Create generals/bride presented bug

[Johnniecash]

Posted in the general forum about if the bride presented bug is still around so I might as well ask here in a shorter variant. for those not familiar the bp bug is if you play a strictly male bloodline game (marrying your princesses only to your males, not accepting adoption and so on) you will in time end up with getting no new brides (and thereby no more children) for your family charaters as the game seems to priority the females getting married of first. Is it still around or have someone find a solution on it?

But this thread is also about another issue and why I post here in the Deus Lo Vult forum (the mod I play, duh).

I read about that you can mod (if it´s not already included in this mod) so that you can build general bodyguards and with them get generals (characters not in your family tree). Is there anyway to mod/do so that you can choose which career your builded generals receive when created?

Sorry if this thread ended up rather confusing and maybe even a bit misplaced, but I simply try finding out how to work around some "bugs" of this game. Have patience please

[Furin]

You can recruit generals from higher level stables wich will not "pollute" your family tree. Grabbing some of those seems to invigorate your royals sex life too (more children) but that could be just a coincidence. This is not a joke, I've often noticed a baby boom after recruiting one or two extra generals.

Oh and you could try my approach and change the daughters retirement age to 1, as a result all daughters retire before coming of age, vanish from the family tree, and you will have only male offspring, but no princesses at all.

[Johnniecash]

Okay, that´s nice then if you can recruite generals. What are know the presqribits (spelling?) for recruting such generals? I´ve read in the manual or somewhere you needed the faction leader or someting similar in the city/castle.

I have also thought about your suggestion concerning retirement age. This seems to be the most basic and working solution to the problem. Although I had hoped for someway to mod out those daughters that didn´t become real princesses only. I like to roleplay and "pimp" up my daughters and then marry them of to my males (and yeah, I heavly seperate my thoughts on such behaviour in game from in real life )

edit: You don´t happend to know how high that maximum number of childrens/males your family tree can have? Or what it´s ratio to provinces your owning is as it seems to be dependent on that?

[Furin]

The "prerequisite" (hope I got that right , not a native speaker either) are the third tier stables and above (so a stable upgrade from fortress +).

The game seems to want always one or two less generals than provinces, once you have an equal number generals start dieing more frequently and if none is old enough you get all kinds of earquakes and floods that kill him, but this could be a coincidence. The whole family thing isn't working so well, it comes in waves, at a certain point you get a child every turn but then the game notices it has produced too many and you stop getting children, now all your generals become older and older without any offspring and start dieing, at another point the game notices this deficit, panicks out and offers you adoptions and man of the hour every turn.

There are some things you can do, if you leave some years between marriages, the children will not become of age all at the same time, now all you need to do is either kill any general that already has 2 or more children, or conquer provinces in a way that keeps the ratio.

No family member can have more than four children at the same time but if you "mod out" the females, generals can have an unlimited number of children, up to the point where they will have four males. Of course the "difficult birth" trait still comes after getting four children and this increases the difficulty.

Please take all this with a grain of salt, because I don't know the code, I can only deduct from what I see in the game and come to my own conclusions, which might be not 100% correct.

Edit: I forgot one thing, the game offers marriages like a typewriter, meaning from top left to bottom right, even if your top right general is 75 years old and will not get any good children, he will get the proposal earlier than the younger general in the lower left. To change this you can modify the max age for male marriage. If you set it to younger only generals to this age will marry and get children and the older ones in the upper tier will be skipped earlier (in theory).

The best method to handle your family might be to allow only the king and heir marriage and use generals for all other tasks, whenever you get a civil one he can govern a city and the other ones can fight the battles. With only 2 family members having children you will get eight for sure, although those might be 8 girls, then you are screwed (namewise).

[Johnniecash]

Thanks for a long and foremost good reply Furin. That´s what makes hanging around in this forums worthwhile.

Down to the subject. Okay, then the third tier of stables would mean you won´t be able to put out generals in the early game, a time where you the most need generals. Although I suspect this is easily modded, say for example connecting bodyguard production with a town hall and introducing some houserules for the exploit of them.

So you say the family limit is somewhere near your provinces minus 2. That seems a bit irritating as you then cannot fill upp all your cities with governors for example (excluding generals that is). But your point seem valid and should work well for anticipating when your getting close to getting no more children.
Although It also seems true as you said that the game works in phases, plopping out childrens for a while and then suddenly its dead quiet for a while and so on. Your advise of not marrying and getting children at the same time is very good, I shall think of it next time.
But about these phases, you said you were getting offered man of the hour and adoption when it had been quiet for a while. Is this because you have no men young enough to gain childrens or do the game work in this way always? If so it´s seems your family is in a nonstopable deadend.

But right know I´m thinking of cutting out the princesses entirely from the game, although it´s hard as I like the role they play very much and love the thrill every time you get the "new family member" if it will be a girl or boy
However, it seems easiest to put them away. Instead, I´m considering cutting down how many childrens a family can have to 2 boys maximum. This would mean a more estetic family tree (not a big horizontal blurr), where your family still grows (2,4,8,16 and so on) but where a few tradegys can quite impact the families future. And maybe most important, no "common women" stopping the "a bride presented to your general" event just because I don´t want any god damn foreigners/foreign surnames in my family tree whatsoever

To compensate in the beginning when there will be very few characters (no 4 boys families anymore) I will, as I said in the beginning, tie the recruitment of bodyguards to an ordinary stable or a town hall perhaps. But the cost of them will be considerly higher so they can´t be missused for cheap cavalery or replacement of dying family members. But do you know how this would impact the other ai factions? Would they start to recruite a lot of bodyguards if I implemented this? That´s the only backside of it, although a quite big one if it entirely changed the balance/realism of the game.

your last idea is also good with only faction heir and faction leader gaining children. Especially since all daughters then will become princesses. But the downside, except of the major one you told, would be that you really would prefer that your "next in line to be heir" should reach age before the old king die or the heir will start jumping up and down in the family tree. Another minor downside would also be a not so estetic looking family tree perhaps.

What do you think honestly? Is my idea (two male children max no princesses) something to go on with or do you like your last idea most? Can´t really decide myself which one would be the best try out.

At last! So have you been given a as long answer as yours was to me I hope you have the will to read it through, partly or at least the questions, as this was a most intresting subject from a family/roleplay perspective.

Cheers!

[Furin]

You are welcome, I am totally with you when it comes to roleplaying your royals, having the same family name after 6 generations is a must .

Changing the total number of children in the campaign_db file seems to make the game unstable, at least when you put a number greater than four, that's a guaranteed CTD, I am not sure how well the game handles if you reduce the children.

In my previous campaign I modded out the girls and then only used family members, the effect was, as you described above, that I was always 2 to 3 generals short for developing my settlements, and only after twohundred years, when the first fortresses were completely build, I had roughly enough.Still it was a good campaign, because I had to think ahead which regions are most important to develop and then distribute my family members accordingly, but I did not have a single military general as all my chums were building stuff, offends the nobility was a frequent guest and as there was only one "family" most boys got the "family was traiterous" trait too, made my heart bleed. Every grand plague (dark age) was a royal pain in the ass too because every time the young ones died, while the old farts survived, and that even increased the "wave" effect described above, after a dark age all I had left was the grandfathers and maybe one or two lucky survivors (mostly the ones with a traiterous family). Around 1450 or so I became bored and started a new campaign.

This time (girls still modded out), I allow only the king and the heir to marry and give all other tasks to generals. I have every city governed but some castles are governed by generals with the military trait, there is no way to influence if you get a civil or military general. So far I have managed to get at least a civil one for every city. The king and the heir get ALOT of children, but mostly daughters, the game seems to prefer daughters if you are short of generals, and the game thinks I have no generals because my family consists only of a couple of royals, somehow all the hired generals are not counted towards the total. Also I get a manofthehour and adoption offer every turn, but turn it down of course. My few royals hang out in the capital and the nearby cities and are pretty unimportant to me, while in the previous game I checked the family tree every turn to see if a new son was born.

So both ways have their ups and downs, the first approach connects you more to your family but has disadvantages ingame, the second approach gives you less hassle playing but you loose some of the feeling as the family is not so important any more.

Here is what it will look like...

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

So I have 6 alive generals at the moment, but at the same time I have around 20 regions with a governor and some military generals. The tree to the right is all the sons from the start who were not allowed to marry. Now in generation four/five I have allowed the not heir to marry either because all the adoption offers are beginning to go on my nerves. Hopefully my family will grow from here on and I can make a better mix of family and hired generals. Also you can see that the plague did not kill one family member, it only killed generals and those were no big loss...

Edit: And I forgot to post it again, but remembered this time, if you have bugs related to your family tree, like not getting marriages or children, save your game, exit the game, restart the computer (or clear your memory somehow) and then start the game again. This should help. It's the same as with those diplomats who talk to a city forever and after you continue your campaign the next day they finally offer trade rights, as they possibly wanted to for 100 years...

[Johnniecash]

So it seems it wasn´t all to bad playing without any girls. Sounds like in real life
And as I can see in the first campaign the offends the nobility and such things will still happend with the same effect. Although you wish it would´t as it´s hard enough as it is to build a nice little family tree. But with only the women modded out and still 4 childrens/family, should´t you encounter the character limit much faster? This is where my idea with max 2 kids would work smoother. With that not said you one day will encounter those birthstops and such, but the growing of your family will at least be in more line with the growing of your country.

The second campaign idea sounded really intresting. But I´m a bit confused, you said in the beginning you modded out the girls but still you state you received a lot of childrens and many of them were girls? Or is it only because girls are born and then you retire them at age 1 something perhaps? How does that effect the family size, will you still reach the 4 children max or will the daughters take up one slot nomatter you retire them or not?
Aside from that I liked that idea. It puts a more focus on your "real" royal family and they become your little preciouses (is that even a word? lol). But as you stated I can imagine you would never dare to take them out for a stroul with the risk of killing of the entire family with the death of one key family member.

But right know I think I´m in for my idea. And why not, after some time we would have the chanse to compare each others ideas and see how they worked out. But before we start up anything I took a look in the desc_campaign_db.xml file (containing family tree rules). Here is the family section of it:

<family_tree>
<max_age uint="110"/>
<max_age_for_marriage_for_male uint="50"/>
<max_age_for_marriage_for_female uint="40"/>
<max_age_before_death uint="111"/>
<max_age_of_child uint="10"/>
<old_age uint="50"/>
<age_of_manhood uint="16"/>
<daughters_age_of_consent uint="14"/>
<daughters_retirement_age uint="45"/>
<age_difference_min int="-10"/>
<age_difference_max int="30"/>
<parent_to_child_min_age_diff uint="12"/>
<min_adoption_age uint="20"/>
<max_adoption_age uint="30"/>
<max_age_for_conception uint="50"/>
<age_of_manhood_close uint="14"/>
<max_number_of_children uint="4"/>
</family_tree>

I believe I remember you said you were not so much in for modding but have you modded out the girls I think you have been here before. What I would like to ask is if you know what the red and green line above regulates. What I try to come up with here is what happens when the red line become true = your women is over the marriage time. From my point of view, they are then utterly useless and if the programmers were at least some worthy they salaries it would mean the woman were removed after this date. This would mean you could set women to be "unavaiable" for marriage after say 20 years old. With that you have 6 years if you would like to use here, or she will be removed and don´t bother you with the haltering "bride presented" bug described above.
But I don´t if my theory is true and therefor I also wonder what the green line mean, if it´s maybe this who tell a women to go to h**l. And if so, you ask yourself if this apply even if the women is married or umarried. So many questions, so few answers

Oh, and by the way, a nice tree you got yourself there. And thanks for the advice on bug problems. However I don´t know how to see the difference between what is a bug and what is game mechanics. In my latest game (which was the one starting this thread), for 20-30 turns only the one and same women got a male presented for her. Children however appeared, but I saw a bottleneck and got worried as other generals could´t get married because of this repeating event.

And intresting about this diplomat trying to do diplomacy but nothing happens. I thought, after reading in another thread, this was only attempts from the diplomat/princess to bribe the settlement.

[Furin]

It is true that a failed bribery attempt looks the same as what I call a bug, and I don't know if the diplomat always tries to bribe the settlement, but it is too much of a coincidence that the very same diplomat will give/ask you for trade rights in the same turn after you restarted the game, when he was stuck at that settlement forever before you restarted. This happens in the very beginning of the game too, when the AI does not even have close to enough money to attempt a bribery. I've posted this like a month after I got the game (years ago?) in the main thread and got told it's a bribery attempt, but I simply don't believe it.

Anyhow, lets take a look at these lines...


<max_age uint="110"/>
<max_age_for_marriage_for_male uint="50"/> <---- the maximum age for a marriage proposal for a male unit, if you set this too low you might loose your family name in a bottleneck/wave, if you set it too high your younger generals will get no proposal as there are still old ones left in the upper tier, ideal should be an age when the father will still live for a while after his son is educated, so you can use the son for a different settlement instead of just replacing the father (let's say something between 35 and 40 sounds ok)
<max_age_for_marriage_for_female uint="40"/> <--- the maximum age for your female family members to marry, no need to change it if you want to get rid of females, daughters will still be in the family tree until their retirement age so this is not the number essential for removing the girls
<max_age_before_death uint="111"/> <--- the absolute max for a generals life, I've heard that the general very rarely becomes 0 instead of dieing and then will continue to live, I've never experienced that myself though
<max_age_of_child uint="10"/> <--- child = not alive, but blocks a slot
<old_age uint="50"/> <--- generals will start dieing equal and above this number
<age_of_manhood uint="16"/> <---- when a male child becomes a real general, I've lowered this to 14 so the general will finish his education at 19/20
<daughters_age_of_consent uint="14"/> <---- when female child becomes "real" female and can marry, you can leave this number at 14
<daughters_retirement_age uint="45"/> <---- this is when your daughter retires, set this to 1, the effect is that your daughter is a child for two turns and then retires without message and the slot will be available again as if she was never born, medieval post natal abortion.... You can also set it to a higher number, for example 5, then the slot will be blocked for ten turns and this leads to a wider spacing of the male children. You can vary between 1 and 13, I believe 0 makes the game crash (haven't tried) and 14 is the consent age.
<age_difference_min int="-10"/> <---- these two give a range of marriage, for example grandpa marrying juicy 14 year old, the perv...
<age_difference_max int="30"/>
<parent_to_child_min_age_diff uint="12"/> <--- the minimum difference between parent and child, pretty useless as it is already defined by age a male or female comes of age, but what the heck, I am no programmer
<min_adoption_age uint="20"/> <--- obviously the range of adoption ages, if you set the minimum age below a generals manhood age it will bug the game, you will get a manhood notification for a general already in use and it will screw up your savegame sooner or later
<max_adoption_age uint="30"/>
<max_age_for_conception uint="50"/> <---- how long can a wife get children
<age_of_manhood_close uint="14"/> <--- not really sure here, maybe a stage between child and alive status, I've lowered this by two just to make sure it matches with my lowered manhood age
<max_number_of_children uint="4"/> <--- that's the one that makes the game less stable, at least if you put something higher than 4 here, I havent tried less than 4


You don't really need to restrict the childbirth anyway, all the negative fertility traits are usually enough to bring some variety to the family tree. When you play with family only, some sons get no children, some get two, some get four, it looks like a real family tree. If you play with generals your family members will get four sons each, unless you get close to the limit.

Also if you change the settings above you need to mod the strat file in the campaign folder and adjust your family tree. A daughter that is older than the retirement age at the gamestart will not vanish like an ingame generated one, she will get a nifty "died peacefully" and block a slot for a male in the beginning.

[mikeon]

What I do is marry the princesses and sons of heirs/kings to their aunts.

None of my princesses will go around to other countries to try and marry their heirs, their only purpose in my game is to marry their nephews/ cousins / grand nephews as soon as the sons reach of age and start their baby making factory.

All other women from other branches of my family still get their marriage requests, I always accept them all then have the general get killed within a few turns so that he doesn't produce any children with the woman.

In my attached pic of my family tree about a dozen turns ago.
The current faction leader's daughter has married the current heir's grandson. The heir's not yet of age daughter will be marrying her uncle.
Kill off the faction leader before the great grand daughters become of age.
The heir's granddaughter will be marrying the heir's great grandson which is her nephew.
The heir's fourth child, second son will be marring his brother's daughter.

And so on in this twisted inbreeding family tree.

[Johnniecash]

Furin: I think I believe in a combination of your theory and the general one about the potential diplomacy bug. Your should be applieable when the same guy later ingame have standed on the same spot for ages. However, about the ai can´t afford bribery in the early game, It would´t surprise me if the ai is so dumb so there is no correlation between the amount of money the ai have and if he will try bribe. He keep on bribing and get rejected every time mainly because of lack of money. The trade right thing would be I believe the ai "restart" everytime you reload the game. This is a common feature in many strategy games (EU3 is another good example) where the ai get bogged down as time goes and a restart will make him think clear again.

Thanks for the good explanation of the family tree lines, now I got it much clearer. And as you point out, it would´t be the first time CA:s programmers have implemented unnessecary lines/commandos in their scripts

Together with your last statment and the one you Mikeon did I´m now considering the path you have choosen Mikeon. Mainly because you don´t have to mod a lot and I´m getting more and more frustraded with how the family tree mechanics works. The two bigdowns with that is however that you will still have the now known "waves" of children births and a hell of a ugly family tree I will however try to look through all these dead husbands and think of them as... well they are in another family tree, such as when you marry off your princess to another heir. It will be hard to swallow as my dream of a clean family tree scatters with it, but I shall attempt. Let´s se if I can bare it or not, otherwise I will try a campaign in your style Furin with only marrying heir and faction leader. Goodest looking and problemfree familytree with that but as you stated, a much boring one, perhaps.

My choosen path of family tree leads me to one concrete question that I would be happy if anyone could answer. When you start your campaign there is a always a pretender to the throne (rebel army) near your capital. Do you really have to fight them? They never move and I can´t see any other downsides with having them stand there for the entire game. If so they will be a great trashcan for unwanted husbands

[Furin]

- they cause devastation (less income from a region)
- they ambush you
- sometimes they besiege your city for a turn

Try building some watchtowers at the border, they will move between these towers and that'll keep 'm busy until you can kill them.

[Johnniecash]

Do you know how large this devastation is? are we talking 10,25,50% of the total income or more of a fixed number?
And I suppose you would not agree on having them there as a trashcan, do you? After all if you need to kill of unwanted husbands it´s not always to find an enemy army or pirates, which can take critical turns when the husband try to reproduce (a big nono!)

The ambush thing I can live with and I have yet to see the beginning army besiege my city. Spawning rebel armies however do it all the time, but that´s another story.

[Aeon`]

Devastation and corruption are limited to 500.

[Johnniecash]

This time (girls still modded out), I allow only the king and the heir to marry and give all other tasks to generals. I have every city governed but some castles are governed by generals with the military trait, there is no way to influence if you get a civil or military general. So far I have managed to get at least a civil one for every city. The king and the heir get ALOT of children, but mostly daughters, the game seems to prefer daughters if you are short of generals, and the game thinks I have no generals because my family consists only of a couple of royals, somehow all the hired generals are not counted towards the total. Also I get a manofthehour and adoption offer every turn, but turn it down of course. My few royals hang out in the capital and the nearby cities and are pretty unimportant to me, while in the previous game I checked the family tree every turn to see if a new son was born.

So both ways have their ups and downs, the first approach connects you more to your family but has disadvantages ingame, the second approach gives you less hassle playing but you loose some of the feeling as the family is not so important any more.

Furin, as you noticed by know I swing back & forth on family strategy quite much as long as I haven´t started up my grand campaign And now I have started to think that this approach might be the funniest/intresting/best. However I´m thinking of attempting it with still girls ingame and allowing up to 6 or maybe even 8 childrens to compensate for a bunch of "ueseless" princesses. This still even if I´ve heard the game might go crazy I´ve heard from others that it should work out. Any more comments on that? If work, still big risk getting 6 or eight girls? Will affect the ai to much? or any other thing?

However you say with this strategy your royals became quite unimportant to you and later state that the game lost some of its feeling concerning the family. Could you develop that? Why they hanged out around your cities and such.
Because of how I see it the individuals should be more intresting as there are feewer of them while the family tree as a whole would be less perhaps. And there´s nothing that say you can not go out and pick a fight with them, as long as you only think twice about using the faction heir for that (although who would be better suited to lead your armies to victory than your lionhearted heir!)

So your, or any other for that matters, thoughts would be appreciated on this subject.

[Furin]

I think you have to find out by trial and error, just start a few campaigns with different settings and see what you like best.

[mikeon]

The max amount of children you can have is still 4. If you set it above that the game crashes.

PS Another good reason to inbred your family is passing along of good traits from the princesses if they have good charm.

[Furin]

Well to be precise, four present in the family tree, under one couple, at the same time. With my described method above you can have unlimited children until you reach four boys.

Hey Johnny why don't you try this setting for your next campaign and tell me how you liked it.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

<family_tree>
<max_age uint="110"/>
<max_age_for_marriage_for_male uint="40"/>
<max_age_for_marriage_for_female uint="40"/>
<max_age_before_death uint="111"/>
<max_age_of_child uint="10"/>
<old_age uint="50"/>
<age_of_manhood uint="14"/>
<daughters_age_of_consent uint="14"/>
<daughters_retirement_age uint="4"/>
<age_difference_min int="-10"/>
<age_difference_max int="10"/>
<parent_to_child_min_age_diff uint="12"/>
<min_adoption_age uint="18"/>
<max_adoption_age uint="25"/>
<max_age_for_conception uint="50"/>
<age_of_manhood_close uint="14"/>
<max_number_of_children uint="4"/>

[Johnniecash]

Thanks I´ll try that one now. But have you modded so you can have generals instantly (through a mustering hall or some other basic building)? Otherwise it seems it will be a hard time without any generals, especially if you expand fast in the beginning?