Never tested them out, and unfortunately don't have time to do so now. I have theories on the old_age switch, maybe it was used to debug the 56 year old king bug.

Found it, numerology thread, quoted from eat cold steel:
http://shoguntotalwar.yuku.com/topic...gy.html?page=2
Quote Originally Posted by Post #29, numerology thread
And from a dev post:
/START
10-20-2003, 05:29
eat cold steel
CA Usergroup: 16
Join Date: Aug 2002
Location: CA, UK
Posts: 315

Time for one of my hidden-in-some-obscure-thread-secert-extra-command-line-switch-post me thinks. New to the VI patch:

-old_age:A where A is when the old age kicks in for generals, for kings, royal blood and hero add 10 years to that. It defaults to 40 which gives you some variation.

-death_msg:R where R is the rank of a general must be to get a general dies of old age parchment when you are displaying non-critical messages.

-critical_death_msg:R same as the one above, but it display a death message regardless of if the non-critical message check box is ticked or not. The default is death_msg:4, critical_death_msg:11. This gives the same behaviour as before the patch - you only death message when you want non-critical message and the general is rank 4+.

/END
If eat cold steel actually posted it, I would say they are valid switches. The patch mentioned would be the 2.01 fix, I guess.