Is maintaining ruling family prestige a futile effort?

[Troyen]

I'm ~130 years into my game playing as a monarchy, but after the start, my ruling family has been woefully small - to the point where I regularly get the event allowing me to adopt an advisor. Even though I keep my ruler married and sometimes arrange marriages for my family members (to spouses of presumably childbearing age, though I don't know if I:R has that restriction), there are only like 2-3 kids total in the family, some of which may be daughters. For some reason, the other families end up with way more characters.

The result of this is it feels like I'm slowly losing a futile battle to keep up with family prestige. Even when I'm careful to not over-allocate government jobs to a family and refrain from needlessly adopting (and taking the 10% prestige hit), my monthly prestige is pretty consistently lower than the other families because they have so many characters. The cumulative effect of which is now my family has the smallest power base among the other families.

Is there a way around this? I've tried revoking other family holdings when there's a prime opportunity like a disgraced family leader and granting holdings to my family, but it seemed to have negligible effect. Realm size is currently ~140 if it matters.

 

[IsaacCAT]

I cannot help you on that except to point out this thread that touched this issue:


Thread 'Anyone else run out of characters?'
https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/anyone-else-run-out-of-characters.1464862/

 

[DukeLeto42]

Even though I keep my ruler married and sometimes arrange marriages for my family members (to spouses of presumably childbearing age, though I don't know if I:R has that restriction), there are only like 2-3 kids total in the family, some of which may be daughters. For some reason, the other families end up with way more characters.

Yes, there's an age restriction on children. I'm not wholly certain if it's a hard cap or declining fertility past a certain age, but keep an eye on it and try to get marriages to women as close to the "adulthood threshold" of 16 or, failing that, with +fertility traits. More importantly, "sometimes arrange marriages" is the problem you're encountering. Family heads are in charge of most marriages in the family, so a lot of your family members aren't getting married or are doing so too late to... uh... keep up the family's numbers.

The result of this is it feels like I'm slowly losing a futile battle to keep up with family prestige. Even when I'm careful to not over-allocate government jobs to a family and refrain from needlessly adopting (and taking the 10% prestige hit), my monthly prestige is pretty consistently lower than the other families because they have so many characters. The cumulative effect of which is now my family has the smallest power base among the other families.

The other lesson here is to be careful about handing out jobs to members of major families. Remember, you just want to give major families enough jobs to keep them from being scorned (and sometimes that's not even practical, like when a family has nothing but garbage-stat members left).

Since you're a fairly small monarchy (at least for the moment), definitely consider where major families should never get appointments - offices don't give families much power, but home region legions or the highest-population regions under your control give them a lot of power, and it's hard to tell who will or won't become a family head in their lifetime (family head + big governorship is a good recipe for a permanently grumpy and powerful person). That tiny region you have with only a few territories to speak of is a perfect place to allocate one of those required job slots.

Alternatively, if a major family is full of garbage people, treat them like garbage. It's not fun to have the "scorned family" notification hanging over your head, but better to have one family unhappy and without offices than several with many offices but just not enough.

 

[IsaacCAT]

I have found this on the wiki:

Very pertinent for the OP question.

original document: https://imperator.paradoxwikis.com/Characters#Family

 

[Troyen]

That's weird because I've definitely seen some characters in the ruling family running the "seek spouse" scheme (and taken the short-term prestige hit) and every adult heir promoted to King has already come married with a spouse so far, which is the big reason why I haven't been arranging every marriage: it looked like the game was doing it for me (and then they just don't have kids or their kids die as children). Maybe there's some additional condition encouraging auto-marriage?

The other lesson here is to be careful about handing out jobs to members of major families. Remember, you just want to give major families enough jobs to keep them from being scorned (and sometimes that's not even practical, like when a family has nothing but garbage-stat members left).

Yeah, that was a mistake early on, though I think I also didn't have enough non-family minor characters at game start to avoid that. I wisened up and stopped doing that about 50 years ago.

Since you're a fairly small monarchy (at least for the moment), definitely consider where major families should never get appointments - offices don't give families much power, but home region legions or the highest-population regions under your control give them a lot of power, and it's hard to tell who will or won't become a family head in their lifetime (family head + big governorship is a good recipe for a permanently grumpy and powerful person). That tiny region you have with only a few territories to speak of is a perfect place to allocate one of those required job slots.

I've tried to avoid giving the family head any government positions, with only a handful of slipups. The big governorship goes to someone not part of any family. Would like to give more major roles to my family but then I have to deal with the Pretender loyalty hit.

Since I only have one legion (royal guard), I've been using the third and fourth legatus commander slots as my filler position for families with terrible stats. Is that a horrible idea? I've rarely had to split the legion thus far so only the first two commanders have been active in practice.

 

[DC123456789]

That's weird because I've definitely seen some characters in the ruling family running the "seek spouse" scheme (and taken the short-term prestige hit) and every adult heir promoted to King has already come married with a spouse so far, which is the big reason why I haven't been arranging every marriage: it looked like the game was doing it for me (and then they just don't have kids or their kids die as children). Maybe there's some additional condition encouraging auto-marriage?

A character needs at least 30 wealth to take that scheme and also needs to be an heir, child of the family head, or hold a position to take the scheme. Unlike AI family auto-marriage (which I'm pretty sure is still the case), it also doesn't happen automatically (i.e. the scheme actually has to be picked at some point).

Yeah, that was a mistake early on, though I think I also didn't have enough non-family minor characters at game start to avoid that. I wisened up and stopped doing that about 50 years ago.

I've tried to avoid giving the family head any government positions, with only a handful of slipups. The big governorship goes to someone not part of any family. Would like to give more major roles to my family but then I have to deal with the Pretender loyalty hit.

Since I only have one legion (royal guard), I've been using the third and fourth legatus commander slots as my filler position for families with terrible stats. Is that a horrible idea? I've rarely had to split the legion thus far so only the first two commanders have been active in practice.

Tribunes get very little family prestige, to the point of being almost meaningless (this on the other hand makes them great positions to hand out to useless members of other families). The best way to increase family prestige is to give out governorships, but obviously that means that stats actually matter (and you probably don't really have many to give out at this point).

 

[TheBrilliantBoolean]

Typically in my campaigns I like to spend a few minutes after a new heir is sired or minor character adopted to see if there are any adolescent female characters in or outside my nation (royal marriages) eligible to marry, if there is I favorite them and will marry them when both come of age. Seek spouse is almost always a waste of PI since it is not guaranteed or even likely to get you a scion so sometimes you just have to luck out on getting young marriages. Typically if you can adopt enough characters or marry enough extended family members the problem sorts itself as you can just marry within the extended family (incest 100) for the rest of the game. Sometimes you may even have enough to marry off excess daughters to powerful governors or family heads to get huge loyalty buffs.

Yeah they system is kind of scuffed and RNG at the end of the day and succession crises suck but that should help.

P.S. I cant believe PDX games get us talking in such mesogonistic ways, at least I don't genocide in HOI4 lol

 

[Troyen]

Okay, after another 80 years taking the advice above: ensuring all family members are married, keeping the daughters married within the family (even if it's an adopted minor noble), giving a governorship to a high loyalty family member, and keeping the other governors away from the other families, I've managed to pull the ruling family from last place to second place. If this keeps up, with some +2/month prestige, it's only a matter of time before I overtake the top family too.

I noticed if the head of a rival family ever gets really low on loyalty (and oh man, are the kingdom events repetitive and set up to tank that loyalty), I can just revoke all their holdings through a bunch of tedious clicking. The only penalty is they lose 5 loyalty, but they're already single-digit loyalty anyway, and in exchange I can strip away a large portion of their power base. Kind of surprised there's no tyranny penalty. (And I don't understand why I have to pay gold to give someone a holding.)