My Royal families never re-produce!! Problem?

[Lord AcidRocker]

First off i love SS first time posting a thread in this forum so i wanted to give my due thanks to the SS team.

Now to my question:

I usually play as western european kingdoms on SS, on hard/hard and ive always come across one problem; my royal families hardly make babies! Is this common among other SS players, or am i doing something wrong? I always hate that the first kings pop out only one or two children ever 35 or so turns (and this is very rare still)

What gets me even more irritated is that the children are mostly female. Thus, my generals usually get old and wrinkly to the point that i need to adopt generals which aleays have terrible traits.

Has anyone come across this too or is it just me?

[Duck of Death]

It can happen. It depends on how many generals you have vs. how many territories you have.
If you adopt and/or recruit generals, they count against your total general number. The game will try to keep your family from getting to big.

For example... If you have 5 territories, 5 recruited generals, 5 family members (including children and unmarried princesses)... the AI will slow down your odds of getting marriage proposals and odds of any family member having kids. If you have 10 territories, only 3 generals and only one living family member (the King)... he'll probably have kids pretty fast.

The AI seems to try to keep you with as many generals (or potential generals (children)) as you have territories.

[Vissewalde rex de Gerzika]

I have noticed that all my generals tend to have children at the same time, i am playing as Scotland right now and the first wave of kids came in about 2 - 4 turns, which was good, because i could marry them to one another, only exception were 3 more kids popping up about 5 turns later then the rest.

My question is: is it normal for such massive waves of kids to just come out of seemingly nowhere?

I had my FL and FH married to other faction princesses, my princess married a french family member, only the third son of the faction leader who died in 1099(before the game starts) was left unmarried (i was actually thinking about killing my FL so he would become the new heir so i could marry him via diplomacy, but didnt) and remained unnmaried for a long time, but eventually got married and none of them didnt have kids anyway untill they were about 35-ish.

[tudor93]

sorry for the late answer, right when I wanted to reply to this thread my internet connection dropped and I left in vacation for 5 days
First of all, get this submod http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showt...436011&page=10. Marriage offers for male FMs are rare (even early in the game), so don't count on them.
What I started to do lately in my SS campaigns is to give my male FMs the Fertile and WifeIsFertile traits via the console. Don't use princesses as diplomats (because you have the diplomat available in cities to use him as a .... diplomat, doh), marry them with their cousins (you can't marry them with their brothers). You can give your princess the FertileWoman trait and her husband will automatically get the WifeIsFertile trait. I don't see it as cheating because the engine is retarded IMHO and will do anything to keep you from having royal blooded babies (it forces you to adopt). I also have issues with the gender of the new born FM; I can determine the adult FM members to have lots of babies (by giving them the fertile traits), but I can't determine the gender of their children and they seem to produce lots of girls, unfortunately. I don't marry the non-royal princesses because I don't want adopted sons.

[RomanGuy]

Once many of my family members get really old, like 60+, I send them out to be killed in battle. This helps a little in allowing more children to be born, but the game engine is still poorly designed.

[Strengelicher]

It is very seldom that I run into family tree problems in my SS campaigns. The key is to expand slowly but continuously while never adopting anyone. This may be difficult at first when the family is very small, as you have to wait a while until the first children come of age. But it is worth it.