Breeding freaks

[Slicendice]

Something I'm wondering about is if I can prevent family members from marrying EVER? So when they keep asking me if I want to adopt I can say "yes" without fear of them reproducing and potentially becoming an heir.

[Shahed]

That seems to be no problem at all for my Turkish royal family. They won't marry, obviously they have other sexual orientation, homosexuality perhaps, but they won't admit it.

A few of them will die without marrying.

[Fisherking]

I have to agree with this one. The family trees seem to produce a bumper crop of nuts when they produce at all.
I have been very disheartened by this and every attempt on my part to prevent poor traits has failed. It is very much like a contagion, once one family member gets poor tax man or the dreaded trait of tax-farmer(different from the ancillary)they all try to out do the others until you can only use them in ambushes or send them on crusades. They come of age with terrible traits so that you have to keep a close eye out for any showing up in towns.
It is too bad I didn't make any screen shots of some of the family trees near the end of one of these games. The abundance of Wall-nuts was astounding!
Most of them are mad as hatters, extravagant to the last degree, of practically no military value, and with no religion what so ever.

Not being able to swap ancillaries is only a very minor problem. I don't know why CA decided to make all the royal houses of Europe into such degenerate swine but it seems certain that they will all turn out that way. Even those adopted can only be left in settlements for a few turns before they are totally useless...and I never have large sums left in the treasury!!!! What triggers all of these pathetic traits in the first place, and what am I doing wrong never to get any positive traits passed along???

[R'as al Ghul]

I don't know why CA decided to make all the royal houses of Europe into such degenerate swine but it seems certain that they will all turn out that way.

Erm, incest?

I suffer the same problem. One needs to micromanage them every turn but even then they still pick up bad traits.

[dopp]

Refer to the "Hotbeds of Sin and Corruption" thread to see why your characters instantly rot away when they enter a settlement. All those negative traits are genetic, btw, and they increase in severity with each passing generation.

Adopting a son, getting married and having children all have high chances of giving your characters negative traits. On the other hand, there are also high chances of getting good traits from these events (dad gives up drinking when daughter is born kind of stuff). Getting hit by an assassin will give the character quite a few nasty traits as well if he survives.

Apart from this, there is a series of triggers that fires every time a new family member appears. They contain almost all the negative and positive traits. So despite your best efforts some of your 'coming of age' family (those that you can't say no to) will have horrible traits that then become genetic. It's completely random and there's nothing you can do about it, except prevent the victim from breeding it further.

Having said that, I suspect the game loads the dice. As I said in another thread, the last few of my VH/VH grand campaigns have all seen madness enter my royal line. The game always seems to roll it up for one of my characters and then goes out of its way to choose that fellow as my faction heir. My current insane despot was chosen as crown prince even though he was adopted and his father was the third son of the previous king (the first son was still alive and had children of his own, but it seems like the game simply skipped that generation altogether to make this wacko crown prince). He still managed to hit 8 authority despite the massive penalties of the trait due to an assassination spree I had going. Mad but dangerous.

[Fisherking]

LOL Well I am not quite sure whether I like it or hate it. Never mind I hate it.
It sounds like unintended consequences of trying to give the game a little levity.

In the last campaign I took to hiding ever one out in the woods hoping to avoid all of this but alas to no avail. I think it needs a serious rework, be it by CA or modders....Only the AI factions seem to have usable generals. I am lucky to have some dolt with two stars and enough bad traits to put him into a freak show.

[seneschal.the]

I got bored of my two venetian generals, the heir and the general at Ragusa, getting pagan magicians in 6 turns at the start of the game. 50-60 turns later my entire family was corrupt homosexual drunkards.

I whipped up a small mod that overhauls the vices, making them much less likely to appear and only when it is somewhat logically sound. Before modding it, I never even used governors as they always, always pick up very bad traits very quickly.

https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=75326

The whole VnV system is just a big trainwreck. How about taking some people off the graphical division and have em read through the .txt files?

[Exino]

Well..... just in case you didn't know the British and French royalty pretty much were inbred in the medieval ages... and inbreeding causes weak genetic diversity, as anyone who has taken a basic science class would know.

Well, now ya know.