Help! My Julii are barren . . .

I've only had RTW for a few months and I've played it quite a bit. I've shopped for mods and finally downloaded several, taking care to create a unique game directory for each mod (I have four or five different links on my desktop). No mod has been loaded over another mod or the original game (v. 1.5)

So, the other night I was playing the Julii in the Europa 270 campaign in the Darth mod and I noticed my four faction leaders were not having children. None. Ten years passed and nothing. So, I started again, this time adding a temple to Ceres (going for the fertility benefit) and another ten years passed with nothing. I started a third game and fifteen years later I was wondering if somewhere in the Forum there was a sale on prophylactics. Not a single heir.

Thinking maybe it was just the Darth mod, I started my vanilla v. 1.5 and it took eight years for four guys to produce one child. This is a problem since it forces me to keep my generals in cities in the desperate hope that something "magical" will happen.

Questions:

(1) Is this normal?

(2) How do I increase the number of children my leaders generate? (And I've read "On the Care and Feeding of Generals and Governors" in the Guides section --- is there any other advice?) What do you do get these guys moving?

(3) Does anyone know how the game manages this? Is it part of the campaign map file or some other file?

Thanks for any advice.

Spidey

I think it's just how the game works. The modding guides database has nothing about increasing fertility. However EB has, somehow, managed to stop characters from having children at all. Perhaps that could be reversed making character have more children. You could ask them.

It's not unusual for there to be a drought when there are no children being born. The size of your family is roughly limited to the size of your empire. You typically only have 1 male family member or so per settlement. So if you don't keep on conquering new lands, you are unlikely to get many new births in the family if you already have several males. You should, however, get adoptions when you're short on family members for the number of settlements owned, and you can expect a sudden spurt of births if you capture several settlements in a short time period.

So basically there's no point restarting a campaign because you've had no new births in the opening 10-20 years because the chances are everything sorts itself out in the end. Sure your original family line might be lost (although in my Julii campaign, the original Julii lineage ruled for 120+ years no probs) but you should get new sons at some stage.

It may not be realistic to have births restricted in this manner, but unless they introduced a heck of a lot of random illnesses and deaths, you'd end up with literally hundreds of family members by the end of the game.

Hi Spidey

1) I play on V1.5 No Mods. I am seeing several children in my German campaign. No huge families but more than enough to keep things ticking along. I do have an ancillery..a priestess from one of the temples. She increases fertility. In other campaigns when expanding fast its not children that I rely on...its Man of the Hour adoptions of captains.

2) I read somewhere that a general being in a city helps. Give ancilleries that increase fertility to young married men.

3) Unknown.

Good luck having babies.

Man, Severous, I see you with your sig (no mods), and I wonder how you do it...

You must at least have player1's bugfixer patch right?

Otherwise you have British generals leading the Spanish armies...

OT: So much has changed here since my last visit. It must have been about 2 years ago when i made my last post. I don't recognize anyone, save Beruit and professorspatula, I remember you!

OnT: Usually, as said by the forummers above, It depends on the size of you're empire. Usually in my experience there is a huge birth rate explosion after a drought of babies is gone.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by fallen851

Man, Severous, I see you with your sig (no mods), and I wonder how you do it...

You must at least have player1's bugfixer patch right?

Otherwise you have British generals leading the Spanish armies...

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Hi fallen851

No mods at all. No bug fixer. Only official patches (V1.3 and V1.5). I have however just played Thrace. Another player started that campaign which I believe needed a mod to unlock the faction. Strange things happened on the generals traits which reduced the enjoyment I got from that game.

I live with blue Spanish generals. Easier to target them when charging cavalry into their ranks.


On topic. Got a message recently. 'Wife no longer of child bearing age'. She was age 56...(or was it 46). Worth bearing in mind the age of the generals (and wives) when trying for children?

Just capture more territory and you should get more generals. I'm pretty sure that the retinue that increase chances of having children don't actually get you more children, just more children from that general. So if you have someone with really good traits and you want them to have the kids, give it to them.

The number of family members is indeed limited by the amount of provinces.

If your family members don't have children of their own, you'll get pop-ups presenting candidates for adoption. Sometimes you'll be able to adopt a captain who just won a major battle (man of the hour pop up).

Unless you get all your generals killed in battle in just a few turns, you'll always have family members around.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Severous

On topic. Got a message recently. 'Wife no longer of child bearing age'. She was age 56...(or was it 46). Worth bearing in mind the age of the generals (and wives) when trying for children?

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This happens to your unmarried daughters. If you deny marriage candidates long enough, they´ll be too old to marry, and that message appears. I´m having this a lot in my Chivalry campaign, though I can´t remember why not in my vanilla RTW ones - maybe I was just too eager to take on each and every suitor that came along.
The same could occur in MTW as well if you didn´t manage to marry your princesses to foreign princes and didn´t want them to marry your Generals. Though the "past childbearing age" message popped up a lot earlier in MTW, I believe. Somewhere in the region of 36, if I´m not too mistaken.