Branch Houses

[Arkady2000]

Is there any benefit or negative impact to have numerous house branches ?

[rossobianco]

Every house head can become dynasty head, based on military strength. So if you are the dynasty head, you'll have more contenders for that.

[dwarfpcfan]

Members of your house can also be called to war as allies.

[Arkady2000]

But cadet branches are not eligible to be called as an ally...

[Panthaz89]

They are basically just mini branches within your own dynasty they can call members from their branch to their help but being a Dynasty head lets you call any Dynasty member its basically just help so they can lead their own realm or in another case if you wanted to form your own cadet branch if you weren't already the dynasty head.

[desaix]

It can get confusing, a bit, when you look at the map, or when you're trying to track down a spouse with the right traits who is outside of your family (to avoid inbred traits). And it creates rivals for dynasty head; it's almost guaranteed you'll lose control of your dynasty at succession for at least a few days (because, for some reason, when it checks at the death of the previous head, the game measures your military strength for purposes of determining dynasty and\or culture head as the unlanded heir your new character was prior to succession, not as the actual just-assumed-the-throne new ruler), but assuming your heir has enough military power any consequences from that only last until the end of an in-game month, so it shouldn't be a big deal.

[Kvinden]

It depends but it makes very little difference except in some specific situations.

Take Lothario II of Lotharingia in 867. He can create a cadet branch at the start of the game. But if he does he will never be able to divorce from his loathed wife and can no longer ligitimate his bastards.

Many people will tell it is a good decicion to create a cadet branch but in general I found not. The dynastic heritage is exactly the same and If one of your house member refuses your head of dynasty's decision he will automatically create his own cadet branch, so it really makes no difference.
The only thing is you can call allies to war but to be the head of the dynasty you must be so more powerful than them that they are useless. And there are other ways to call allies.

[DoomMaster18895]

Lets say your beginning house(The progenitor dynasty) Dies out. Do you still continue the game through a cadet branch? Or is that game over?

[Kvinden]

Originally posted by DoomMaster18895:

Lets say your beginning house(The progenitor dynasty) Dies out. Do you still continue the game through a cadet branch? Or is that game over?

Yes, the game continues. The cadet branches are not a different dynasty.

[VoiD]

As the dynasty head ruling over several independent kingdoms you can call them into your wars for free, very powerful ability.

Creating a branch house lets them do something like that within their own houses, making themselves more powerful, while also breaking away from the dynasty head's influence, they can't be called for free and if I'm not mistaken only the house head gets free hooks on everyone born under them, not the dynasty head (unless they are the same person of course)

tl;dr a bit more independence from the main house, but they still count as members of your house and you can still influence them, and get score from their independent realms

[Arkady2000]

well, now my dynasty reach 30 cadet houses and two of them shares the same name...I definitely reach some limit and the game engine is not able to check properly for duplicates ;)

there shoudl be some diplomatic possibility to re-attach cadet branch back to main house (like one last member of the house will be adopted back - I solved it now with matrimonial marriage)