Small families

[ArminiusdeCherusk]

In my spartan playthrough i seem to have a problem with increasing my family to get enough characters to have a choice, who i put where. My kings family often lacks of enough (male) characters. This could be solved by adoption, but another family has the same problem. How do you mange those?
Possibility would be to allow woman in power at start of campaign, so that you have enough people to choose from. Playing Vanilla newest Version.

[mr_pan7s]

as Sparta are able to conquer a bunch of the other Greece city states surrounding Sparta within a few years of the game. when you sue for peace and they no longer exist you can take the final option to take families from them and then use those characters perhaps

[Menkerot]

yes, gender equality makes things a lot easier. Other than that - royal marriages and hope you get enough children before your king dies.

[alan_buchbach]

Originally posted by Menkerot:

yes, gender equality makes things a lot easier. Other than that - royal marriages and hope you get enough children before your king dies.

100% what Menkerot says. "Royal Marriage" option should be used to a) Capture the Argead bloodline into your royal line and b) to ensure your extended family males find brides as you can only arrange marriages within your kingdom for close relatives.

Additionally, you can adopt minor family characters into your house - although I don't recommend doing this too often as it will reduce your family's prestige and thus your powerbase. If you 'make friends' with them first it is cheaper to adopt in both terms of legitimacy and prestige (you can also make friends with characters from foreign countries and then recruit them).

[Jean-Maurice Nya]

You should have a cultural decision that allows your head families to marry characters from other cultures. Intermarriage rights I think.
Anyway, if a family is too small you'll get an event to adopt someone sooner or later.

[ArminiusdeCherusk]

Royal Marriage would lead to incest or not ? Does it give negative traits or didn't paradox bother of the fact that a marriage between brother and sister isn't a good idea?

[Duuvian]

In the migratory tribe game I was playing, when the ruler changed I used the character search to find ruler family members. You can arrange a marriage for unmarried family members. You can also adopt characters not in a family.

What I do is marry all the female family members to unmarried males in the smallest noble family. After that the male family members have marriages arranged. Whichever gender still has partners available I then adopt characters of that gender into the family and get everyone married.

Families will die out if you don't do this for them. Old characters including males almost always require a gigantic amount of gold to have a marriage offer accepted if the offer is to a younger person. This price happens with characters with low health as well. Unlike CK3 it's totally not worth it to arrange marriages in situations like that, since you can't tell if it would be rejected without gold payment.

It's also infuriating because it costs political mana or whatnot to cancel it without paying the outrageous gold cost when it's demanded. That's the real downside to doing this to have enough important family members for families that aren't the ruler's. The family prestige loss isn't very noticeable. It's that dang mana cost to refuse paying for the marriage.

[Jean-Maurice Nya]

Incest doesn't provoke anything bad. Just have a look at the Ptolemaic dynasty, they were marrying each other's in the same family and never have trouble.
Inbred is a problem only if you have mutated/defective genes. If your genes are OK, then inbred doesn't cause any harm.

[Menkerot]

Originally posted by ArminiusdeCherusk:

Royal Marriage would lead to incest or not ? Does it give negative traits or didn't paradox bother of the fact that a marriage between brother and sister isn't a good idea?

yes, but you confuse it with a regular marriage tho

[alan_buchbach]

Originally posted by ArminiusdeCherusk:

Royal Marriage would lead to incest or not ? Does it give negative traits or didn't paradox bother of the fact that a marriage between brother and sister isn't a good idea?

You are confusing the law change "familial marriage" with the diplomatic action "royal marriage".

When you click on another country via the diplomacy tab, there is a button in the top right to show their characters. You can filter by age / marriage status. If you have positive relations with that country you can arrange a marriage between one of their characters and yours. There's no incest between a Spartan ruler marrying a princess from Epirus, Macedon or the Bosporan Kingdom, for example.

You can arrange a betrothal between characters from 12 years of age and they will marry at 16 (although this is a little buggy, better to bookmark and arrange the marriage when they turn 16).

In the case of Egypt, where they start off being able to marry siblings... incest does lead to the 'inbred' trait sometimes being applied. Negative to all stats, fertility and health.

[ArminiusdeCherusk]

thx for your answers. When ( and if) i make another playthrough, I will activate woman in power at campaign start and will look after my family that all having a partner.

[AldouzTek]

There's a simple trick, Go to administration expand region then click release a province to became independent (make sure this province have the same culture and religion) with you, after that cancel diplomatic relation then invade, aftermath spare their families to join you.