DON'T Romance your wife if there is a low success chance. The game will spawn a lover for her.

[NewbieOne]

As per title. Here's my case:

Wife is Lover + Friend + 100 opinion. However, she is Paranoid, while my emperor is Compassionate and Forgiving, so 0% chance on romance.

At the last stage of the romance, when you get to save the woman, I get the 'rolling in the grass naked as on the day she was born with some other dude' scene. Dude is identified as her lover.

The problem: It's almost certain the game must have made him her lover right there and then, not before. Why? The wife and the lover are both pure white, my emperor is dark-skinned and all 10 kids are dark. Hence, none of the kids can be the lover's. And she's very fertile (10 kids by age 34, which she is now), so the lover must be very recent.

This is also questionable design on Paradox's part. While the spawning of a lover in similar circumstance is understandable from a plot perspective, it inflicts unnecessary grief on the player. What is outright retarded design is Paradox's persistent failure — or stubborn refusal? — to introduce a proper system of weights, to shield 100 opinion lovers, friends and such like spouses (not only actual soulmates) from almost all adultery.

Simple seduction is safer — while being your lover doesn't prevent her from having other lovers, at least the game won't spawn lovers for her (or competitors, i.e. other guys who also romance her, which is part of the quest — note 'continues to romance her' consequence of losing duels with them or them turning down your bribes).

[Wolfsun]

There are so many weird events in CK3 similar to the one you have described OP that personally I've just learned to run with it as you appear to be doing.

That said: considering that writers in general write about what they know it does make me wonder what kind of world the swedish writer/developers of CK3 must live in.

[CrUsHeR]

The romance scheme needs a complete rework.

Basically the entire thing is written from the perspective of a courtier (knight) romancing a higher noble's wife.

[NewbieOne]

Originally posted by Wolfsun:

There are so many weird events in CK3 similar to the one you have described OP that personally I've just learned to run with it as you appear to be doing.

That said: considering that writers in general write about what they know it does make me wonder what kind of world the swedish writer/developers of CK3 must live in.

To me, it looks more like designers being limited by their intellect, creativity or diligence and not coming up with checks, conditins, triggers or weights any random teenage modder would be smart, diligent and dedicated enough to think about.

Originally posted by CrUsHeR:

The romance scheme needs a complete rework.

Nah, it does contain a spark of genius and has a workable skeleton. With some necessary fixes it could be all right.

Necessary fixes include at least the minimum use of intelligence and skill, for example coming up with a female-perspective romance scheme instead of just replacing the prounouns, which results in Western characters from male-dominated cultures/reiigions kneeling before the men (e.g. one of my empresses from a previous game) to sing songs, winning duels to impress them, and saving them from danger, etc. This means someone didn't invest the brain effort in actually coming up with a female line of romancing, leaving it with just the male perspective, which is utterly hilarious if you consider how proactive Paradox designers are about pushing equality themes in the CK series.

There is also a need to revisit misfortunate decisions such as spawning lovers.

… And to account for the fact that you are already married. The Seduce scheme clearly does (the last scene is wholly written from a married point of view when you're married). The Romance scheme doesn't seem to.

Basically the entire thing is written from the perspective of a courtier (knight) romancing a higher noble's wife.

Nah. The dialogue lines and the lines in letters are egalitarian — they clearly assume equal status. She calls you 'my lord' (that's what kings called their vassal lords too, but it's not a way of talking to simple knights, except maybe by commoners sucking up to a rich knight) and just look at the things she writes to you.

So quite possibly romancing someone else's wife, but not your social superior.

Still, the game does err in how it makes it look like it was perfectly okay in the middle ages to openly pursue a married woman with a romantic and sexual relationship in mind. It was not. Especially not vs your liege's wife or daughter.

[Twelvefield]

Originally posted by Wolfsun:

That said: considering that writers in general write about what they know it does make me wonder what kind of world the swedish writer/developers of CK3 must live in.

My guess is somewhere between The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and the episode of Road Runner where Wile E. Coyote buys the catapult from Acme.

[Sol]

Originally posted by Twelvefield:

Originally posted by Wolfsun:

That said: considering that writers in general write about what they know it does make me wonder what kind of world the swedish writer/developers of CK3 must live in.

My guess is somewhere between The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and the episode of Road Runner where Wile E. Coyote buys the catapult from Acme.

I was going to guess an amped up swinger club on coke and viagra, with a touch of every choopy b-level soap opera - from magic doppleganger evil twins and hundreds of no-reason affairs, to random "who is your real father" storylines on repeat.

[Sol]

The real issue is nothing builds a story, everything is random and without reason, "just because RNG said so!" and it leads to more bad storytelling than good.

Example is all the no-reason cheating. Half is based on lover events (or the AI having failed lover schemes and events, spawning new lovers for the intended target, who can often be someone else's wife) and the other half on seduction schemes and events. There are mods that remove it all, and when you use it, the world crashes to a halt, and almost nothing happens - because this half-baked nonsense is actually 60% of the game's content.

Anyone remember when the AI would use the Magic Bastard fabrication thing to make between 40%-80% of all children in the world bastards while messing with real_father?

I think the problem isn't the RNG, and there is no good RNG setting. The solution is building a new, sane system and discarding the current one.

[Kapika96]

Really romancing your wife should have an entirely different set of events than romancing somebody while you're single (which it seems the current romance system is aimed towards).

[NewbieOne]

Originally posted by Shadow:

The real issue is nothing builds a story, everything is random and without reason, "just because RNG said so!" and it leads to more bad storytelling than good.

Example is all the no-reason cheating. Half is based on lover events (or the AI having failed lover schemes and events, spawning new lovers for the intended target, who can often be someone else's wife) and the other half on seduction schemes and events. There are mods that remove it all, and when you use it, the world crashes to a halt, and almost nothing happens - because this half-baked nonsense is actually 60% of the game's content.

Anyone remember when the AI would use the Magic Bastard fabrication thing to make between 40%-80% of all children in the world bastards while messing with real_father?

I think the problem isn't the RNG, and there is no good RNG setting. The solution is building a new, sane system and discarding the current one.

The problem isn't RNG itself, it's more like MTTH (the law of great numbers in any case), but it all really comes down to designers lacking the skill to control it (which I found implausible for anyone who managed to graduate programming school) or just simply not caring.

I'm not a professional programmer, but I've coded since childhood, and I know what designing and coding those things looks like. It really comes down to actually giving a damn about sitting down to think up and write down a semi-decent, semi-intelligent list of ifs and thens for whatever your script is supposed to be handling. Any reasonably smart teenager working with an in-game scenario editor could be expected more skill at scripting these things than Paradox designers and programmers currently do. It's actually beyond me how professional or even dedicated amateur coders could be failing so miserably to think about conditions, triggers, weights and such like. Again, I would expect more from a self-taught 15 y.o. modder. More thoughtfulness before anything else.

[snuggleform]

What's the benefit of romancing your wife anyways? I only noticed one super rare event that wasn't very impressive that was a result of it.

[NewbieOne]

Originally posted by Kapika96:

Really romancing your wife should have an entirely different set of events than romancing somebody while you're single (which it seems the current romance system is aimed towards).

If romancing a single as a single in a Western European mediaeval setting the game should look at culmination in a marriage proposal, not going to bed 'here and now' (in a castle full of servants, some of who may already be running to the scene after hearing the screams and sounds of combat) after thwarting an assassination attempt or on the ground in the forest during a hunt after a run-in with a wild animal with scores of other hunters potentially passing by (and probably already headed in the general direction after having heard the same screams).

Western Middle Ages didn't have live-in boyfriends and girlfriends in the modern sense, at least not among Catholic nobility South of the North. ;) Yes, people had lovers, sometimes openly, but that was kings taking women from the lowest petty nobility as lovers, not counts' sons openly proposing an unmarried sexual relationship to other counts' daughters.

And if the personality and physique were all right, you went along well and the alliance was decent (e.g. between two families or more or less equal military power), then one might as well marry — as good a prospect as any and better than most.

And people didn't just simply openly court their lieges' wives into sexual relationships.

What was done openly was of course all the heaping of adoration and adulation, the poems (about how lovely your lips are but not about your lips on mine or the other way round), the tournament charms and dedicated victories and ballads and everything but that was essentially an elaborate form of exchange of compliments, as much towards the woman as her high-ranking husband, whose prestige grew because of how he was the man to actually the marry the woman everybody desired, so in this sense complimenting his wife's beauty was compliment the size of that guy's lance and his position in the pecking order.

The default version should be like courting a woman who is above your league, so you can't outright ask for her hand, or perhaps you want some romance, you have fallen in love, you want to know if she loves you too as opposed to your respective heads of houses negotiating a deal. So you basically court the woman, prove your worth, your honour, maybe your nobility of spirit, prowess, perhaps your prospects or promise, and then after estabilishing your mettle and capturing her heart in the process you get her to say she loves you too, so her dad looks bad for not allowing the two of you to marry, and he could always end up with a worse son-in-law anyway — for example some craven sadist without much of a brain.

The thing with kings is that they can make high lords and they always need high lords and high lords are good enough for royal daughters. Showing one's fitness for the job makes the choice easier, especially if the king has more high-profile jobs available than worthy candidates for them.

Or in some cases of course it was all predicated on feelings or attraction and the two people had a thing for each other without really thinking about how their relationship will affect their prospects in life (if you're taking the king's daughter on a ship to some land far way where you're gonna be working as a mercenary for the two of you's living or at best operated some damp keep in a borderland for some lord whose previous vassal has just died, then you're clearly not looking for social advancement).

Originally posted by snuggleform:

What's the benefit of romancing your wife anyways? I only noticed one super rare event that wasn't very impressive that was a result of it.

Real or perceived increase of the chance that she will remain faithful to you. Soulmates are supposed to be more resistant to seduction attempts.

[doroboro]

Originally posted by NewbieOne:

Originally posted by snuggleform:

What's the benefit of romancing your wife anyways? I only noticed one super rare event that wasn't very impressive that was a result of it.

Real or perceived increase of the chance that she will remain faithful to you. Soulmates are supposed to be more resistant to seduction attempts.

And sometimes jump starts a pregnancy!

[NewbieOne]

Originally posted by D4Deez:

Originally posted by NewbieOne:

Real or perceived increase of the chance that she will remain faithful to you. Soulmates are supposed to be more resistant to seduction attempts.

And sometimes jump starts a pregnancy!

Yeah — at the very least 'you lay with X'.