What do you guys usually do with your family members and why?

When I send them into the field, they aquire good traits and ancillaries that I would love to pass on, unfortunately waging war on the borders means they spend most of thier time away from the womenfolk...which means few if any children.

When I leave them home they have more offspring, but but they become much less desirable.

Switching them out constantly is not feasable when your borders start to expand as they will spend too much time traveling to be useful as fighters or breeders.

The only two options I can see right now are:

1) Send them into the field to develop them and later bring them home to stud and work the desk job until they kick the bucket. BUT it seems like the older they get, the less chance they have to have children, especially if the wife dies early...then you are left with no kids at all.

2) Have them hang out in town to finish growing up, get married, pop out some babies, and then head out to battle. Here you run the risk of aquiring bad traits while they sit around which could spoil both the children and their military career.

So what's a paterfamilias to do? Any thoughts?

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Have very few family members, and have them spend a couple of turns in every settlement they capture - mostly to help maintain law and order, and allow a police force to be built, before the main army moves on to take the next settlement.

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Family members with good management and influecial traits are used for managing cities and the ones with good commanding abilities are used for warfare and policing the countryside. Family members with bad traits are sent to the front on suicidal missions.
I agree that having a commander just sitting in a town his whole life has bad consequenses in the long run both for him and for his offspring. To prevent this I basically do two things:
1. Always let the provincial govenor take care of rebellions in his own province supported by some 3-5 cavs. This will allow a good manager to get some commanding skills/ traits.
2. Rotate your govenors every 5 years or so between your settlements to pick up traits and supporting all cities with different abilities. Sometimes I´ve tried to keep all my govenors in newly conquered or the smaller settlements to boost the evolvement, keep law and order and since your core settlements can be highly taxable without govenors I use them where they are most needed. By this I also prevent a border-settlement to be bribed off.

To prevent all bad traits to evolve with time is not feasible. Remember that corruption and decadence goes han in hand with power.

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I only really bother using family members in the early campaign. Later on the family tree just grows too big to be manageable, so I just let them all mass by the capital. My cities make more money without governors since they always get corruption traits (can't stop it when treasury grows big enough). Sometimes I will train a good governor or two before capturing a far-off province where their influence will be needed to keep it under control.

For battlefield, I'll make do without generals after the early phases of a campaign. The AI is easy enough to beat even without the morale bonuses once I get to build the better units and my war machine really gets going.

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I use my best generals for commanding my armies in countries far from home and i use the rest to handle the cities i have saved from the dirty ghauls. My great germania is growing stronger and stronger so i guess my strategy works.

It has it's downsides though. Yesturday my beloved King and conqueror died in battle. The ghaul warband was assaulting my outnumbered spear warband. My brave spearmen held their ground but they were loosing men due to beeing outflanked by enemy infanry. My king did not hesitate, he ordered a charge and set away full speed against the enemies. His cavalry warband crashed right into the flank of the enemies causing chaos in their ranks. Just as they were about to flee one infantry man got a lucky hit on my king and he fell to the ground. He died glouriously on the battlefield doing the bloody bussines that he loved. He became 57 years old and he had been out in the field conquering many towns from the ghauls. Now his son have taken over the rule of the country and he will have revenge. The ghauls shall run in fear when my mighty german army approaches their last stronghold.

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Early in the game I use them to take and stabalize cities. I don't worry about them being killed in battle because if they are I know I will get a MOTH, son-in-law or adoption in the next turn or two. Later in the game I will move a few in between cities to keep them viable, while the rest are on the frontier.

mfberg

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yeah, in the early turn all my general are out in the frontier with legions of full stack army. I find it quite undesirable to switch them around from and send them home to near the capital to govern my cities. Mostly I just send the new family out in the field and have the other general go back into one of the city without governor immedialy. another thing is that when they earn a right amount of command stars I also send them back, said like five is the minimum to be a governor. However, this don't really work when the empire expand to large to be manage by me though.

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I use my family members mostly as governors.

If I am playing a none barbarian faction then let them in a city with culture improvements during a while to get good routines then I send him to other city.

A few of them are used as generals, when one of these is reaching an old age I start training a new one fighting rebels or small armies. After that I join him to the old general stack and I transfer all routines to the new one.

If my old general is near a city I use him as governor for the rest of his days.

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Each Family Member can have 4+ children (I think it's 4 for Romans and 5 for Eastern Factions, it doesn't matter anyway).

You have one family member in a city. Hopefully, he will have lots of sons. Half his sons go to war, half go into management. The ones that go into management will have more children. Half of these will go into management, half to war. And so on... you get the idea.

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I use all family members as generals. They stay in cities for one to two turns to commission a garrison, then move on to the next, unless it is absolutely imperative that they stay in a city to keep it green.

The only chance a city has to decide on its tax rate is therefore when the city is first conquered. Otherwise they will have to wait for comings of age, where new faction members tour the provinces on the way to their assigned theatre of operations, where the towns will again have another chance to appeal for a tax revision. But that usually doesn't happen since all my towns are on low tax rate :-) Alternatively, he will also conscript a levy army from cities he passes by to destroy rebels en route, but his main purpose is military operations against enemy factions, not as a mere rebel-killer.

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