Question!

[Caerfanan]

Never had it happen to me, but someone here has said that it must be either your king or heir (and the heir must take the throne) that marries the princess. Basically the princess must become your queen.

But must she be the actual queen or does she only need to be a potential queen?

Oh, anyone knows if it's possible to know if your kiing is married to a princess coming from another faction?

(I should try to keep track of this of it's not possible)

[Deus ret.]

It's not possible, you'll have to take care of this yourself.

Sometimes you can even arrange a marriage when the heir has already become king but is still unmarried. You only have a couple of turns for that, though, before he weds a young lady from the gentry.

[EatYerGreens]

There's only one time I can properly recall seeing it happen and, even then, it was one of the AI factions which benefited! I was the English and an already-rampant Spain collected some Novgorod lands through marriage.


If you think about it, for the rules of inheritance (of those times) to work at all, you should have married the dead king's eldest daughter (not the younger, prettier, sister...<g>). Normal etiquette was that younger daughters had to wait their turn anyway (because of the inheritance laws themselves?) but the game doesn't actually enforce that.

It will take close attention, on the part of the player, plus as many emissaries as it takes to have one in every 'court', following faction leaders about (with the attendent risks, of course) in order to spot the appearance of the eldest daughter and to 'chase them down', when they set off, touring the world. Your marriage offer will only work (I should say 'be worthwhile' here) if your heir is still unmarried (as Deus Ret. pointed out, your king never remains unmarried for long enough to catch the princess in time) and could still be turned down anyway, because that faction does not wish to ally with you.

Strangely, the AI will often agree to 'irrelevant' marriages, where it's the king's uncles, or brothers, or the heir's younger siblings who receive the bride and likewise when you send a daughter to them. In these cases, since the prospective husbands are not in direct line to inherit the kingdom, your faction will not inherit the other faction's lands through the marriage.

One remaining puzzle is that, once married, the princess is removed from the game and there's no attempt to continue to track when she dies of old age. In theory though, she should comfortably outlive her heirless father.

What would also be interesting is some proof that you can form an alliance through marriage, then several generations go by and then the other faction dies out. Do you still have rights through marriage from generations earlier, or not? FTSOA, say none of the daughters in subsequent generations had married into other factions and all had married home-faction generals instead?

The point being this:
1st generation daughter from faction A, marries into faction B
3rd generation daughter from A, marries into faction D
4th generation daughter from A, marries into faction F
6th generation king of A dies (no offsping at all). Assume that the aunts/great-(n)-aunts, referred to, above, are also dead by now.

B, D and F all have legitimate claims through marriage but who's to say who has the strongest claim? The one that got there first? The one which was most historically recent? Perhaps the rule, for the purposes of the game, is that if there is the slightest possibility of disputed claims, then nobody inherits?

That might explain why it happens so rarely. But it's just a theory...

One upshot of this might be that, having married one of their daughters, you then have to set about assassinating every other daughter they produce thereafter. Families, eh?

[EatYerGreens]

On the subject of keeping track of which factions you've had marriages with, I'd be interested to learn whether the game really does track the genetics of it so, for example:-

You marry a daughter off to the Danes;
A few generations go by and the Danes suddenly have a glut of daughters;
You need to get your heir married and approach them.
This is basically some form of cousin-marriage.
Another few generations pass...

Do your male heirs come of age with "chinless" or other varieties of "less than eight great-grandparents" vices?

There are more complex permutations, such as you marry to the Danes, a later generation of Danes send a daughter to the Spanish and a later generation of Spanish sends a daughter to you, and so on - but all with the same potential consquences.


The only strategy that comes to mind is that you adopt the following policies:-
1) Consistently accept princess offers from minor factions who you are unlikely ever to need to go to war with to win the game (60% conquest).
2) Don't offer any subsequent princesses of yours back to the factions in (1).
3) Consistenly offer your princesses only to the factions who you need to go to war with in order to win the game but from whom you will occasionally need to obtain a ceasefire - a respite, in order to rebuild troop numbers, tech up, or deal with another faction on a second front.
4) Don't accept any subsequent princesses back from the factions in (3).
5) When situation (3) is not applicable, use princesses strictly for surveillance and remember to bring them back home in time to marry your generals. 'Home in time' means that they get only about 10-12 years of useful travelling (which is why I prefer to rely on bishops).

[Martok]

On the subject of keeping track of which factions you've had marriages with, I'd be interested to learn whether the game really does track the genetics of it so, for example:-

You marry a daughter off to the Danes;
A few generations go by and the Danes suddenly have a glut of daughters;
You need to get your heir married and approach them.
This is basically some form of cousin-marriage.
Another few generations pass...

Do your male heirs come of age with "chinless" or other varieties of "less than eight great-grandparents" vices?

There are more complex permutations, such as you marry to the Danes, a later generation of Danes send a daughter to the Spanish and a later generation of Spanish sends a daughter to you, and so on - but all with the same potential consquences.

While I won't claim to have conducted controlled, empirical studies as such, I am 99.9% certain that marriages between relatives has no effect on the possibility of characters getting any of the "inbred" line of vices.

I used to believe that the opposite was true, but experience has since taught me that the Chinless/Inbred/Odd-number-of-toes traits are not determined by who a general's parents were. Princes and generals that happen to be cursed with these vices are victims of coincidence, not inbreeding.

The only possible exception to this rule is when a brother commits incest and marries his sister -- and even then I still have my doubts that there's any ill effects on their offspring. I think that for the most part, such vices are bestowed randomly. The biggest factor for collecting these negative traits seems to be if a prince/general is just sitting around and doing nothing.

[caravel]

Martok has it right. The only vice acquired as a direct result of inbreeding is the Incest/Secret Incest vice. This affects piety and nothing more. This vice comes from marrying your princesses to your faction leader or heirs. It doesn't occur as a result of your faction leader marrying an aristocrat. The other inbred vices seem to be random.

[Caerfanan]

It's not possible, you'll have to take care of this yourself.

Sometimes you can even arrange a marriage when the heir has already become king but is still unmarried. You only have a couple of turns for that, though, before he weds a young lady from the gentry.

A pity! But OK, I'll do that!