No Heir, Civil War

[Maloncanth]

Well instead i decided to go back to my last save point which was about 4 or 5 years prior to this and try a few different things and hope this wouldnt happen again. I moved my king to some lower, warmer provinces, far away from northern plagues and pneumonia. He also remarried and i have a son at age 1, a hope. Also I have been keeping all my large stacks busy attacking and seiging provinces, hopefully they will have no idle time for secret meetings of

Is there anyway to prevent this from happening, as i dont think my king will last 15 years for my prince to mature. Or should i have sided with the rebels, whom when i go back and look at the save point during the rebellion, might have been the better army even though they had very few provinces. I tried bribing the rebels when i sided with the loyalists but this was not possible. I just dont want to lose all these good men and leaders that ive controlled for so long and worked up. The computer seemed determined though to throw a huge wrench in my world domination plans. Any help would be appreciated.

The likelihood of a king dying has nothing to do with where he is. As long as there is no direct heir to the throne, there will be a civil war or else you lose the game. Nor does it matter in this case what generals were doing, how loyal they are, or anything. This is not, afterall, a normal civil war, it's a war of succession between generals with indirect links to the throne - most likely generals that were once part of the main line, uncles or descendants of the uncles of the dead king and so forth. Go through your generals and look for the crown symbol on the right side of their window. A crown signifies royal blood, that the general can potentially become king or lead a side in a civil war should the main line die out.

If your king was in his late 50's at the time of your reload, the likelihood of him surviving 15 years is very low, though no zero. What the game does is roll if a king will die in a certain year, and then check for eligible kings to die of old age if it has determined that a king will die. Kings are eligible to die certainly by their late 50's however, some kings will (rarely) survive into their 70's. Since you're just going four or five turns and the game stores random numbers, what will likely happen is that you will find your king dying at the exact same year no matter what you do, there's probably no avoiding it. All you can do is make the best of it and try to quickly settle the civil war and get back into the game.

You might try manipulating who ends up on whose side during the inevitible civil war but I'm not sure how this can be reliably done.