• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Make adoption a thing. Problem solved.
 
Isn't there already a hidden fertility modifier that sometimes makes it *very* difficult to have kids? I've definitely had a couple ostensibly healthy kings & queens (or duke & duchess) who struggled to make babies. I even remember once after like 15 years of fruitless marriage an event chain popped up - IIRC rumors were spreading that my king might not be able to "perform", hence the lack of an heir. There was a prestige or reputation hit involved or something. I thought it was vanilla but maybe was playing HIP/VIET or something.

I think in general it works well as-is. People in those days pumped out babies like crazy, but every so often you do get a couple that struggle to do this. The one historical thing I could see changing for accuracy is infant mortality, which strikes me as waaay to low for the Medieval period. There should be a period from birth to age 2 or thereabouts where survival is very dicey, plus more of a chance of the mother dying due to childbirth complications (I can't recall a single time this has happened for me).
 
Terrible idea.

I don't think it is. Some people happen to be infertile, so it would only add to the realism. However, I do think you should receive an event where the character learns he can't get any kids and 'gains the trait infertile'. That way you can still try to make the best out of the situation.
 
Isn't there already a hidden fertility modifier that sometimes makes it *very* difficult to have kids? I've definitely had a couple ostensibly healthy kings & queens (or duke & duchess) who struggled to make babies. I even remember once after like 15 years of fruitless marriage an event chain popped up - IIRC rumors were spreading that my king might not be able to "perform", hence the lack of an heir. There was a prestige or reputation hit involved or something. I thought it was vanilla but maybe was playing HIP/VIET or something.

I think in general it works well as-is. People in those days pumped out babies like crazy, but every so often you do get a couple that struggle to do this. The one historical thing I could see changing for accuracy is infant mortality, which strikes me as waaay to low for the Medieval period. There should be a period from birth to age 2 or thereabouts where survival is very dicey, plus more of a chance of the mother dying due to childbirth complications (I can't recall a single time this has happened for me).
CKII compensates the lack of child deaths by you having less kids.Increase infant mortality and it will not only be a mess,people will do a uprising because their genius strong attractive heir died randomly.
 
It would be a pain in the arse I know. That's the point. Obstacles such as this are what make the game fun. There is a loading screen that states that if you are old and childless your vassals or family members may demand your titles. This has never happened to me once, but I kinda wish it had. It sounds fun.

It's not that it would be an obstacle, it's that it would be instant game over. I'm talking about people that are the only dynasty member or only viable dynasty member at game start. If you can't have a kid as them its game over. If you random the infertile trait, its game over from the second you press play.
 
I still see plenty of cases of infertility, though rarely with the character I am playing. I see landed dynasty members die all the time without heirs. I have unlanded dynasty members in my court who have trouble having kids (even though my court is relatively small).

Unlanded characters have decreased fertility.
 
It's not that it would be an obstacle, it's that it would be instant game over. I'm talking about people that are the only dynasty member or only viable dynasty member at game start. If you can't have a kid as them its game over. If you random the infertile trait, its game over from the second you press play.

This. If you play for hours with a fore-ordained Game Over trait unbeknownst to you - well, that's faulty game design. It's one thing to have some series of percentages that can lead to bad results, especially if the player doesn't take opportunities to maximize them... it's another thing to have a single trait terminate the game before it really gets started.

CKII compensates the lack of child deaths by you having less kids.Increase infant mortality and it will not only be a mess,people will do a uprising because their genius strong attractive heir died randomly.

Yeah, I kind of agree with this - that's why I didn't really state it strongly one way or another. You *could* just have babies die more often at birth though, that way players wouldn't get attached but you'd still get the feeling that childbirth is a risky proposition, as it was in real life then. I.e. the baby wouldn't even be introduced as a character - the pregnancy would just finish with zero in-game result. Maybe the mother would gain an Ill trait for a couple months too. You could even have cumulative chances of say the mother (or even the father) gaining the Depressed trait after a string of miscarriages or infant deaths.
 
I don't think we need an infertile trait.
But this is a good idea:
There doesn't have to be an infertility trait. Just increase the fertility range to allow for people to be born with extremely low to no fertility.
Also making the game more deadly could be a thing, with more random results for the events. Now they are just boring. Nobody can still enjoy these repetitive hunting events, you just act like a robot, clicking always on the same thing.
It should be the same for fertility: there should be fertility-oriented events, like sacrifices or prayers, or even accidents (not all eunuchs are mutilated slaves). There is a lot to do with events (defective children your character could want to abandon, adopted children, hassle between children, initiation, religious visions, princesses kidnapped by djinns, etc, etc...).
 
I don't think we need an infertile trait.
But this is a good idea: There doesn't have to be an infertility trait. Just increase the fertility range to allow for people to be born with extremely low to no fertility.

Seeing as that would work in exactly the same way I would be more than happy for that to be an option instead.
 
And another piss poor idea sees the light of day. Good job OP :)

Care to explain why and actually say why you think it's a bad idea?

Seeing as one of the main challenges to this game is succession, I think it would be interesting to have the occasional game where one of my kings didn't churn out six or so kids before popping his clogs.
 
In one recent Indian game, I matrilinieally married a Strong daughter to a Sayyid Fatimid (to get Sayyid into my blood line). Married them off when they were 16. By 30 they had a single kid (fortunately, a boy, for Sayyid). I cycled through all the siblings (it was Ultimogeniture) until I got to play the Strong daughter, but even then she only ended up having a single kid.

Ha, this caught my attention since I had something similar quite recently. I had formed a nice Tartarian-Persian-Rajasthani Empire with my Dulo dynasty, adopted Zoroastrianism as the state religion, and engaged in all that Saoshyant posturing - but what I still lacked was to have my ruling lineage descend both from the Prophet and the Saoshyant. And it was in this that I got the impression that Sayyid-breeding is fraught with bad luck. It probably isn't in any scripted sense, but it certainly seemed so. I tried for about 230 years to get a matrilineal couple to issue a sufficient amount of Dulo Sayyid-kids for some of them to survive their frankly quite murderous Abbasid uncles... It didn't help that I had intermarried with Abbasids for such a long time that I started to get Inbred traits a lot. But this certainly brought some excitement for the endgame (especially since the Timurids didn't show up). Finally I succeeded in having my very last ruler before the game ending to be both a Saoshyant descendant, a Sayyid, and - as a nice bonus - equipped with the same name as the last Sassanid emperor, Yazdegerd.
 
It's a wonder any medieval christians had children:

flowchart2.png
 
  • 1
Reactions:
As of the moment there seems to be very little risk of your character dying without a bunch of children - marry at 16 and you are all but guaranteed to have a brood of five or more princes and princesses running around your palace. My suggestion is that there should be a hidden trait, 'Infertile', which affects around one in fifty individuals (I think that is the rough prevalence), and would make it impossible for that character to have children. This would in turn lead to more interesting successions with different branches of the family inheriting things, and would make the game more unpredictable in general, which is always good.

That's a wonderful idea. I mean, it could be worked around a little bit, but I completely agree with your premise. Lately I've been keeping my male rulers and heirs unmarried for some time, partly in order to compensate for the general lack of collateral successions that you described and partly because I am trying to roleplay and very few male rulers married so young.

The only time I had a cousin succeed my character was when I deliberately left my duchess unmarried. It could be said that I did an Elizabeth I. She had no siblings, and gavelkind had left her aunt with half the duchy. When the duchess died, her cousin succeeded and united all Gascon counties under one ruler once again.

Another time my character nearly died childless was when a queen had no children after 20 years of marriage. Then, suddenly, she had a son at the age of 37, followed by a daughter at 44. The son inherited another kingdom and died in battle before her, obviously :D
 
Care to explain why and actually say why you think it's a bad idea?

Seeing as one of the main challenges to this game is succession, I think it would be interesting to have the occasional game where one of my kings didn't churn out six or so kids before popping his clogs.
There's a difference between not popping 6 and not being permitted any. Given that its not unusual to start a game with the only member of a dynasty, if a Random Number Generator doomed that person to being infertile and incapable of having any kids you'd be guaranteed Game Over. With no warning if its an invisible trait.

It may be realistic but its not fun and in general bad game design to be pre-ordained to be guaranteed to lose and have game over completely outside of your control before you've put a second of effort into the game let alone hours.
 
There's a difference between not popping 6 and not being permitted any. Given that its not unusual to start a game with the only member of a dynasty, if a Random Number Generator doomed that person to being infertile and incapable of having any kids you'd be guaranteed Game Over. With no warning if its an invisible trait.

It may be realistic but its not fun and in general bad game design to be pre-ordained to be guaranteed to lose and have game over completely outside of your control before you've put a second of effort into the game let alone hours.

Make it so infertility is only given at birth, and not to randomly generated characters. Problem solved.

This would have to be done anyway since characters who have children at a start date should definitely not get the infertile trait.
 
There should be but game engine works differently as someone pointed out in CK 2 less kids are born but less die in infancy. So infertile characters should either very rare or people should make more babies ( which is not gonna happen because that would explode courts with additional courtiers and make save files too big).