Tasunke just said something that got me thinking

in the "My sad tale; a nood's first game..." thread, he said, "I'd prefer marrying my royalty off to Peasant Girls and Farmers ..."

and a thought popped into my mind. one i havent heard mentioned yet, but may have overlooked(this sites search function is terrible). that is who would take you seriously? from a Role playing standpoint, marriages are arranged to further the power and influence of a given dynasty. if you are marrying off your children solely, from a gameplay standpoint, to nobodies, then wouldn't this have serious reprecussions? by contrast, wouldn't marrying them to powerful influential people, who may essentially be useless otherwise, have tremendous benefits,

so right now, you marry off your daughters and you give the enemy a spell caster but gain a relation boost to that faction, or keep them unwed, because you can't marry them to anyone else. alot of people are clamouring for a third option, marry an adventurer and keep the grandchild. the problems being that this has no real downside, and more importantly, the other option has no upside.

yeah, you can marry them off to rival fanctions for a relation boost, but couldn't you take this a step further? what if marrying into a rival faction generated political capital as well as a reputation boost to your sovereign, since you are marrying into a rival faction, your reputation rises in relation to theirs(so don't kill em, instead help them),  ofcourse, reputation needs to mean a little more than it does now. but we can get to that in a minute

things would need to be changed, hopefully just a little, but marry a merchant, your children might be merchants with relatively piss poor stats, but as the merchant grows in power, in his own reputation, that in turn boosts the soveriengs reputation, being a member of the dynasty, and again, being a powerful influential merchant, maybe you start generating some more of that political capital, or get a deal at the local shops or cheaper troops(probably not), but being the spoiled children of a rich merchant, not only are they crap, stat wise, but maybe get a ill trait or two. inefficient, insane, etc.(id reserved insane for when the happy couple share branches on the family tree, but i digress)

on the other hand, marry an adventurer, your children may have better stats, be more battle ready, but until he/she cleans out a few dungeons, slays some high level beast, he/she not only does nothing for you, but actually brings your reputation down, you've essentially married a struggling artist that spends their days watching daytime soaps. gotta hurt the other factions oppinions of you, your own people even.

one way to increase the effectiveness of reputation, is to reduce the cost of future highers, but its kinda of limited in value, especially with charisma already there. it definitely needs something else. it could also serve like diplomatic bonuses, where the highest reputation between the two factions sees their deals looking better, so if you let your reputation sink into the crapper you are going to get screwed on diplomacy. another is a higher reputation gives an additional moral boost to troops. your king/queen is great, you gotta feel a little better about fighting for him/her.

if done right, maybe now you start to have a real choice to make. keep the daughter for another spell caster, or marry her off, get political capital, get a reputation boost so you can get some choice diplomatic deals. marry an adventurer so you can get some primo generals, just as long as you can take the reputation hit until they prove themselves.

obviously for this to work the different classes have to have different base stats, with those not geared towards labour having drastically reduced stats, like royalty being exceptionally frail, and merchants only slightly better. but with farmers, production and mining, being very labour intensive, having nice starting stats, except perhaps wwith less intellegence than the others, and adventurers topping the charts.

ofcourse i'm not sure what else you could do with the laborers, they should take a reputation hit, being commoners, but it seems like they need a greater benefit other than getting to keep your daughter infamily.

i should probably clarify here that most of this assumes the bonuses and penalties go to the brides side of the family. the grooms side gets a free spell caster, so its the brides side that if affected by the marriage.

as i said, hope this hasn't been brought up before, and hope someone can flesh it out a little better. but if done right, you would have to actually stop and consider the benefits and costs of any marriage, strategicly think it out, which i think would only add to the game

and if you don't like it, blame tasunke.