Fertility

[R'hllor]

Currently the fertility in HIP feels a bit high IMO. I'm about 100 or so years into a game and it feels like most dynasties have dozens of members. Most families have more children than before, around 4-5 seems to be the norm, which is pretty historical. However this hurts performance, which is why I'd suggest nerfing fertility just a bit.

Another problem is, that its pretty rare to see couples who just can't produce an heir. There certainly were infertile people around, which is why I'd suggest adding an "infertile" trait with a small chance of inheritance. I think that also
increasing the frequency of fertility-nerfing traits and modifiers combined with a tweaked base ferility would both make dynasties more realistically die out, and help our poor computers.

 

[Ecnahc]

I disagree. This is the first time fertility in HIP is starting to become more realistic after past nerfing for the sake of performance. It may effect performance, but it has just been too low in the past. I may be biased, as I have been advocating higher fertility rates for awhile. I just do not want to see them nerfed again without good reason. Families would be very large. A married couple would be having sex often, and there were no contraceptives. An average of 4-5, as you said, is accurate and what I wanted HIP to reach. If there is a huge performance impact for 10 percent of the HIP population, then maybe it should be scaled back. Not to the level it was before though. I was sick of playing games where I would have 2 or 3 children, if I was lucky and added the "fertile" trait. If you look at the history files you can see how large families were historically, and that's what HIP should strive to achieve. I think it should stay as it is unless a large enough percentage of HIP players are suffering moderate to severe performance issues because of it. If it is tweaked, the changes should be minute and not drastic, like you suggested.

 

[nilotic]

Currently the fertility in HIP feels a bit high IMO. I'm about 100 or so years into a game and it feels like most dynasties have dozens of members. Most families have more children than before, around 4-5 seems to be the norm, which is pretty historical. However this hurts performance, which is why I'd suggest nerfing fertility just a bit.

Another problem is, that its pretty rare to see couples who just can't produce an heir. There certainly were infertile people around, which is why I'd suggest adding an "infertile" trait with a small chance of inheritance. I think that also
increasing the frequency of fertility-nerfing traits and modifiers combined with a tweaked base ferility would both make dynasties more realistically die out, and help our poor computers.

While in principle I do agree, one thing tho I noted through my experience playing as merchant republics, is that it was increadibly hard before the latest patch to get a decent number of adult males in your dynasty at any given time (not to mention having many males so you could expand your trade-post limit). I was often on the brink of extinction and indeed most of the original AI patrician families died out after a few generations.

I suspected this was due to the circumstances of playing a merchant republic game where you tend to have larger courts (basically your whole dynasty is in your court, as ther isn't much/any land to give out to family members and you are locked to seniority succession), easily reaching beyonf 50-60. The defines have set COURT_SIZE_CHILD_PENALTY_THRESHOLD = 30, meaing fertility of the whole court is diminised (IIRC cut in half?) if the court has more than 30 people in it, as well as NDefines.NDisease.CROWDED_THRESHOLD_MODIFIER = 60.

Maybe the fertility rate could be nerfed a bit like you say, but make some accomodation for the large courts of the Merchant Republics by increasing the COURT_SIZE_CHILD_PENALTY_THRESHOLD ?