Dev Diary #3: The Blood of Númenor
by Jamie-san
“Believe not that in the land of Gondor the blood of Númenor is spent, nor all its pride and dignity forgotten…” - Boromir, The Fellowship of the Ring
Hey guys, it's me again with another Dev Diary. This week I'm going to be talking about some of the changes coming to the Blood of Númenor traits in v2.2, particularly in light of the information about Númenórean lifestyles set out in the recently published book, The Nature of Middle-earth. As always, anything discussed here is hot code and may be subject to change after playtesting!
Life Expectancies
Given the many different ways that characters can die in CK3, and the different influences on life expectancy from health, events, lifestyles and intrigue, it's always a bit of a guessing game figuring out how long characters might be expected to live; so to help remove that uncertainty, I ran some tests to figure it out by giving every single character the different Blood of Númenor traits and letting the game run for 100 or so years - logging each death age along the way. The results were interesting and have allowed us to tweak the life expectancy modifiers of the traits to align with our target life expectancies of 110, 150 and 210 for Tiers 1, 2 and 3. I've shown some of the results of this testing on the original unadjusted traits below (note that I set all Tier3 characters to age 160 to avoid having to wait so long for death!):
These charts are interesting to try to analyse, we have an early peak of deaths which I suspect is due to characters being created for events then dying soon after and knight characters being created and then dying in battles; then a gradual decline presumably due to deaths by various illnesses; then finally a peak as the character's health value begins to decline to dangerous levels and the 'old age' peak kicks in.
Marriage and Maturity
Due to their longer lifespans, Númenóreans typically reached 'maturity' (which implies full-growth of mind as well as body) at a later age than other men and would not seek to wed until such a time, enjoying various pursuits (especially seafaring for Númenórean men) before settling down. To reflect this, we have made it so that AI characters with Númenórean blood traits will not seek marriages until an age threshold higher than the default age of 16; and the longer they expect to live, the longer they'll wait! We have set these threshold ages at 20/30/50/100 for Tiers 1/2/3/4. As a player, of course you will still be able to go against the traditions of your people and marry at whatever age you wish.
Fertility and Childbirth
With Númenórean blood characters marrying later in life, we needed to offset the effects of the normal mortal menopause age on women or face them never being able to have any children. Therefore, we've added additional years of fertility modifiers to the traits to make sure that they won't pay the price for waiting to wed!
Stressbusting
After taking a second look at the Númenórean blood traits, we were concerned that the stress reduction modifiers were so large as to make stress a non-factor when playing those characters. So we've taken the decision to nerf those reductions, making life just a little more stressful for the kin of Elros!
Blood Trait Inheritance Mechanics
I've made some additional tweaks to the checks made to determine what tier of Númenórean blood trait will be inherited by a couple's children. As well as the checks on the morality of each parent's publicly known traits, I've added additional checks on the secrets of each parent. Yes, now Eru knows what you've done - even THAT! This will mean no more closet cannibals or murderers will be avoiding judgement.
I've also made a special exception for the easter egg blood purist dynasty of the Ar-Adûnaim. Under the current system, they're up against the inheritance odds due to being counted among the Forces of Evil (as well as their many other morally dubious deeds!). To give them a bit of a helping hand, I've added an exception to the religion check for parents of their dynasty.
As it's a commonly asked question, a reminder of the current traits checked for blood inheritance are in a pinned comment in our discussion channel:
The Death of a Spouse
“A second marriage was permitted, by traditional law, if one of the partners died young, leaving the other in vigour and still with a need or desire of children; but the cases were naturally very rare.” - Lives of the Númenóreans, The Nature of Middle-earth
In Númenórean culture, it was unusual for a widowed spouse to remarry, except where they were left without any children of their own. While the Númenóreans are long gone by our 3000 T.A. start date, this tradition is preserved among those of the Dúnedain culture group. To reflect this, there is a new event on spousal death for the surviving Dúnedain character (where they are not childless), giving them the chance to take on the 'Widow' trait which forbids remarriage. The AI are weighted to take this option more often than not (modified by character traits such as lustful) and should add extra cultural flavour to the Men of the West.
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Only tangentially related, but will you be adding the Gondorian plate armour as a cosmetic?