Originally Posted by
Roma_Victrix
While all of this is very true, you guys also removed the ONE tool that the game offered to mitigate this problem: the princess agent.
With a princess, you don't have to marry her off to a foreign faction to gain an alliance or use her as a diplomat until she dies. You can literally marry her to one of your prominent family members who isn't already married, usually ensuring that they can produce children with traits like their father. The game is already hard enough as it is when it comes to this issue and the removal of the princess just makes it impossible to guarantee that the family will grow in an orderly/planned fashion.
It's actually made worse by the fact that the game seems to get confused if you recruit too many allied government client rulers at once. It lumps them in with the total number of family members, so that when the client rulers die off all of the sudden you're left with an extremely diminished amount of family members/generals. When my empire grows big enough to about 100 provinces or so, this sometimes turns into a disparity of 30 to 40 family members less than I theoretically should have, given the number of provinces. This has the potential to ruin your economy, to endanger your borders due to emboldened enemies facing your captains instead of generals, and significantly decreases your chances of keeping troublesome rebellious settlements in order with enough quality governors to make sure they aren't misbehaving and revolting.