Pretenders

[ross_ntu]

Is this working as designed? I am playing as king of Scotland and, having remarried, I now have three sons. One is my heir, who has a relationship of around 5 with me. My other two sons hate me, despite their age (one is less than 1 years old!) they hate me due to the type of succession I have, but mostly because they are pretenders to the throne. It seems a bit silly that a child of a few months old would hate their father due to their designs on the throne- is there no way of changing this to make it so that, in general, very young children do not have high levels of dislike for their parents?

 

[artfox]

It's more of a design issue really... It's designed this way to show that they will begin dislike you as soon as they are old enough to become a threat.

Personally I prefer to have this information during their childhood (how silly it may seam). This way you will have plenty of time to see an upcoming threat instead of suddenly noticing it the same day they become adults and immediately trying to assassinate you ;-)

 

[ross_ntu]

So is there a chance that they won't become pretenders and threaten my heir? Have I just been unlucky to have my two younger sons develop this?

 

[artfox]

Your younger sons will always be pretenders as they know that if your firstborn was dead, they would be ruling your kingdom and they are upset with this "injustice". However, what you could do is try to improve your relations by giving them gifts, landed titles, honorary titles or if you are feeling particulary evil - inprison or assassinate them.

Another way of dealing with the problem is to change laws.

 

[ross_ntu]

Thanks for replying again. I still feel this is too "cut and dried". To me it would make more sense that sons with an ambitious trait would be more likely to get the jealousy negative, or some sort of "designs on the throne" negative that is less than the -50 for pretender. As it is, currently your relationships with your sons is hit twice - once by succession law penalty, and then by the huge pretender penalty. Surely, historically, pretenders only really become pretenders when they gather support due to the genuine claimant not having a particularly strong link eg not a son / daughter, when the genuine claimant was unpopular, or when the genuine claimant was weak. Surely having those checks before a character was given the pretender negative would be a more historical way of doing this? After all, not every single second son had designs on taking their elder brother's place - I am sure this has not happened many times at all, but in fairness maybe you can point at examples of this happening irl much more often than I am aware of.

 

[Talar]

Even if not really a bug I agree it would be much better if it could be controlled by traits. Having every younger son automatically hate you seems like it will be tiresome in long run, at least some of them should realistically be content with lesser titles.

 

[phbbt107]

Well, the content and ambitious traits already affect their opinion of you.