General rule:

Children are as awesome as the loins they spring from, squared.

Yeah, this is normal. Jury's still out on whether it should or shouldn't be.

You should get 1 really good kid from every game.  There's a max on children, right?  Like 4 or something?

Hmm.  No.  Every other game.  So a 12.5% chance, assuming 4 kids per game.

Has anyone played a game long enough where grandchildren are born, and/or become NPCs?

Most of the games I've played were either over very quickly (smaller maps) or on larger maps they were decided early enough where I didn't bother playing onward (or the slowdowns on my machine made it difficult).

Do games last long enough for it to matter, for other people?  How many turns in are we talking about? 

Shhhhhh! Don't tell the devs about children getting up to +4 mana per round in combat. Lets keep this our little secret.

In about 7 games now, I've yet to have a kid that was any good.  Best I had was one with 5 essence, hehe.

I 've finished my first game last night (attempt #6 due to all the OOM and slowdown crashes, I found if I play a small map then I only get OOM crashes that I can reload through)  Anyhow my 3rd child (Son) had 300+ mana at manhood.  I was more than pleasently surprised... happily shocked I guess one could say.  Still thats a bit ridiculous and I was not playing on ridiculous level.

I think that children look so badass because of their ability to regenerate both mana and health in tactical combat. It makes dad/mom look bad. I actually modded my custom and core sovereigns to all have some degree of tactical mana/health regen. After that, children no longer look so overpowered. This affects AI as well so it not really cheating.

hehe - i always fee lbad marrying of daughters - im giving a ultra unit free to my potential enemies!! and they spawn even more ultra units! crazy!

You won't believe this, my grandaughter marry my grandson that's because I married all my children to Pariden, so we have mutual grand children LOL

"honey ! its me ! daddy!"

Daughter with epic gear : RAAaWWR!!!!

There's definitely something strange here.

My kids all start with 10 in every stat except essence (which is in the 300+ area), move 6, but can only move 1 square. Mostly mum and dad's special abilities.

That was just before it crashed due to oom (reported in another post).

There's something odd with kids these days....

awesome

Let's have death at childbirth too. No, really. I can counter all your counterarguments by saying "It has happened in The Song Of Ice And Fire".