Removing the notion of 'family' from the family tree

[Augustus Lucifer]

Anyone have any thoughts on this? This is a serious pet peeve of mine/thorn in my side. It works fine that feudal Europe has family members governing their cities and leading their armies, but the constrained inheritance system is not true everywhere. The options seem fairly limited though, you can adopt characters but then they're still considered 'family', which I suppose isn't a huge problem, but is definitely an annoyance. And you still have a tendency to sire multiple children which get a free pass to being a general/governor.

It seems like any government derived from something besides a Feudal Monarchy(Patriarchy) is impossible to represent with any fairness. Has anyone successfully represented, like, a Democracy? Not talking about ruler elections, I'm aware of the authority bonus and I'm sure I could script something like that but it doesn't apply. Referring more to the fact that the governors and generals, in for instance, the USA, have no familial ties whatsoever to the President or each other. Some 'military families' or 'political families' might have sons and daughters in the fields, but they're the exception rather than the rule, and rarely hold the same posts as their parents.

For reference I'll explain the issue with the Song, one of our factions. First and foremost, the real 'faction leader' is the Emperor, but the imperial family doesn't comprise the generals and governors of the land, in most cases they live secluded court lives aside from the occasional warmonger Emperor(usually a dynastic founder and his immediate successor). That's fine, I'm avoiding this by making the player 'faction leader' a Regent as opposed to the Emperor, since there's numerous complications with the former.

But even so, the son of the Regent is not going to be the next Regent, that's happened maybe once if ever, and is more likely to occur in a court dominated by noble families which is not the case at this point in history. The path to holding office was through the military or the civil service examinations; commoners had to serve in the military in the hopes of attaining lucrative military posts and prestige in that manner. Those who passed the jinshi exams served as scholar-officials and occupied most of the posts during this era. In all cases, it was seen as dishonorable for a son to leech on the office of the father, and those who attained office without themselves proving worthy through the traditional means were looked down upon and never held the highest offices(aka the only offices that TW actually represents in the form of its 'family members'). As such it's safe to say that not a single soul that held a provincial governorship or high military rank was directly related, and if any were, it was circumstance not inheritance.

That's all well and good. But to compound the issue, this is not the case in all factions. Notably Japan was at this time very much dominated by the concept of 'noble families', not quite in the European sense, but many of the main players in the Genpei War were members of either the Taira or Minamoto clan, and those which held office after the war could also be loosely associated with one of the large clans(it's still not that simple, but it's at least manageable in game terms). This means I can't really nullify birth rates or what have you to force adoptions, because some nations, probably those with more of a Tribal Government as well, were ruled as a Monarchy.

So there's my dilemma, I'd be interested to see if anyone has any ideas about how to resolve this. It annoys me enough that we can't have [surname-given name] setup instead of [given name-surname], but I'm about pulling my hair out over this fiendishly unmoddable "family" implementation.

[uanime5]

You could use the same family tree the Teutonic Order used. This treats all generals as unrelated, so the son of the current grand master will not become the next grand master (obviously they didn't have sons but if they did they wouldn't automatically become the grand master).

[Augustus Lucifer]

You could use the same family tree the Teutonic Order used. This treats all generals as unrelated, so the son of the current grand master will not become the next grand master (obviously they didn't have sons but if they did they wouldn't automatically become the grand master).

Yes I can see that the TO seems to have a disambiguated family tree. This would only solve the startup though, wouldn't it? After that they'd start having kids, so even with 40 different unrelated personages at the start it would still be inheritance. Unless I missed something and they don't have kids which enter into the family tree, I haven't ever played the Teutonic campaign, it's the only one I never actually tried go figure.

I wonder if terrible fertility traits might make the women infertile so it forces adoptions, still adoptions would maintain the whole "father" thing, but it'd be an improvement.

[Gigantus]

Unless I missed something and they don't have kids which enter into the family tree

There is no family tree!
There are no kids!
Only the faction leader and the faction heir. The heir gets appointed through a trait (authority, chivalry - something like that). I believe they kind of adopt, but as I said: no family tree.

[konny]

It works very much like the Papal States, with the difference in FH and FL. You can also allow them for recruiting FMs additionally, in this case - provided the player does actually use that feature - there would be not many "adoptions" at all. For traiting purposes: EDCT treats recruited generals as adopted.