Is Sex Determiner Not Operating with 50/50 Chance?

[Chlodio]

I keep seeing many characters and screenshots where people have something like nine daughters on a row. And if it was 50% odds for each sex, the odds of that happening are 1 in 500, but it seems far more likely. Meanwhile, I don't recall seeing many characters/screenshots where people have nine sons on a row.

 

[WJS]

No one complains about having nine sons in a row. If you're stuck on gavelkind, then you stop having children, never mind sons, before you reach nine. Otherwise, the more the merrier.

If there were more enatic clans, then yes, you could see someone with nine sons and still desperate to make a daughter. But that's a far rarer situation.

 

[klopkr]

Start flipping some coins and tell me how many times you get the same result 9 times in a row. Then do it for thousands upon thousands of characters in ck2.

 

[Patriarch of Bub]

I'm pretty sure it works at 50/50. Sure sometimes you only have daughters, but heh, that's life

 

[mrinku]

1 in 500 is not particularly unusual considering you can spam that many kids in a few years under reasonably common circumstances, so there are a lot of large families out there.

You would expect to see a run of 9 every few games at least.

 

[Chlodio]

You would expect to see a run of 9 every few games at least.

Okay, let's say your average ruler's reign lasts two decades and you play from 769 to 1453, thus you will play 34 rulers, thus the odds of your character having nine daughters on a row per campaign is ~7% per campaign.
Now, that I have contextualized it, all of it makes sense.

 

[makaramus]

I heard it also decides by comparing how many female/male characters in game to keep a some kind of healthy balance too.
this is not offical I just heard dont jump at me dont even expect it to be true!

 

[Vortex_13]

It's 50/50 globally, I believe.

 

[Patriarch of Bub]

I kind of get OP frustration. Recently i remembered a free game (Battle for Wesnoth) i used to play and it had been added to Steam, so i grabbed a copy and started playing.

Units can have melee and ranged attacks. These attacks have a chance to land almost always depending the kind of terrain tile the units stand on. Magic attacks are different because they have a fixed 70% chance to hit regardless of terrain.

There is an option to calculate damage. Attacking with my white mage using 3 ranged magic attacks. The calculation told me that the enemy only had 2, 97% chance of "being unscathed". I have been so frustrated at how often i saw that result. :/

 

[Rogan de Auria]

As far as I can recall my record was at least 7-8 sons in a row playing as the Umayyads and 6 daughters in a row playing a french lord.

 

[Badesumofu]

I work in a casino. Dealing roulette last week I spun 13 numbers in a row between 19-36 (wheel has 0 - 36 on it). These sorts of things are rare in that you wouldn't expect that result to happen very often but at the same time unremarkable in that with enough spins of the wheel, you're almost certain to see them at some point. Similar story for CK2 (and every other game with RNG) at some point you're going to see something that seems like it just shouldn't happen. Then add to that that no one feels the need to visit the forums to report a sequence of MFMFMFMFM (which is exactly as improbable as FFFFFFFFF) and you start to see how someone's impression of how often these things either should or do happen can get skewed.

 

[Rags17]

FWIW, my RL wife has a genetic abnormality called "X chromosome long arm inversion" which means that one of her X chromosomes is stuffed. Since all women have two X chromosomes this is not an issue except when it comes to having kids - if (when) she got pregnant with a boy baby which used her broken X chromosomes the baby would invariably not work out. We only found this out after having two girls, one boy and LOTS of miscarriages, oddly enough shortly after finding out she became pregnant with our last child - a happy healthy baby boy.

TL;DR - some people in real life have a greater or lesser chance of having boys or girls, of course RNG means that this chance can often be overcome. In my wife's case we ended up with two boys and two girls when pure random would suggest that we should have had 3 girls and one boy (plus lots of miscarriages).

Of course all of the above doesn't have much to do with CK2 - I am just suggesting that it MAY be the case that they have implemented some sort of hidden sex selection bias for each woman in the game.

 

[jwalche]

If you have gavelkind, keep having strong duels to re-merge the realms. Use subjugation CB on each new ruler too.

 

[Vaximillian]

Random gonna random, and RNG always hates you.

 

[mrinku]

I work in a casino. Dealing roulette last week I spun 13 numbers in a row between 19-36 (wheel has 0 - 36 on it). These sorts of things are rare in that you wouldn't expect that result to happen very often but at the same time unremarkable in that with enough spins of the wheel, you're almost certain to see them at some point. Similar story for CK2 (and every other game with RNG) at some point you're going to see something that seems like it just shouldn't happen. Then add to that that no one feels the need to visit the forums to report a sequence of MFMFMFMFM (which is exactly as improbable as FFFFFFFFF) and you start to see how someone's impression of how often these things either should or do happen can get skewed.

Oh yeah. Former croupier here, and this is it. Dice have no memory.

Having said that, there is the possibility of kludges in the code to affect any of this. And it is not unusual for pseudorandom number generators to be anti-randomized a bit to prevent runs, especially in games. But I doubt that's happening in CK2; the distributions have always seemed right.