Suddenly all Carthaginian family members are barren?

[Jacque Schtrapp]

I'm playing as Carthage.... again. This time I am finally getting somewhere. It is 244 and I just noticed that it has been awhile since I have had any family members come of age. I went to the family tree and discovered that my youngest heir is 39 and there are NO children. WTF is this BS? Is there a .unfreeze. command or something like it to help with this problem? I was enjoying this campaign immensely until this lame problem developed. Any help will be appreciated.






-----> -----> ----->




*

[motorhead]

It's just probability at work. Sometimes you get runs of nothing and sometimes you get swamped with kids. In my current carth campaign, i went thru a similar dead-zone, but now i've got 9 kids ready to mature in the next 5 years with another group of six who were born in the last 3-4 years.

[andrewt]

I had the same problem in my Julii and Pontus campaign. In my Julii campaign, I had to do some save/load to get one. I eventually had a few more but they only replaced the ones that died. It was only near the end that my family members multiplied.

In my Pontus game, I had a few adoptions (I think 2) out of nowhere and bribed an Armenian general a few years before the adoptions so I waited it out. The floodgates finally opened after a while and I had 16 new family members in 15 years.

[Quillan]

I wonder if the game deliberately factored in the likelihood of children dying before coming of age, and didn't show you any that wouldn't live to make it to adulthood. Regardless, I've had similar experiences in the game. In my Bruti game, I had a 20 year gap in births, and even then I only had one in a 24 year span. After that, they started popping out babies left and right. I've never seen twins, though. I wonder if the game has a random chance for that built in.

[andrewt]

I don't think they bothered with having twins. It's around 1 per 80 births, though. The older the mother, the higher the percentage as well. Of course, twins probably had a higher infant mortality rate back then.

[Sleepy]

This happens, eventually you'll get a flood af kids. You could if still worried try bribing a young general from another faction as a stop gap. Or try to get a captain -> General promotion.

I suspect that the game engine is designed to limit the size of your family. Hence the barren periods people often get. I once had 16 childless couple for 20 odd years. But if they had produced kids at the normal rate my 30 odd region empire would have had over 100 family members.