Since the devs have stated the game is not difficult enough, one low-hanging fruit they can fix is to nerf player strategies based around eugenics. Here’s the problem:
- Only the player arranges marriages for congenital traits, so it creates disparity with the AI over time
- Eugenics as a strategy is not immersive at all; historically medieval rulers who married strategically ended up less healthy and more inbred, not becoming superhuman.
- The Blood dynasty legacy should probably be removed entirely. From an immersion or historical perspective it makes no sense. The other legacies perhaps abstract away the idea that your dynasty is focusing on a certain way of ruling or living, like a martial or legalistic way. What does the Blood legacy represent? Genetic modification? The bonuses it confers are also extremely powerful such that it’s basically suboptimal not to take them at some point, making the choice of legacies less interesting. On top of that, many if not all of its bonuses are unique, whereas some of the bonuses from other legacies can be attained in other ways. Because the devs likely won’t remove an entire piece of “content” from the game, at least significantly nerfing the benefits is worth doing.
- Even with plagues, producing enough living children to secure the succession is easy throughout the game. So the risk of marrying, say, an older spouse just for the traits is minimal. And the Beautiful trait boosts fertility anyway; same for the Hale line of traits and health. The fact that securing the succession is barely a problem is another problem with difficulty in CK3.
- Marrying for congenital traits is not punished enough, if at all, by game mechanics. Now with Legitimacy, marrying a lowborn for traits is somewhat punished. But the decrease in Legitimacy is still manageable, and more importantly, the prevalence of such traits among nobles is high enough, and the consequences of marrying a random noble of the wrong religion and culture nonexistent, that you can still easily perform the strategy. And once the traits are in your family, you never have to worry about marrying lowborns again.
- For all these reasons, a player trying to play optimally more or less has to opt into eugenics, which is a tedious and repetitive strategy, especially when you have to use it game after game. And it displaces the more interesting (for the player) strategy of marrying powerful nearby dynasties or noble families in your realm, which could look differently every game. Of course, strong alliances are not even necessary to win wars and defend oneself, but that owes to separate issues like MAA bonuses being way overtuned.
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