"How should this child be raised?"

[Bear Cavalry]

Hi, longtime forum lurker here.

I have a few questions about the "How should this child be raised?" event. It's the event that fires when your child is very young, and it allows you to choose between a parental upbringing, sending the child to nannies, sending the child to monks, and sending the child to nobles. As far as I can tell, this event only happens to the player--the AI just gets the educational branch choice event that happens a bit later.

I think I understand education pretty well after having read "On Education" in the FAQs, but I'm still not so sure about how this event works exactly. I know that choosing, say, nobles for instance, gives your child the trusting trait... but later, you get an event that determines the personality of your child (i.e. "x has become a warmonger!"), which gives your child new traits and sometimes overrides the old trait they got when you decided how to raise them. Also, children who never had a "How should this child be raised?" happen to them due to being AI-controlled still get this personality-determining event. So, I guess my question also involves the mechanics of this personality-determining event.

If there is a thread about either or both of these events, then that would be swell, but alas I have yet to come across one... "On Education" gave a really comprehensive look at how traits affect one's educational outcome, but did not deal with how these traits are gained in the first place through the personality event, or with the "How should this child be raised?" event.

So yeah, there are alot of questions that I'm posing here. One specific question that I have is, exactly how does parental upbringing work? I've never really tried it for fear of negative repercussions... Another question is, exactly how does the "How should this child be raised?" event work in general? If I choose "send to monks", does that make my child less likely to develop a warmonger personality? How does the personality-determining event work? Are attributes (Ma,Di,In,St) and/or traits involved? Any help here would be greatly appreciated, thank you!

 

[Snaake]

Parental upbringing costs money for you, as well as lowering the health and fertility of your ruler (=the father of the child). You do, however, get loads of events that allow you to shape the traits of said child more than you could otherwise (btw, don't send children to be raised by monks if you want them to be eligible for the emperor trait, raised by monks gives modest, which prevents you from getting emperor).

AFAIK, there's no effect (to education or otherwise) between the other 3, besides than the trait given by the decision.

Raised by noble -> trusting (+1D, -2I, you think better of others, the last makes this potentially good for younger sons, as they'll be more docile vassals due to this making their personality more compatible with pretty much anyone... and they don't need a big demesne),
raised by monks -> modest (-2 prestige, +1 piety (yearly I think), but modest people will never become emperors),
raised by nannies -> selfish (+1S, -2 prestige, -1 piety, so good for money but bad for prestige and piety, plus I think a lot of the "good" traits don't like selfish people).

Parental upbringing fires several different events which give you choices that have % chances of personality traits. You might end up with someone awesome, or a selfish, incompetent sociopath, depending on your choices and probably even more on the luck you have on those "has a xx% chance of gaining the trait yyyy" results.


AFAIK the "your child has become a warmonger"/psychopath/bully/bravo/leader/healer/nurturer/whatever events are just random (possibly influenced somewhat by their traits before that, so selfish people might get "bad" personalities more often?), and you can't affect them much.

edit: did some cursory digging in childhood_events.txt, and it seems what modifies the personality events (they fire between 12 and 16 years of age) are a) a lot of triggers of "not [trait X]" for the child (that stop the event from firing at all, possibly just there just to prevent multiple such events from firing for one child),
and b) a lot of MTTH modifiers that depend on the traits of the father (a selfish/proud/stubborn/arbitrary father is more likely to raise stubborn/selfish/proud kids).

There are separate sets of events for each of the noble/monks/nannies choices (my favourite from looking at the events is "this child has turned out as a paragon of decadence" from monks: seeing the indulgent/lustful/gregarious/weak-willed nature of his father, the son becomes indulgent, lustful (75% chance) and maybe gregarious (35%) and weak-willed (10%) => loads of babies, lustful and indulgent both boost fertility). There's also a common set (architect, bravo, caregiver and the like), that don't have MTTH modifiers for the father's traits.

 

[unmerged(45977)]

I take the monks route a lot. Raising yourself is just too harmful to your ruler and the events associated with it are also generally bad. The nannies give selfish which gives you negative piety and prestige plus gives you bad relations with a lot of your vassals. The nobles gives negative intrigue which is probably the most important stat for a ruler to have.

I'm not sure why you wouldn't choose the monks.

 

[Snaake]

Well, emperor, like I said. condition = not trait value modest, or somesuch is a part of the code. It's my ultimate goal in most games.

There really probably aren't many other reasons not to choose modest. Well, negative yearly prestige isn't nice.

 

[unmerged(133776)]

I always send all of my kids off to the Monks. At first, I tried to play the 'throw the dice and pick the best for every circumstance' game, but I found the results not worth the effort. So it's off to the Monks and on to more interesting stuff (like boohoo, I don't get along with my classmates event, oh wait, that's another irritating event). Anyway, back to the subject, even with all my kids going to the monks, I've yet to have a ruler who met the '5 King Titles, etc' requirements, fail to get the Emperor Trait. Not really sure why as I rarely pay attention to every minor trait they have at all times.

 

[Snaake]

you're most likely getting personality events that remove the 'modest' trait (if you get one of the monks-specific ones, I think that always happens).

 

[Veldmaarschalk]

Parental upbringing costs money for you, as well as lowering the health and fertility of your ruler (=the father of the child

One minor correction, there is a chance (5% IIRC) that you loose health and fertilit. So you don't lose it always.

 

[unmerged(84239)]

Raised by noble -> trusting (+1D, -2I, you think better of others, the last makes this potentially good for younger sons, as they'll be more docile vassals due to this making their personality more compatible with pretty much anyone... and they don't need a big demesne),
raised by monks -> modest (-2 prestige, +1 piety (yearly I think), but modest people will never become emperors),
raised by nannies -> selfish (+1S, -2 prestige, -1 piety, so good for money but bad for prestige and piety, plus I think a lot of the "good" traits don't like selfish people).

After the personality matures, 2 times out of 3, you will lose trusting/modest/selfish, so it doesn't really matter which you choose.


End results:



Ah, started to write it up, but found an old post by Veld:

http://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/showpost.php?p=7133783&postcount=9

If you send your child to the nannies (selfish)

egoistical rapscallion (selfish, proud, 35% chance of arbitrary, 10% of deceitfull)

girlish sissy (merciful, 75% chance of forgiving, 35% temperate, 10% generous)

mischievous blackguard (energetic, 75% cruel, 35% reckless, 10 % vengefull)

So 2 out of 3 times you will lose the selfish trait this way.

If you send your child to the monks (modest trait)

sniveling bookworm (modest, wise, 35% coward, 10% temperate)

heathen bashing fanatic (zealous, 75% valorous, 35% reckless, 10% cruel)

critical scholar (suspicious, 75% sceptical, 35% wise, 10% arbitrary)

So again, 2 out of 3 times you will lose the modest trait

When you sent to child to nobles (trusting)

muppet of barons (trusting, coward, 35% lazy, 10% indulgent)

aggressive warmonger (valorous, 75% cruel, 35% energetic, 10% arbitrary)

great stateman (just, 75% honest, 35% wise, 10% proud)

So again 2 out of 3 times you will lose the trusting trait.

In my opinion all education can turn out good or bad, as it is only %'s, none of the fixed personality traits are really bad.
Interesting is 'nobles' as the best (great statesman) and the worse (muppet) is there side by side.



This post from Veldmaarschalk should help to answer the original question.

 

[Snaake]

From reading the event file, I got the impression that first of all: there is a relatively long list of trigger requirements that say you can't have almost any traits other than modest, selfish or trusting for personalities to fire. This is there so you only get one personality.

Second, there are personalities other than the 3 per nanny/monks/noble option: architect, bravo, etc. It's possible to get one of these as well, the end result being that it's not a 2/3 chance to lose modest/selfish/trusting, it's more like 2/(3+number of the other personalities). I'm not at home atm, so I can't check the file in more detail.

In any case, if you want advice on what to do to get trait X for a child, either take parental upbringing for some more detailed choices, or if the father (presumeably your current ruler) is eg. just, honest, wise and proud, there's a pretty high chance (MTTH modifier of .9 or something per trait) that the child will get great statesman if you send him to be raised by nobles. Like father, like son.

 

[Veldmaarschalk]

The best thing you can (or what I do ) is to not bother yourself with these kind of details to much. I usually pick parental upbringing for my designated heir and pick the other options randomly (through a dice roll in my head).

The same goes for most event-options dealing with characters, I imagine myself 'what kind of person is this character' and make my choices depending on that.

In the big picture of the game, the choices you make aren't critical, they can sometimes cause your empire to fall apart, but for me that makes the game just more fun and challenging.

 

[Bear Cavalry]

Wow, thanks everyone! I think my question has definitely been cleared up. I'll have to try parental upbringing with my firstborn son next time, so I can experience all these personality-shaping events that I've been missing out on.