Marriage in Medieval Times

Hey guys I would appreciate some feedback on the marriage aspect of the game. As a new convert to the MTW game I am completely hooked and want to explore it thoroughly so that I can play the game to the hilt.

My first question is this... I have been having a lot of daughters and marrying them off to Princes in other realms. Aside from the marriage forming an alliance will I ever really see it paying off with having a claim to their lands due to the mix of our bloodlines? If you've seen this how long did it take? I imagine she'd have to marry the Prince and hopefully he one day becomes king and has children and perhaps in a civil war I could lay claims?

My second question... If I marry my daughter to a loyal general will they then have children with blood ties to the royal family?

Alright, thanks a lot and Have a Great Weekend everyone!

Marrying your daughters to their sons gives them a claim on your lands when your lines fail. Marrying your sons to their daughters gives you a claim on their lands when their lines fail. As Byz it took a war between England, France and Spain, but I got Aquitaine, Toulouse, and Isle de France when the Spainish killed of the last of the French line, so you just have to wait until either the line gets killed off or dies out on its own. (Assassins may be of some use here.)
Keep your emmisaries busy asking princesses to marry your worthless progeny and you could have lands from east to west without directly fighting for it.
Your generals will gain loyalty if you give them your princesses, but no bloodlines are formed.

mfberg

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Originally Posted by mfberg

Your generals will gain loyalty if you give them your princesses, but no bloodlines are formed.

mfberg

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While I haven't experienced this myself, a number of people have said that a general married to one of their princesses can also take over your empire should your faction leader die without an heir. So married generals may also provide an extra measure in helping to secure the line of succession.

Marrying your sons and daughters can give you some messed up kids. It is kimda funny though.

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Originally Posted by Martok

While I haven't experienced this myself, a number of people have said that a general married to one of their princesses can also take over your empire should your faction leader die without an heir. So married generals may also provide an extra measure in helping to secure the line of succession.

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Very true.....
I marry a Princess to my best general, so if my king dies without heirs(I never had this ~D ), he's gonna be the leader of the empire....

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Originally Posted by edyzmedieval

Very true.....
I marry a Princess to my best general, so if my king dies without heirs(I never had this ~D ), he's gonna be the leader of the empire....

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Cool cool. Just remember that even if your general does take over the empire, it's possible a civil war could happen (since he is not a "direct" heir), and he may have to fight off one or more claimants to the throne.

I came very close to seeing this happen for myself, so I've still not got any direct verification that the game takes account of it. If anyone out there has got direct experience, I'd be happy to hear about it.

Basically, my Byz emperor took over, was married, had no perversions but had no heir and then the Royal-blood uncles all started dying of old age, leaving him as the only one left with a crown icon on his parchment. He was advancing into his forties and it looked like my time was soon to be up (his predesessors didn't all die at 56, so that bugfix definitely worked but none of them lasted much more than 2 or 3 years beyond that).

I had married a daughter to my highest acumen govenor and it would be interesting to know how the game keeps track of his potential for a claim to a vacant throne, since the only sign left of such a link is the wedding ring icon on his parchment.

I now have an heir but I'm still not out of the woods yet, since the emperor should be about 62 before the heir comes of age, so it's touch and go which will happen first.

Is it possible to have an under-age faction leader or does the game disintegrate your empire if the successor is as little as one year too young?

I've heard before that marrying off you daughters into a faction makes that faction more likely to marry their princesses into yours. From my own experiences this seems to be true, but sometimes faction wont marry no matter what you do!

@ EatYerGreens:

I have read here previously that an underage heir is not sufficient for the continuance of the empire. Game over. No chance of re-emergence for the human player, unfortunately.

It would have been a cool facet of the game to have the AI factions play out their turns while you wait for the roll of the dice to determine where your glorious re-emergence is to occur.

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Originally Posted by EatYerGreens

Is it possible to have an under-age faction leader or does the game disintegrate your empire if the successor is as little as one year too young?

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I have lost a Byzantine Empire game because my emperor died the year before his son became 16. So: no, you cannot rule with an underage king. This is to a certain extent historically correct: ruling in the early middle ages was a personal business, so few nobles would want to be led by a child.

I don't think that marrying daughters to favourite generals helps either: a royal connection just makes the general more likely to lead a civil war (should it break out, but remember that marriage to a princess also makes the general more loyal). So unless you can quickly organize a civil war, I am afraid the game is already lost. Generals inheriting the crown only happens in the Holy Roman Empire.

Though you could use the .unfreeze. cheat and hope the emperor reaches 62.

I do try to start a civil war to keep the empire going when my King is over 45 with no sons/heirs. The .unfreeze. cheat seems too much like cheating to me :smartass: .

mfberg

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Originally Posted by tigger_on_vrb

I've heard before that marrying off you daughters into a faction makes that faction more likely to marry their princesses into yours.

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That's encouraging to hear. I shall look out for that. THe thing I always forget is what age they disappear to the nunnery, if left unmarried. Last time that happened to me was in unpatched V1.0 and age 30 springs to mind. Now I'm using VI (v2.01), I've seen other faction's princesses still floating around at age 32 so either I remember wrong, or they've changed it.

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Originally Posted by tigger_on_vrb

From my own experiences this seems to be true, but sometimes faction wont marry no matter what you do!

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There's several good reasons I can think of for them to do that.

1) A previous marriage has successfully established the alliance between you and a further marriage would achieve nothing additional for them.
2) In fact another marriage into your faction would deprive them of a 'freebie' agent with which to spy on the goings-on around the world.
3) It would also give them one less opportunity to seal an alliance with another faction, should the need to do so arise all of a sudden.
4) Perhaps they are not currently allied to you and do not wish to be allied either because they have designs on your lands... :sly:
5) The only unmarried princes in your faction are not in direct line to the throne, which negates the 'claim to heirless lands' angle.
6) Your remaining unmarried princes have undesirable, even dangerous, vices.
7) The past mutual exchange of princesses was a generation or more ago, making a request to marry their latest princess to your king or his sons turn out to be one between cousins, cousins-once-removed, twice-removed etc.

I was reading an old thread the other day, about how to assure good stats in princes and someone raised the point about 'king marries daughter of a noble' being the track towards declining heirs stats. I wonder about this.

In reality, the royal families of Europe went to great lengths to intermarry with one another and, as far as I know, generally managed to avoid this course of action. Ironically, this means that they're more at risk of becoming inbred than the rest of us are. It would be fascinating to know if the game actually keeps track of who's related to whom. Also, it's a pity that the alliance screen doesn't help to to distinguish plain alliances from marriage-related ones, so you can avoid marrying into another faction twice uninentionally and getting the inbred vice in your royal line.

Then again, I've had generals start off okay and suddenly they develop 'inbred' or 'odd number of toes' so I've a feeling that the V&V's arise spontaneously anyway. For instance, I've seen ones with completely contradictory V&V's and have also seen princes coming of age with 'great warrior', 'traumatised', 'captured', and other seemingly unjustifiable traits, rather than developing these purely as a result of things which happened to them in the campaign.

EDIT:
P.S. Cross-reference this thread with the recent "Civil War :furious3:" thread.

P.P.S. Today's session saw Nicephorous IV father another heir, at 51. So don't start rushing into CivWars just cos they're in their 40's.

I mostly use my ladies as scouts until reaching about age 30, then I marry
them to a general to boost loyalty. I use emissaries to ask their daughters
to marry and for alliance request. My assassins cruise around taking out
enemy units as often as possible :evilgrin: I do not like to have confused
bloodlines :no: .

In response to EatYerGreens.....
Everything you say is very true if the computer factions thought like humans, but I think more of a factor is that when you are a small unexpanded nation the foreign princesses are very keen and you can get several marriages from one faction, but after you get too big no one will accept. I assume this is one of the features hard-wired into the game to slow you down when you are getting too big like no one accepting alliances.

No alliances when you are big is just sensible AI, for once, IMO.

A large, powerful faction's sole interest in taking an, ostensibly, peaceful stance with a neighbour is that it wants to concentrate on war at one front at a time. Even neutrality with the neighbour means that sizeable army stacks need to be built and then maintained on the peaceful border on a 'just in case' basis. This is a double financial drain and slows their expansion in one way.

The other is that of demands on deployment. In the Byz example, they begin Early with just one training centre and it takes time to get other provinces up to troop-producing standards. For example ByzInf requires Fort, Keep, Town Watch, Spearmaker, Swordsmith, or 4+8+2+2+4=20 years, not counting farm improvements or other niceties. So this leaves them only weaker unit types at the secondary castles, early on and when attempting to maintain two fighting fronts, BI units from only one available source have to be deployed alternately in the direction of each front, which is a real handicap when recovering from heavy casualties in a battle.

If playing as Turk, Eggy, Bulgaria, Poland or Russia (are Novgorod playable under VI?) you need to exploit this slow mobilisation, push early and cripple them economically, if nothing else. Normally, you can save money by letting other factions invest in the infrastructure first, then steal it off them but, in their case, I think it would pay not to let them do that. Waiting will only make them so strong that your task becomes militarily difficult or, if you win anyway, very expensive in terms of lives.

Agreed. The AI Hungarians and Polish cannot be relied upon to make war with the Byzantines. Beating the Empire back up to the Balkan region early is essential as the Turks or Eggies, because the Byz will out-cash and out-tech you every year for the first 75 or so...

Sicily often scraps with them, but just as often gets relegated back to its islands, with the Sicilian fleet lying at the bottom of the Med.