Regarding illegitimate children and inbreeding

[satayagraha]

My character has 125% fertility and four young lovers. That means an innumerable amount of more or less illegitimate children around the court, my best guess is about 10 or so. Not counting my legitimate offspring.

When you get children by other women than your wife, they fall into one of three CATEGORIES: 1) It's obvious that it is your child, and you may either legitimize, recognize or not. 2) Your lover was married to someone else who thinks it is his child even though it is not. 3) Your lover gives birth to a child by an 'unknown father' who is in fact you.

Now, normally you can keep track of any bloodlines by looking for the little red or black "blood drops" on character portraits. Thus avoiding marrying them to someone too close (not to mention yourself) and get inbred children from it.

But with category 2 and 3 children, you cannot! (That same goes for category 1 if you denounce the child.) You can only keep track of those either with a very good memory or with 'charinfo' that lets you see the name of the REAL father, you. Or, you may guess it due to the simple fact that the children will have the little red icon signifying ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ or more politely: Illegitimate. But there are other ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥s around than your own.

And now my questions:

1) Does the inbreeding factor even count with category 2 and 3 offspring? Meaning could you marry one such child to his half sister without risk of inbreeding? My own guess is no, but since you can only know 100% positivley with 'charinfo', perhaps there is a loophole in the game or something. Just wondering...

2) What relations do actually carry the risk of inbreeding in the game? Father-daughter and brother-sister and the like, obviously. But how about the more distant ones? Is it as in real lilfe, that the risk is already significantly deminished between cousins?

Thanks in advance for any answers, shared experiences and ideas

[MikMogus]

1) The game tracks genetics, so no, you will risk inbreeding even if the game dosn't list you and another person as family. I had a game where I married who I thought was a random woman from my court and we produced inbred kids. It turnd out she was my half-sister, daughter of my father and his lover.

2) Just close kin for the most part (siblings, parent-child, ect.), but I think cousins also have small chance to pump out some abominations too. Uncle-neices/aunts-nephews might too but I'm not sure. It's absolutly safe to marry anyone more distant than that though (kinsmen/kinswoman)

Hope I answered your questions the way you wanted.

Also, the only way I know to reduce the chance of the inbred trait with a close-kin spouce is to be Zoroastrian. The Divine Marriage bonus they get for close kin makes it less likley for offspring to have the inbred trait but more likley for them to become lunatics.

[Corrupted Sanity (Vex)]

Heh. Yeah, things can get messy if you have a lot of lovers.

Since I'm current playing a republic, I tend to legitimize bastard children since you want a lot of adult males. I'd say about half of my family are legitimized bastards, haha. But there are also illegitimate bastards that, for whatever reason, went with the "unknown father" event.

My character recently had the lover event with a new character. I went and looked at that character, and noticed that her mother... Was one of my other lovers. And two of her siblings were marked as my children.
So, yeah, I'm pretty sure that my character's new lover is also his daughter. Heh. Didn't think I'd have that happen when I wasn't playing Zoroastrian.

EDIT: Aaaand... She's pregnant.

Also thought I would point out that, the way the genetics system works, it is fairly unlikely to get inbred traits with distant relatives and once you get far enough, more or less impossible. As I understand it, it's based on a string of 13 letters, 6 are inherited from each parent, and 1 is random. If a bunch of them end up the same letter, then inbreeding starts to pop up. Distant relatives might have none of the same letters at all.

[Langkard]

Originally posted by Corrupted Sanity:

As I understand it, it's based on a string of 13 letters, 6 are inherited from each parent, and 1 is random. If a bunch of them end up the same letter, then inbreeding starts to pop up. Distant relatives might have none of the same letters at all.

That's essentially the way character DNA works; but it's a string of 11 letters, with 5 from each parent's string and 1 random. In the game files, and in charinfo, you can see the DNA for a character. It will be a string of 11 small case letters.

For example:

Father's DNA: sjrnyofgkwm
Mother's DNA: sfnyosnfly

The child will have 5 letters at random from both mother and father and one completely random. As you can see in the above example, the mother already has some genetic issues. She has duplicates of 4 different letters: s, f, n and y. So odds are good that at least some of those letters are going to appear in the child. The father has no duplicates, but he does share some letters with the mother: s, f , y, o and n. Since those letters have a high chance of showing up from the mother, it's a good bet that the child is going to have some duplicates. It is entirely possible that the child could end up with 3 s, 3 f, 3 y and/or 3 n or even one of those with 4 if the child is unlucky with the 11th random letter. That is probably not a good thing.

No one knows for sure, and Paradox hasn't said, how genetics works aside from the above. So we don't know how many duplicate letters in a string cause inbred, or how they affect the percentage chances for getting breeding traits like slow or hunchback or, yes, even genius (it seems counterinutitive, but genius, quick and strong can also be caused by inbreeding). There is some anecdotal evidence, unconfirmed, that the genetic traits also affect which character portraits are chosen. I don't find it completely credible, but it is possible. It is also possible for two characters to marry from entirely different lineages and not related at all to have similar DNA strings. This is simply because there is only a pool of 24 letters for each of the 11 letters in the string. Statistically, it would be possible even for two unrelated characters to have identical strings. Unlikely, but possible. So, being very careful not to inbreed is no absolute guarantee that you won't introduce negative traits into your line.

There is one other known fact about inbreeding. Once your genetic line acquires the inbred trait itself, with the icon for it, there is a base 25% chance it will be passed down to that character's children. The chance increases if the character marries someone with a genetic line too close to theirs. So it is difficult to get rid of inbred once it appears in your family.

[Corrupted Sanity (Vex)]

Hahahaha... Well, I was close.

Yeah, it's quite possible to get two random characters cause inbreeding, though I don't think I've really seen it.


I've noticed that in both of my games as Pisa (one before the India patch), the poor traits seem to show up a little more often - I wonder if the characters/different families there have a couple similar letters to start with?
Just a random observation.

[lasereyedtuna]

I once had a lover as king of England and had a secret bastard Daughter, when I died my son had a new younger lover. It turned out to be his secret sister :/

[Langkard]

Originally posted by Corrupted Sanity:

Hahahaha... Well, I was close.

Yeah, it's quite possible to get two random characters cause inbreeding, though I don't think I've really seen it.


I've noticed that in both of my games as Pisa (one before the India patch), the poor traits seem to show up a little more often - I wonder if the characters/different families there have a couple similar letters to start with?
Just a random observation.

I'm certain they have similar letters at the start. I think it was deliberate by Paradox. It's been a while since I looked at the save game file and the DNA, but I don't recall ever seeing many characters without at least some duplicate letters. And I think they simulated cultural closeness by having some of the same letters appear in all of the starting characters within the same area. Like in Italy, and thus Pisa. The characters who exist at the beginning of the game are radndomly generated for traits, but I don't know about the DNA. One of these days I'll have to check. The names and ages and such of all of the rulers and their wives and children who exist at game start are always the same. I wonder about DNA is as well? Maybe only traits and portraits are randomized at the start for rulers. True random would then only begin once the starting set of characters begin having children, and even then it is influenced by the DNa of the parent s to a large extent.