2. What's up with the Family trees? My Heir isn't part of the family, or my Faction Leader has NO family.
The current setup for many factions regarding their family tree was implemented for a number of reasons, among which were the ability to add historical characters freely, and faction survivability. But here is a detailed explanation of how the 'family' system works in RS2.
First of all, I need to digress back to a known issue in RTW regarding the ability to add historical characters to the starting positions of any given faction. The ability to do this was severely hampered by the fact that in RTW, all family members MUST be related to each other. So you have a father and mother a certain age, and sons they had who must be related to the father, and who must be young enough to be his children. Here you have a typical RTW family setup...in this case for the Cimbri in RS2:
character_record Vannius, male, command 0, influence 0, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 14, alive, never_a_leader
character_record Sesithacus, male, command 0, influence 0, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 10, alive, never_a_leader
character_record Othelhildis, male, command 0, influence 0, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 6, alive, never_a_leader
character_record Carolus, male, command 0, influence 0, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 2, alive, never_a_leader
character_record Herlinda, female, command 0, influence 0, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 58, alive, never_a_leader
character_record Thusnelda, female, command 0, influence 0, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 35, alive, never_a_leader
character_record Aurinia, female, command 0, influence 0, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 28, alive, never_a_leader
character_record Amalberga, female, command 0, influence 0, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 8, alive, never_a_leader
character_record Biua, female, command 0, influence 0, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 7, alive, never_a_leader
relative Arminius, Herlinda, Ariogaisus, Hariulfus, Ricburgis, end
relative Ariogaisus, Thusnelda, Vannius, Amalberga, Othelhildis, end
relative Hariulfus, Aurinia, Sesithacus, Biua, Carolus, end
Note that Ariogaisus and Hariulfus are sons of Arminius, and that Arminius has to be old enough to be their father. So if the oldest son is 30, then the father has to be at least 50.
This restriction of age and relationship makes it very difficult to add a LOT of characters to any faction's starting family tree, and on top of that, no father and mother can have more than four children.
To get around this, modders started adding 'non-related' characters to this list...which you CAN do, but with the unforeseen side affect that the game would try to adopt this character (and in the case of the AI it WILL adopt that character) and then 'clone' him. What that means is that the game has difficulty recognizing the 'status' of this added 'non-family' character, so it not only adopts him, but also create another one of him, so there are now TWO people with this same name. Later in the game, when one of these two 'cloned' characters dies, the game will CTD. Without fail, the game crashes, and your campaign is over. There is no way around this error.
To solve this issue in RS2, I added non-family characters like this:
character sub_faction romans_brutii, Gaius Flaminius, named character, command 0, influence 0, management 0, subterfuge 0, age 72, , x 156, y 145
Note the 'sub_faction romans_brutii,' in front of Gaius Flaminius. What this does is make the game look at this character (my guess, anyway) as if he had been bribed and brought into the list of Roman characters. For whatever reason, a character added this way will NEVER be adopted, and therefore never cloned. The result of this, then, as shown here:
relative Quintus Fabius, Faustina, Sextus Fabius, Marcellus Fabius, Licinia, Minervina, end
relative Sextus Fabius, Poppaea, Fadia, Decius Fabius, Marcus Fabius, end
relative Marcellus Fabius, Alypia, Amulius Fabius, end
;;;;sub_faction characters;;;All chars. are 'sub_faction romans_brutii'
relative Lucius Paullus, Metella, end
relative Gaius Varro, Antistia, end
relative Gaius Flaminius, Eutropia, end
relative Gnaeus Geminus, Domitilla, end
relative Publius Scipio, Severina, end
relative Atilius Regulus, Alfidia, end
Is that the ruling family starts out as 'Fabius' (actually Fabius Maximus), and you have the normal family tree above...but all characters listed below them are 'sub_faction romans_brutii' characters, and I can add as many of them as I want to add. You could add hundreds if you wanted, and none will ever be adopted or cloned. However, a problem arose that at first seemed to 'upset the apple cart' of what I was doing. The game started making any one of these characters the 'Heir', and then HE would become the faction leader. Beta testers reported there was no family tree anymore, and I was upset....because I put tons of time into all this and it appeared the game was once again to thwart my best efforts.
But credit to Tone, who noticed in a few of his countless AI campaigns, that these characters quickly and efficiently created there OWN families, or already had them. The resulting conclusion was that RTW keeps track of 'hidden' family trees. So even if a character isn't strictly 'family', he still gets married (or is), has children, they grow up.....they are just all hidden....until one of them becomes a Faction Leader. So this was not as big a problem as I first thought. In fact, it's very cool, because the family leadership can be totally switched to another family (as in real life).
Then, I discovered a 'trigger' in the advice files of RTW that dealt with offering characters for marriage or adoption. It is the trigger that opens the window that asks if you want to allow a marriage, or adopt a character. The trigger CAN include a trait restriction......so if a character has a certain trait, you can tell that trigger NOT to offer him for marriage or adoption. This allowed the removal of the 'sub_faction' statement and a character list like this:
relative Quintus Fabius, Faustina, Sextus Fabius, Marcellus Fabius, Licinia, Minervina, end
relative Sextus Fabius, Poppaea, Fadia, Decius Fabius, Marcus Fabius, end
relative Marcellus Fabius, Alypia, Amulius Fabius, end
;;;;Characters Not_Adoptible;;;
relative Lucius Paullus, Metella, end
relative Gaius Varro, Antistia, end
relative Gaius Flaminius, Eutropia, end
relative Gnaeus Geminus, Domitilla, end
relative Publius Scipio, Severina, PubliusA Scipio, end
relative PubliusA Scipio, Helena, end
relative Atilius Regulus, Alfidia, end
relative QuintusC Caecilius_Metellus, Fausta, end
relative MarcusD Claudius_Marcellus, Dryantilla, end
relative MarcusC Livius_Salinator, Ustina, end
relative Tiberius Sempronius_Longus, Octavia, end
relative LuciusC Postumius_Albinus, Plautilla, end
Characters below the RTW approved 'family' all have a trait called 'Not_Adoptible', and their children inherit this trait. They also all have a high 'Fertility' trait setting so they reproduce like rabbits. And notice that Publius Scipio, a non-family member, who is the Elder Scipio, has a son named PubliusA Scipio, who is the famous Scipio Africanus. What this means is that with this setup, you could build incredibly large lists of characters with children, if you wished, and non-family characters with big families of their own right from the start. But in any event, every one of these characters, if made an Heir or Faction Leader, will either have or quickly create a family tree.
Now, there is one caveat here, which we learned very painfully....this setup works ONLY for the Player. The advice thread trigger that restricts adoption or marriage via a trait ONLY applies to the played campaign...the AI ignores that resriction and adopts and clones characters anyway. So PLAYED campaigns have to be set up differently than AI factions. (Another reason for modfoldered campaigns).
All of this allows for a large diversity of ruling families, often switching from one and back to the original...or the original may just die out. And, for some factions, this allows for a greater selection of characters to be made Heirs in the event that they 'accidentally' kill off all their family members in a campaign...which happens on occasion.
Roma Surrectum Family Tree Change Feature
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Originally Posted by Caesar Clivus
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