Sooo I'm trying to figure out for the life of me why it's not worth it to create or use a lady sovereign and just marry Janusk on the first turn to start pumping out little adventurers... That is to say, I'm trying to figure out a way for Elemental to more strategically integrate offspring into the game.

As it is now, there's no reason not to marry some random dude wandering around the wasteland and get your happily married couple to have 16 kids. Before feature lock I'd love to see better incentives to think about who your characters are marrying beyond the line of succession of foreign kingdoms.. If there were a way to have the skills of the offspring related to the worth of the parents, it would incentivize strategic thinking on the part of players. I'm thinking it could work like this-

If the Sovereign marries a Wasteland Sorcerer (or some other wasteland magicker) then their offspring (let's call her Betty) would have a 50% or 75% chance of having some amount of magic power, say 3 or 4 essence points. Then you might choose to marry lil' Betty off to lil' Grognar, and their kid might end up being an adventurer with a little magic, a little bit of strength, and the potential to grow. Alternately, you might have Betty marry Merlin, and try and get a whole line of minor channelers who can trace their magical ancestry back to beginning of the kingdom/empire.

With this kind of system, I think you could set players up to think about their long term game plan, and start getting into fun situations where two or three generations down the line the player has finally produced a Master Merchant with +7 gold a turn thanks to smart breeding. I'd hope this could all be done by tweaking the algorithms and/or adding some extra categories or abilities for adventurers, but I'm not a game programmer

Any thoughts?