Marrying up

[The Guru]

It seems to me that it is extremely easy to marry up... I play a little (but fertile) count on the Portuguese coast and Kings ( including hugely powerful ones, such as the King of West Francia) never seem to have any second thoughts about marrying their heirs to my daughters, resulting in easy alliances for me with allies with 10 times my forces, while I get the impression that they would have been right to expect better. That the heir to a vast kingdom doesn't even ask to me married to a daughter duke ( and preferably a powerful one) seems strange and makes to game too easy.
Is this part of the horrifyingly frustrating hardcoded stuff that we have no power over?

 

[SerialCereal]

I don't think that it's that bad. You say that you're on the Portuguese coast so I assume that you count the Moors as your enemy? Could be that the people you are making alliances with view them the same way so they value you as an ally.

 

[The Guru]

I'm afraid we can always find some sort of rationale but still. (Actually, in this precise case, I'm one of the smallest protagonists facing the Moors).
I still am pretty sure that the AI makes very poor deals with its marriage and fails to live up to the historical expectations;

readjusting the acceptance criteria for these high-value marriages would be an easy and proper way to fight blobbing. The easiest way to expand gluttonously in CK2 is still to get an ally ten times your size and let him do all the killing and dying and paying and let you reap the rewards

 

[Zylathas]

I always found it strange how marrying worked in CK II.

Preferbaly we'd see a much better marriage AI sometimes soon. Think something in lines of: 1.Check if someone of your highest rank is avaiable under 40 2.Check if someone of a higher rank is avaiable under 40. 3.Check if someone of one lower rank is avaiable under 40. 4.Check if someone of two ranks lower is avaiable under 40. 5.Check age. Age under <25, repeat process in 5 years.

Something among these lines could solve many issues I think. It would atleast make it highly likely for people of the same class to marry.

 

[2ndPorphyry]

Part of the trouble is that it is always more advantageous to be married than not, so the AI (and player) is eager for any match over none—princesses of your religion group and of marriageable age can often be sparse and you need those stat bonuses now, not in 4 years. And then there's the trouble that NAPs only come automatically from a marriage when the eligible parties are the ones contracting the union. Otherwise they must be negotiated separately after the marriage, and the AI seems not to see the potential NAP/alliance as at all valuable. (For example, recently as emperor I wanted to marry off my grand nephew; his father my nephew is a duke, but I landed him after the kid came of age and so he's still my courtier instead of his father's. Since I'm the one contracting the marriage for him, no one is automatically getting a NAP with his father the duke, even though they could negotiate it with him later, and so they all turn it down because they "desire a better alliance." He's heir to a duchy, but in the AIs' logic he's "just" a courtier. This happens more often with young widows, who stay in the court of their husband's successor, but aren't valuable to him/her or anyone else for remarriage purposes by AI logic because no one will get a NAP with her family out of the marriage diplo action itself... which is mostly ahistorical.)

None of this is to say that improvements can't be made, it's a glaring AI weak point, but that first point tends to override all other concerns.

 

[The Guru]

None of this is to say that improvements can't be made

Dunno.... some of the most annoying stuff of CK2 is hardcoded, and there's nothing you can do but weep.

Is this something the HIP team has looked into?

Guys?

 

[majesty8]

There's a mod that adds events to marry landed characters to their nieces/aunts/cousins, to simulate the aristocratic "Habsburgian" marriages.
Perhaps something similar could be made - an event that forces unmarried kings to marry other kings'/dukes' close relatives, with higher priority to vassal dukes and neighbors.

 

[zijistark]

To accomplish the goal implied by the OP, we'd have to completely disable the Arrange Marriage diplo-action and handle it all magically with events. I think that would suck, on net.

Can marriage outcomes improve with the help of auto-marrying folks off to each other? Yes, although do not overestimate the difficulty and CPU consumption required for soft-code to do this, considering all the variables that we want it to consider-- including strategic planning re: line of succession and such, nor the amount of effort that would have to go into such a beast to completely cover the marriage problem for the AI.

In the end with as good of a complete implementation as soft-code could do, you'd still be able to find dozens upon dozens of cases where AIs married very poorly, because it is-- believe it or not-- a risky game with much luck involved in most of the factors requisite for its [subjective] success.

Could we do more limited stuff that tries to let the proper AI function (esp. since they *have* been putting a lot of work into this consistently for a couple patches now, which is a relief) but only intervenes when it seems that the AI has fallen on its face, with simpler logic? Sure, and we may at some point. But, again, none of those improvements would address players gaming the marriage AI (even if it's easy, at least when you get to pick the initial marriage proposal on day-1 before the AI's had a chance to do anything for itself).

These days, I have a lot more trouble than I once did securing land through marriages. However, offensive alliances are a thing now (for some reason, rather than defensive), so I imagine it'll take some tweaking before AI valuation of everything related to NAPs and alliances gets smarter.