need tips on inbreeding

okay, I've been trying to heavily inbreed my royal family (playing as byzantines, so that I can explore this hilarious aspect of the game without much threat from other factions) by marrying ever princess with every prince and king, but it isn't working very well. midway through the game I was getting a higher rate of royals being inbred, but now later in the game that has settled back down to being on par with the average rate. and they haven't even been that inbred either. they weren't majorly affected by it, and rarely did the inbred royals ascent to the throne. and so far, not a single "extra toes" vice.

what should I be doing to ensure a royal family so astonishingly inbred that they can't stand up?

Heya ET, fitting name to go with your post :).
No idea how to increase the inbreds in your family...I could make some silly redneck jokes, but I wont ;).


Welcome to The Org!

This is actually very good to know as it seems that it is hardly possible to mess up you family line thru inbreeding...

What you could do to mess it up even more: counter-select your royals, so keep the most "vicious", vice-ridden and poorest stat heirs. It might not have relevance, but try to have the greatest age difference between prince and princess...

Also, generate some vices with low valor assassins and spies (and pray that they fail :wink: )

lol. My days...

Not sure what to say except perhaps accuse the developers of leaving out some detail on this matter.

Well I guess my first post should be in reply to someone else's first post. To me it all seems highly random. If you drop a princess on a royal that royal gets traits (I think I did it on accident once and over the next decade he went to inbred).

I'm playing the italians right now and my first heir had an inbred trait. Odd number of toes. I thought I could breed it out so over the course of the game I made sure the heir not only married another factions princess, but never the same faction twice. The lucky girls were from Sicily, Spain, France, England and the Byzantines. I have just hit the high era and what do you know my next heir to be has Odd number of toes.

Explain that one to me. You seem to be trying to do what I am trying not to do and neither of us is succeeding.

The inbreeding vices do not seem to be linked to actual inbreeding. I remember a poster who married all his Sicilian princes to their sisters without any noticable increase in the rate of inbreeding vices. There has long been the rumour that not marrying foreign princesses but daughters of local aristocrats increased the number of inbred vices but the developers denied this. However, inbreeding does seem to occur more often in certain royal lines, in particular the Egyptians and the Almohads.

If you seriously want to degenerate your royal line into a bunch of nine-toed, chinless morons, your best bet is to take a prince with a high inbred vice and make him king, select his most inbred son for the next throne and so on. And keep them out of battles: fighting decreases the rate at which some vices are acumulated (though I don't know if inbreeding is one of those vices).