Creating a female general or ruler

[Tighd Mhic Dubhghaill]

This may be a dumb question but I can't remember seeing any discussion on it. I'm considering making a single female character in campaign who can then act as a general, heir and possibly ruler.

I'm intending to do this by creating my ruler's sister as a male general unit in descr_start after adding her name to the male names list and giving her a custom portrait. I'll then give her a 'husband' with a male or unisex name so she can have children. I don't anticipate any problems but can't remember seeing it before, are there any drawbacks to this approach?

All I can think of is ending up with new male children with her name, but that can be solved by loading from the previous turn and using up that name for a captain.

[Callistonian]

What you described will work as planned. Some additional, optional things you can do to complete the illusion include: 1) making sure the leader/heir traits &/or ancillaries have gender-neutral text. 2) Making a female strat model for this character and ensuring she gets no other traits with Level effects. Remember to set her name for the rollover text in expanded.txt. 3) Give her a BG unit with female audio. 4) Give her female custom selection audio for the strat map.

Some other information on this topic: It is possible to set a named character's gender to "female" in descr_strat. This will prevent the character from getting marriage offers and having children. However, it will also preclude them from being in the family tree. It is possible to spawn a uniquely named character in campaign_script but it is not possible to specify their gender (script fails to parse). The only way to prevent a spawned, uniquely named, male, named character from getting marriage offers is to set their age to be over the limit for marriage offers in descr_campaign_db.

[Gigantus]

The positioning of spouses and use of the default female portrait in the family tree may cause this to look a bit odd. One also has to keep in mind that children will inherit the surname properties from the male parent, so care need to be taken how to apply surnames.
There is also a good chance that the faction's next male generation of characters and agents may receive the female name. Otherwise I haven't tested\can't remember what happens if a first name is only listed in the female section and you apply it to a male character, eg just a non fatal error in the log or no name displayed on the character.