, since my Dynasty got spread everywhere (Ok, this part is my fault), and thus has a lot of members and dynastic prestige, I get a Duchesses from Germany marrying Dukes from Egypt, and Duchesses from Anatolia marrying Dukes from Spain, and it causes no end of headaches. Almost as many as when a they do the same thing with a King/Queen.
I think the lowborn marriage thing is now relatively rare among the Christian rulers. But especially first generation Muslim rulers seem to have tendency to marry 16 years old peasant girls, because Muslim courts are real sausage fests and usually there isn't a single noblewoman in the entire Ummah when the game starts.
And also because inheriting a kingdom is almost impossible if your Muslim.
I've married off imbeciles to dukes-- and with the genetics being improved it can leave a huge impact. I'm not sure if you have to have high prestige or what the criteria are but more often than not I'll clean house in my overpopulated court and do a little dynasty trashing.
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That's cheese indeed but it's not a broken mechanic. What's broken is that after repeating the same trick you aren't excommunicated and invaded by the whole of Europe with your vassals released from their bond of loyalty by the Pope.
You can do a lot of evil or wrong things in the game. You can assassinate people, you can cut down inferior and/or defeated enemy armies just to inflict losses on the opponent, you can fabricate claims and oust legitimate heirs, not to mention the invasions etc. Intentionally breaking a betrothal after betrothal to make foreign kings die heirless is a thing from the same repertoire (in roleplaying terms). Not all of those have their own separate button with a tooltip saying that it would be evil and outrageous to do so and harmful to your opinion. So it's either playing as a mean person or cheesing the mechanics of the game.
Yeah, it's like micromanagement/APM in RTS games. There's a number of things the computer doesn't need to do (e.g. define groups of units).
But betrothal has the advantage of claiming the bride or groom reliably (including preemption of the human player's actions), as breaking it off will deteriorate diplomatic relations. So I think the AI should do it from time to time.
They did that in real life too.
Happens too often IMHO, also in matrilineal marriages. Matrilineal marriage is about continuing the mother's dynasty but it's not like the father's (lack thereof) doesn't matter. It's just that the father is, let's say, the third son whose elder brothers already have kids of their own, and so he's not really needed.
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No, it only becomes cheesy if you use it in a particular way. I always try to arrange marriages between those close in rank and age.
Furthermore vassals of a ruler, who marriesd a lowborn, ought to get a negative opinion modifier.
Furthermore vassals of a ruler, who marriesd a lowborn, ought to get a negative opinion modifier.
Well, historically the ruler and lords did know succession laws and planned their marriages accordingly--or to gain an alliance. Sometimes somebody wanted a pretty or a pious or a rich wife and that was a factor, but not always. Prestige of the entire family eclipsed an individual's rank or, should we say, title. Because even if you actually had no huge benefices to spare as the head of family, historically there really wouldn't have been a 'ritter von Salian' or a 'Mr. Komnenos', although you could theoretically have a plain 'sir John Plantagenet' (there are untitled Windsors these days, who are legally commoners despite being relatively high on the succession list and recognised as members of the royal family). Those guys generally counted as princes (especially in the east) and even when not, they were generally seen as more prestigious than their 'peers' due to their lineage, even if sometimes it was possible for a relatively plain lord to outrank a royal based simply on the degree of the landed title (in fact, for a time, the Palaiologoi of Monferrato were vassals of Savoy despite being close relations of the 'Greek emperor'). This is reflected by dynasty prestige ('marrying into dynasty x'). But I guess you take that into account.
Yeah, and possibly those born of a lowborn mother and especially a lowborn father in a matrilineal marriage. Succession by the son of a woman matrilineally married to a lowborn man really shouldn't go down easily when there are available males from the dynasty.
In my latest game (still on 1.07b, with Project Balance), I'm playing as the ERE. My vassal king of Egypt married a lowborn with lousy stats (and hunchback) pretty much the day he turned 16. I then saw rumors that he was involved in an assassination attempt on her every year or so for almost a decade, until she died "in a suspicious accident". As he was part of my dynasty, I thought about intervening to keep the gene pool clean (I try to keep negative congenital traits to a minimum in the family...), but it was too amusing watching him repeatedly try to kill her.
When I have a cyber-brain that can scan the whole character database every day of the game-time, I may feel it's unfair.
What about when your heir's wife dies and he picks a lowborn with poor stats, older than he is etc.?
That's the point. In CK1 you couldn't marry into royal families because the AI would marry 16 years old girls the day they turned 16. I like the way it is now.
I don't want to look through massive lists of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes every 5 minutes. With betrothal I can do the research, pick what I think is the best match and lock it in. Taking it out would be a micromangement nightmare. It is of course gamey to make betrothals you intend to break merely to mess with the AI, but that's entirely your issue, if you want to play that way.
Though contrary to CK1 you can see the actual birth date when you hover your mouse over the age, still betrothals are fine with me.
I believe having seen the AI doing it as well, only one or twice, but it's probably just my imagination...
I used to think the same until I missed out on some really good opportunities. I tend to commit it to my memory when those most interesting folks are going to come of age, with accuracy at least to years but not months.
The way I handle the marriages of my sons is a hybrid: I hit with a betrothal because the other ruler will refuse a marriage proposal from me for a son whom I give land when the proposal is en route. So it needs to be betrothal. So I kinda wait to the last moment unless I'm really confident.
Agreed; it's very rare that I make a betrothal for anyone under the age of 11-12, and usually it's when my dynast is 16 and they're 14-15: they're to make sure a marriage I'd want happens, plan a little ahead of time, and try to avoid betrothals that would be forbidden if they were marriages.