Good Breeding: A guide to taking care of your family tree.

[Durallan]

Greetings, this is partly in response to the people having trouble getting good generals married, and just as a guide to those who wish to have a well bred family.

First of all, let me show you my family tree from my Denmark campaign.


As you can see, the kings all progress nicely down the left hand side which is what we are aiming for.

NOTE: unfortunately this will not work for Muslim factions or any other faction where you do not get moveable princesses on the campaign map.

Starting a new game

Ok. When starting a game it is very important to train your prince up, not the king, the prince, you can pretty much ignore the king for the most part unless he has alot of command and you have some important battles he needs to be in.
The most important part of a young mans life is princehood.
The first and most urgent thing to do is find him a bride. Remember that traits are done when the kids come of age not when they are born. This gives you several turns to train up your prince.

Training up a prince for good traits

Now we need to organise a couple of battles for him. make sure they are not too easy and are challenging so he gets some kills in, hopefully he will get a couple of traits out of the battle. Next and if you want a chivalrous prince, Crusades.
These give great command bonuses and make sure that your prince is the one that completes it but bring as many generals as you like with armies of their own (until they surround the city) so they also get traits and bonuses if the target is nearby. By now your prince should be very decent with up to 6-10 command stars, loyalty points, chivalry.

IMPORTANT:"It is important that a Princes son comes of age, BEFORE you knock off the current King. Otherwise who knows who will become Prince!"
Hopefully your prince now has a son and some daughters of his own and are nearly ready to come of age. As soon as you find a suitable foreign princess ( with 1.2 it is quite easy for the AI to get decent princesses) on the campaign map to marry your new prince to, knock off the old king in the fastest manner possible. Not only does this have the advantage of not getting incest traits, it also allows you to forge some great alliances and the AI nearly never breaks a marriage alliance, unless its Portugal. As you can see most of my kings have died in battle, this is to make way for the new prince. Now we have a new prince! basically we go back to the start of this guide, find him a bride and give him a ride!
Again with the new prince you need to start training him in battles straight away.

Princesses and how to use them

Ok, by now you should either have some princesses either made by your king (if the starting king and queen are young enough) or hopefully some princesses by your prince. Moveable princesses are the most valuable commodity and ones with high charm are priceless. Cross your fingers that your princesses have 3 or more charm, if not you may need to try some negotiations to increase their charm if it can be increased that way.

There are 3 things you can do with a princess that are worthwhile,
Marry inside the family.
Marry outside the family.
Marry another factions heir or king.

Incest it not always so bad if it means your family can keep going in a regular pattern. Marrying inside the family does sound rather bad, but if there are no suitable foreign princesses for your princes son and the prince has a sister that is not married yet, then it may become necessary to marry them to ensure normal continuation of the family line. Just remember not to go too far with the incest business otherwise you may end up finding out that you have gone so far that your king has ended up being his own grandfather. You also get some really bad traits if you do it more than once or twice.

However if you have no problems there but have a wonderful general that is 40 or under you can marry one of your spare princesses to him to ensure that he may hopefully have a son, and you won't have to wait forever for the marriage proposals.

Marrying another factions heir/king can be great for relations, especially if your princess has high charm, because the ai value a high charm wife just as much as you do you may be able to squeeze some cash from them. However if the bride to be isn't very charming, expect to pay a hefty price to get a marriage going. Also apparently if that factions royal family is all killed off you may inherit their properties if the queen is still alive.

If you see a general that you really like on the campaign map but he isn't yours, you can try and get one of your princesses to marry him. If its successful he will then join your family tree and they will have kiddies of their own. However there is a bug where the children when they come of age will all have different last names. I don't recommend this unless its a 10 star general because the princesses can be used for the more worthwhile causes above and you should have good generals in your king and prince anyway.

The prince that has become a king

What to do with the king? well until it is time to knock him off this mortal coil, you can either get him doing some battles, but it is better to do them with your prince, or get him to be a good governor. You may want to read Kobals guide for governing on that.

What if my new king doesn't have a high authority?
Well unfortunately not too much can be done in the short term, however if your king has stats like full command, full chivalry or full piety, it seems that in the several intervening turns that he may get authoritarian traits automatically. However training him up to a governor will give you better chances.

Once the new princes son comes of age it is time to knock this king off so that the new son becomes the faction heir and then you can troll the map for a suitable foreign princess.

Keeping the family tree pruned and groomed

Sometimes due to tragedies and some unfortunate circumstances you may just lose a family member no matter what you try to do to avoid the unavoidable. In this case just try and train up whoever is going to be the faction heir, get them a bride if they do not already have one and try and keep the family going that way.

As to keeping your family tree tidy, here are some tips:
Never, ever accept an adoption, marriage proposal (one that comes up as an event, not a foreign diplomatic marriage) or man of the hour unless the general has amazing stats or you are in serious trouble.

You have to keep in mind that every single married couple can have up to 4 kids, which means that it can increase exponentially. Also if you flood your family tree you will not get the adoption or marriage proposal events and if you have a really wonderful general you want to marry, you may find you will never be able to.

Make sure you always have a faction heir to marry a girl too, otherwise your kings will no longer always be on the left hand side of the family tree and some of the traits that the adopted people can get will damage the bloodline.

Try to make sure your faction heir always survives any engagement no matter how many ordinary troops that may die as a result of his being able to escape. Without a faction heir and therefore someone to continue your bloodline you get into trouble.

Always take the king and his son on the crusade, I ahve found you can get a crusade every generation but make sure the prince is the one that finishes the crusade, itll also be good for the king even if he just was one of the supporting armies in the siege.

The End

I hope you liked this guide and I hope it helps gives you ideas on how to keep a tidy and well groomed royal family. Any and all questions are welcome.

[Durallan]

Links to Kobals guides
-Kobavelli's The Prince : a guide to breeding the perfect statesman.
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=86130
-Kob Tsu's The Art of War : a guide to building the perfect warmonger
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=87740

Also Blue Ball's guide to character development
-Blue_Ball's The proper care of Characters: A guide to character development
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=87579

-Waffles addendum to Kobals guide to the perfect warmonger
https://forums.totalwar.org/vb/showthread.php?t=87749

[Kobal2fr]

Good guide, and my thanks for the plug.

On the subject of princesses, I've found out by accident that you can use them to "scout" for husbands even without a network of spies : select a princess, and hover the mouse cursor over any city or castle, even one that's in the fog of war. The tooltip will tell you wether there are potential candidates for marriage in there. If there are, right click to open the marriage proposal window, and you'll see the stats of all possible suitors. Again, this works even within fog of war and halfway off the map. You can obviously use this to scout for potential assassinatees instead of suitors .

It's quite possibly a bug. Note also that you can get a bad surprise if your princess is not fast enough, as the target general could very well marry before she gets there.

Also, I'm not positive that marrying in the family leads to the Inbred trait. It's possibly hard-coded somewhere else, but there's nothing about that in the trait files, the only triggers there for Inbred are a 1% chance at birth (no matter who the parents are) and a huge chance if daddy's already got big ears and a receding chin (read : he's got the Inbred trait). Then again, I've never really *tried* to create loopy family trees so...

[Durallan]

thank you for the compliment Kobal and I give credit where credit's due, you have created 2 great guides

Good point on that Kobal, you can use princesses in that way, you can select a princess, then right click on a settlement and then see if there are any suitable men and this works even where you have no visual range. The only problem with this is that you cannot see princes or kings that are on the minimap (not in a town), although you only need to take her to the nearest unit of the desired faction and if the faction leader or heir are unmarried the option will present itself if I remember correctly.

As far as I can tell it does lead to the inbred trait Kobal, as you can see on my family tree, King Sten the Cunning married one of my factions own princesses(if I remember correctly King Sten was married to his aunt). However it did take awhile to present itself. King Valdemar's 2 sons (the 1 without any offspring is adopted) both had the 'A bit odd' trait. If it is only a 1% chance and both of them having that? I decided to go no further with inbreeding and fortunately I managed to find foreign beauties to marry instead. Luckily Sweyn the II's son (King Emund the Crusader) didn't get the 'A bit odd' trait. I do believe if you do try to really go for incest that it can wind up really screwy. But then some royal families were at the time :P

[DesertEagle]

Few quick concerns with accuracy here..

On starting a new game, you say:

The first and most urgent thing to do is find him a bride. Remember that traits are done when the kids come of age not when they are born. This gives you several turns to train up your prince.

But if you can control him, he's alrady come of age. You can't do anything with them really, until they come of age. So by the time you control a prince, he already has come of age and gotten his traits. Unless you mean to say train up your KING to influence what traits he passes to a son who has not yet come of age.

On training a prince, you say:

Hopefully your prince now has a son and some daughters of his own and are nearly ready to come of age. As soon as you find a suitable foreign princess on the campaign map to marry your new prince to

Well unless there's something hokey going on, my PRINCE should not be popping out sons and daughters. Since you go on to say he's unmarried, it isn't his wife popping buns out of the oven. And since this game doesn't model the sons and daughters unmarried noblemen might or might not have had *ahem*, this seems a strange statment. Again perhaps you meant the king has sons ready to come of age, but then, if his son hasn't come of age and you knock off the king, then your "prince" may be in the lurch.

I stopped here with the critical review, but you may want to re-read it. There are a few other things you say that don't quite make sense to me. Or maybe I'm just dense, certainly wouldn't be the first time.

[Whacker]

I vote we stick both of the village idiI MEAN kobal's guides in the M2TW guide/faq forum, they are both definitely worthy enough of keeping.

[Durallan]

Few quick concerns with accuracy here..

On starting a new game, you say:


But if you can control him, he's alrady come of age. You can't do anything with them really, until they come of age. So by the time you control a prince, he already has come of age and gotten his traits. Unless you mean to say train up your KING to influence what traits he passes to a son who has not yet come of age.

On training a prince, you say:


Well unless there's something hokey going on, my PRINCE should not be popping out sons and daughters. Since you go on to say he's unmarried, it isn't his wife popping buns out of the oven. And since this game doesn't model the sons and daughters unmarried noblemen might or might not have had *ahem*, this seems a strange statment. Again perhaps you meant the king has sons ready to come of age, but then, if his son hasn't come of age and you knock off the king, then your "prince" may be in the lurch.

I stopped here with the critical review, but you may want to re-read it. There are a few other things you say that don't quite make sense to me. Or maybe I'm just dense, certainly wouldn't be the first time.

First off, thanks for the criticism, I'll try to clear up the situation.

At the start of the new game, it is pointless to train up your current King because he only has 1 and if you are lucky 2 empty slots in which he can have children. Your faction heir is already decided at the start, and if he is unmarried you should remedy this as soon as possible.

Ok, What we are trying to do is give the Princes offspring good traits. This way you can try to ensure as good a royal family as possible.

So to condense what I mean is yes, you are training up the First prince, so when his offspring come of age, they will inherit those good traits.

So I can make this more understandable lets set up a family tree.

King Sten the Bold and Queen Mary

this couple have 2 children, Prince Charles (18) and Princess Bert (19).

Now lets say that we have found a bride for Prince Charles called Camilla Parker Bowles.

Prince Charles and Camilla have 3 kids when Prince Charles is 19.

Ronald, Harry and Martha.

we fast forward 18 years and King Sten is knocking on deaths door and Queen Mary has already kicked the royal bucket and for which, was beheaded.

Prince Charles is 37 years old and so is his wife.

Ronald comes of age first.

We now arrange for death to meet King Sten, and so Charles becomes King Charles! this now means that we refer to Ronald as Prince Ronald!

We now want to marry someone to Prince Ronald as soon as possible. We then send him on a couple of battles and get his command up. After that we send him on a crusade and he becomes about a 7 star general.

Prince Ronald finds a bride when he is 20. They have 1 son and 2 daughters

Gary, Clara and Bella.

Fast forward another 18 years.

King Charles is 56, Prince Ronald is 38 and his son Gary is 18.

King Charles suddenly decides that it is a good idea to attack the Portugese wearing only a helmet and some socks Camilla made for their wedding day. He is unfortunately killed and Prince Ronald is Crowned, King Ronald! his son Gary, becomes Prince Gary! we now must find another beauty to marry Prince Gary and carry on the tradition.

Prince Gary then starts going into battles and goes on a crusade with his father, and Gary has some kids of his own and starts the process all over again.....



It is important that a Princes son comes of age, before you knock off the current King. Otherwise who knows who will become Prince.


I hope this clears up your questions :)

EDIT
@ Whacker, I have to agree, his guides are top notch! wonder if I can get mine in also? :))

[Hrafn]

Ive read this guide along with the others on grooming the governors and generals....

I have a very nice Ventian faction heir on his way to the crusades, but i wonder how i am to get this guy married to one of those nice princesses wandering around? Ive tried to start diplomatic negotiations with both the faction and the princess, but have been unable to find a "marriage proposal button" anywhere??

How on earth do i get the prince married to one of the wandering princesses..(ive turned down 2 event based marriages already and starts to fear this guy is going to be single for the rest of his days..??? Traits like "Feck", "Girls" and "Arse" are not those i want him to get...)

[jepva]

When playing as Lithuania, I'll take any heavy cavalry I can get - adopted, man of the hour, village idiot - otherwise I won't HAVE a family tree to worry about.

[Zain]

I usually get lucky with the family trees and have an all left side lineage (right word? Idk, just thought it sounded good)

[Anonymous II]

Marrying inside the family does sound rather bad, but if there are no suitable foreign princesses for your princes son and the prince has a sister that is not married yet, then it may become necessary to marry them to ensure normal continuation of the family line.

Ok, I have one question I'd really like to get the answer to:

How on earth do I do this? When I use my princess, it only says "no suitors in this army" when I click on the prince, and I can't use a diplomat on my own princess.

I would be really thankful for some help!

[YuriVII]

I am still confused as how to assure that the prince has a son.