A shortage of eligible men

[StephenT]

No, this isnt a thread about online dating.

One of the biggest problems I remember from CK1 was running out of adult male courtiers who could be assigned counties and duchies. You'd conquer some new territory, look for an eligible man to run it... and realise that your court was full of 953 women and a four-year-old boy. So you ended up overstretching your demesne by controlling the new counties yourself, hoping desperately for some man to show up at court - however disloyal, crippled or mad he might be - so you could hand over the title to him.

As for appointing a diocesan bishop, forget it.

I know there was supposed to be a mechanism for checking the availability of characters and giving you new ones if needed, but it never seemed to work - maybe because those 953 women were already straining the system to breaking point. As well as limiting gameplay, it's not very realistic - does anyone really imagine that if the king wanted to make someone Count of Umptyshire he'd be unable to find anyone willing to take the title?

So! My proposal for the new game:

Allow a ruler to create a new adult male courtier suitable for being awarded a title, just by pressing a button. (Like the new Advisor system in HttT for EU3).

The courtier shouldn't be related to the dynasty; pick a family name at random. Basically, this is a knight or gentleman whom the king has decided to elevate to the nobility. Once created he would be eligible for marriage, other titles, etc, just as a normal character.

Doing this should cost a lot of prestige, gold, and maybe a loyalty hit to your other vassals - because they're unhappy about some jumped-up commoner being given the same status as them. This will prevent gamey attempts by players to churn through creating many new nobles until they get one with high stats.


Another option to deal with the excess of characters that clutters up some games: add a button to their character sheet that says "Send to a monastery / nunnery" (depending on their sex). Such characters would then vanish from court and from the game forever.


Thoughts?

 

[Orinsul]

theyd have to come from a non-established dynasty or else youd have the same problem as in CK where suddenly someone has a relative they cant account for.

and instead of the needing two decisions to retire courtiers, you could have have a retire from court button. which would upset their friends and hurt the prestige of their family.
Id hope you could send folks off to a monastery without them dieing, so you could do so with one of your sons and possibly get a saint or famed abbot or even pope out of the runt.
and the announcement of more church inclusion in this from the last might give hope for that too

 

[Woody Man]

Good solution to a really really annoying problem, much prefer to have my court offices filled by those who would actually have held them.

 

[the_legion]

The most annoying thing was that you wheren't even able to form
a bishopry (you know, where a bishop rules, don't know the word ^^)
if you have no religious char in your court.

I, King of Germany, Burgundy, Bohemia, Italy, Controller of the pope,
short - The mightiest single person in the known world - cannot make
someone bishop in my lands? No one in my whole country is able to?
That sucked.

 

[Shanalya]

It would also be nice
if when you give an advisor a county he stays your advisor if you want (it was happening so in the reality)
vassals were often advisors and still had "counties"...

 

[DPS]

No, this isnt a thread about online dating.

One of the biggest problems I remember from CK1 was running out of adult male courtiers who could be assigned counties and duchies. You'd conquer some new territory, look for an eligible man to run it... and realise that your court was full of 953 women and a four-year-old boy. So you ended up overstretching your demesne by controlling the new counties yourself, hoping desperately for some man to show up at court - however disloyal, crippled or mad he might be - so you could hand over the title to him.

As for appointing a diocesan bishop, forget it.

I know there was supposed to be a mechanism for checking the availability of characters and giving you new ones if needed, but it never seemed to work - maybe because those 953 women were already straining the system to breaking point. As well as limiting gameplay, it's not very realistic - does anyone really imagine that if the king wanted to make someone Count of Umptyshire he'd be unable to find anyone willing to take the title?

So! My proposal for the new game:

Allow a ruler to create a new adult male courtier suitable for being awarded a title, just by pressing a button. (Like the new Advisor system in HttT for EU3).

The courtier shouldn't be related to the dynasty; pick a family name at random. Basically, this is a knight or gentleman whom the king has decided to elevate to the nobility. Once created he would be eligible for marriage, other titles, etc, just as a normal character.

Doing this should cost a lot of prestige, gold, and maybe a loyalty hit to your other vassals - because they're unhappy about some jumped-up commoner being given the same status as them. This will prevent gamey attempts by players to churn through creating many new nobles until they get one with high stats.


Another option to deal with the excess of characters that clutters up some games: add a button to their character sheet that says "Send to a monastery / nunnery" (depending on their sex). Such characters would then vanish from court and from the game forever.


Thoughts?

Well, this probably won't be needed if they fix the biggest problem with CK1 courts, which was that whenever the system had to spawn a "random" character in a court (which was basically whenever there weren't a certain number of courtiers in a court, either due to a new realm being formed, lots of characters dying of the plague, or just not enough courtiers in most courts at the start of the game), it almost always spawned a female. Supposedly, it was supposed to check if there was an overall shortage of either men or wome in the game, and if there was a shortage of one sex, then that would be the sex of the new, randomly generated character, but it didn't seem to work that way in practice. So very often, at the start of the game, IF you were lucky, you had a male with a halfway decent martial stat in your court that you could appoint Marshall, and a number (which varied by the level of your title) of women, most of whom would be too old to even be breeding stock, but one of whom might have a decent stewardship or intrigue rating, so they could at least make you a decent spymaster or steward--if you were unlucky, you got all women, so you wouldn't even have a Marshall at all, and all of the women would be in their 50s with no decent stats at all. I don't have a problem with the idea that courtiers with decent stats are in short supply, but I do have a problem with kingdoms in which women seem to outnumber men something like 6:1.

 

[unmerged(133776)]

Well, this probably won't be needed if they fix the biggest problem with CK1 courts,,,, it almost always spawned a female. Supposedly, it was supposed to check if there was an overall shortage of either men or wome in the game, and if there was a shortage of one sex, then that would be the sex of the new, randomly generated character, but it didn't seem to work that way in practice.

You're right, in that it was meant to redress an imbalance of too many Men starting out, but I have a feeling that the reason tons more females (then seem to be needed) kept popping up everywhere, was because the game actually needed a certain number of females of child-bearing age. And since the starting age was random, it would keep popping out more women as the game progressed until the first crop of babies finally started to grow up.