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Polygamy

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Yeah, I hope that the current setup has something in the religion file like

christian
{
blablabla

playable = 1
}

muslim
{
blablabla

playable = 0
}
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And we can change 0 to 1 and play as Muslim states, they just won't be unique or 'offically supported', just a reskin of the Christian ones, even drawing from the same event pool or whatever until we get the possible Islam Expansion.

I'd hate to see it 100% hardcoded locked out.
 
Yeah, surely we can just play them like daft, backward Christian nations until we get beefed up in the expansion! :p

Even playing them like Tribes in EU: Rome would be fine to start with.
 
Doomdark said:
Yes, playable Muslim countries would require some form of polygamy and harem mechanics. (Production of heirs was not usually an issue...) This is one reason (the other being the religious gameplay) that Muslim countries will not initially be playable in CK2. It will take an expansion to do the Muslim world justice.
Click to expand...

That is pretty good news, actually.
I'm guessing that also excludes the Knight Orders from being playable?
 
Mikebloke said:
Yeah, surely we can just play them like daft, backward Christian nations until we get beefed up in the expansion! :p

Even playing them like Tribes in EU: Rome would be fine to start with.
Click to expand...

Well, polygamy does exist in Western Christian nations (including the Papal States), just not in a recognized form. Kings and Queens had their lovers, which should be modeled somehow, if not in vanilla then by modding. With arranged marriages, sometimes the real loves of our characters' lives are still in court, which can make for some good events. There could be events to introduce a commoner woman (or man) into court as the more or less unofficial royal love interest, with events to recognize bastards and include them in the succession. (Under Roman law, bastards of unmarried men could be legitimized by marrying the mother, but there were other ways to do this, too. These were "natural children.")

In CK1, I generally allowed younger sons to marry their childhood sweethearts, but this was not usually the case historically.
 
Chamboozer said:
Feasible, yes. Worthwhile? Not really. Aside from flavor, I don't really see the point. What would it do besides increase the number of heirs you would have?
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The point it that it would drop chances of ruling dynastic changes, which never happened in near and middle east societies. Dynastic change where always the result of violence instead of a lack of heirs. That's why you could be sure that the rule of the Ottoman Empire will be ruled by character from the house of Osman, that the Seljuq empire will be ruled by a character from the Seljuq dynasty etc.

Excluding Abdallah von Wittelsbach from ruling the Almohads seem to be the point and it seem a good enough feature to be honestly envisaged into the game.
 
RedRooster81 said:
Well, polygamy does exist in Western Christian nations (including the Papal States), just not in a recognized form. Kings and Queens had their lovers, which should be modeled somehow, if not in vanilla then by modding.
Click to expand...

There's a huge difference, though, with polygamy compared to serial monogamy. In the former all heirs are recognized as legitimate, in the latter only the "legitimate" partner is recognized as mother of the heirs-to-be at the exclusion of every other heirs. Also, there are significant difference in social status and precedence in the latter (mistresses are treated as barely higher-status casual sex partners, and even then it doesn't stop the monarch from hooking up with wenches in the brothel or down the castle keep), while in polygamy the "queen" is usually a "primus inter pares" among the concubines, and the competitiveness between the concubines to be the mother of the heir is extremely rabid.

In the Western world, serial monogamy was widely accepted for those in power and standing, but the rules were clear: only the wife's children were legitimate, and the mistresses was to remain a plaything with very few overt emotional involvement. In polygamy, all sexual partners would be seen as legitimate partners, which opens up a LOT of succession crisises which, IHMO, only the later Ottomans found a efficient way to solve (and it wasn't pretty).
 
Drakken said:
There's a huge difference, though, with polygamy compared to serial monogamy. In the former all heirs are recognized as legitimate, in the latter only the "legitimate" partner is recognized as mother of the heirs-to-be at the exclusion of every other heirs. Also, there are significant difference in social status and precedence in the latter (mistresses are treated as barely higher-status casual sex partners, and even then it doesn't stop the monarch from hooking up with wenches in the brothel or down the castle keep), while in polygamy the "queen" is usually a "primus inter pares" among the concubines, and the competitiveness between the concubines to be the mother of the heir is extremely rabid.

In the Western world, serial monogamy was widely accepted for those in power and standing, but the rules were clear: only the wife's children were legitimate, and the mistresses was to remain a plaything with very few overt emotional involvement. In polygamy, all sexual partners would be seen as legitimate partners, which opens up a LOT of succession crisises which, IHMO, only the later Ottomans found a efficient way to solve (and it wasn't pretty).
Click to expand...

The point of the post, beyond the first sentence, was to suggest ways to model what is sociologically speaking polygamy. Your reply seemed aimed at convincing me that polygamy did not exist in the same form as it did, say, in the Ottoman Empire. Of this I am well aware, but for me polygamy has a wider definition, and some interesting possibilities for how great households operated in medieval Europe and the Christian Near East.

Polygamy is the maintenance of more than one regular sexual partner, more or less on a steady basis. The legal spouse existed in this situation for the purpose of establishing the succession. The king's other lovers produced heirs, who could in some circumstances be legitimized, and were in any case heirs, even if they were not of the ideal kind. Alternatively, an unmarried father could marry the mother of his natural children, and thereby legitimize them. Such an action would not be met without controversy, but it did happen particularly in more peripheral areas and during extraordinary times, when normal rules did not necessarily apply. (for example, Robert I of Normandy names his son William heir to the duchy; and there is the case of Arnulf of Carinthia succeeding to the kingship of East Francia despite his illegitimate birth.)

Alongside the idea of primogeniture was the idea of elective kingship, and in such a situation legitimacy was less a factor, unless the laws of the kingdom dictated otherwise. One of my more interesting reigns in CK1 has consisted of grooming a competent but illegitimate son for succession. CK2 is set to begin with a Norman bastard's ambitions to take the English throne. Who knows what will happen over the next four centuries?
 
My general impression about Pagans is that some of them considered it good, others considered polygamy an abomination. If they're going to do polgamy in Crusader Kings 2, then they'll need to rework the religious system to reflect this (which I would thoroughly support, there was about as much similarity betwen Finnish Pagans and Pagans who lived in Russia as there was between Christians and Muslims). I think it's something that should wait for the expansion pack.
 
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