Hello and welcome to this weeks development diary! Today we will be talking about changes coming to Characters and Families in the Livy Update. Ever since the release of the game it has been a concern that while you have a great number of characters in your country that matter for things like office output, and civil wars, it is hard to develop an attachment to, and knowledge of, most characters in your country. Often enough you just end up picking the character with the best stat for any given job. Some things that we have already introduced to make job assignments a trickier decision is Power Base system of the Pompey update, the way Political Influence is generated from loyal officers in Cicero and in Livy the introduction of Statesmanship. While these changes all make the decision of who to put in a certain job a bit trickier it does not address the fact that most characters can be quite anonymous, and that has been of very little relevance to you what family they belong to. To address this, and to make Family an important part of the game, we are completely revamping how Families work and interact with your country and its characters in the game.

Great Families

In Livy we are doing away with the idea of an unlimited number of families in a country and instead adopt having limited number for the country as a whole. This number will generally be much lower than is currently the case in 1.2 and will be directly related to your country rank. Families will also tend to be bigger and wield more Power Base than is currently the case and will become scorned if they are not given enough of the jobs in your country.
A country will never have less than 3 potential families, and will gain an additional family when it becomes a Regional Power and a fifth Family once it becomes a Great Power.
In all interfaces each family will also be assigned a color, to make it easy to quickly distinguish what family they belong to.

Family Prestige & Power Base

Family Prestige is a value that is mainly increased over time by a family hold positions in your country, up until now it has not been used for much. In Livy family prestige it will be used to add power base to the head of family. Since Families are now fewer and more important, 120 power base will be distributed between the families in a country in accordance with how prestigious their family is compared to other Great Families in the country. At the start of the game most families will have a Prestige Value of 300 to ensure they all already have a power base, though this may differ in specific cases. What this means is that over time any family that is bestowed a lot of responsibility over the state will also become more powerful, with a higher prestige rating and a larger part of the 120 Familial Power Base tied to its head of family. An exception to these rules are Tribes, where Families will coincide with Clans and get their inherent power base from their retinues as before. Family Prestige will instead bestow Prominence on Tribal Head of Families.

Family Members

Most characters in your country at any given time will be Family Members, these are generally the result of natural procreation, adoption (more on that below) and marriage.

Minor Characters

Not all characters in a country will belong to a Great Family. Minor Characters are characters that do not. A fair number of these exist at start and more will be generated if you have too few characters in your country to hold jobs, most characters generated from script will also be a minor characters. A minor character will: [olist]

Not belong to any of the families.

Be unable to marry or have children (unless they marry a member of a Great Family).

Have a last name, but they will not actually be considered to belong to a family and wont have any family prestige.

Generally they will also be adult and of a gender that can hold offices in your country, though exceptions from this can exist, both at start and as a result of event content. [/olist] As a rule Minor Characters are ambitious characters that have risen from obscure families because of their abilities. When a minor character is very successful one of the big families might adopt this character through script (see the section on adoption). There is nothing to stop a Minor Character from holding office, even the Consulship in a Republic, but relying on Minor Characters to a large degree does risk your Great Families becoming scorned.

Scorned & Grateful Families

(Yes, even though your ruler is always loyal his family will still expect offices from a member in power) Instead of expecting to hold a certain wage as in previous version, Great Families will be scorned if they do not hold what they consider their share of jobs and titles in the country. Since this is an age of Aristocracy families will expect to share 80% of all possible jobs in your country between them. Any Great Family holding less than its share of jobs will be considered scorned, and all members will lose substantial loyalty over time. This includes: All Governorships, all Offices and any Armies or Navies that have a commander (leaderless armies or navies do not factor into these expectations). Likewise any family that gets double the share of work in the state that it expects will be Grateful, increasing loyalty, lowering the wages and facilitating Statesmanship buildup among all members.
(note: the minor_mac family shown here is not a proper family but extra information that I see because this screenshot was taken in debug mode)

Adoption:

(This particular character is cheaper to adopt since it is my ruler's bastard son) Heads of family may adopt successful minor characters to increase their family power and to ensure their survival. At all times families will strive to have slightly more characters that are able to hold offices than they would require to not be scorned. Every time a family performs an adoption the prestige of that family will be decreased slightly, hurting their power base in the short term.
(Stubborn characters may resist adoption) If playing a monarchy the player can use a character interaction to adopt minor characters. Something a Minor Character will generally agree to unless they have a particularly stubborn or proud disposition.

Falling from Grace & Rising from Obscurity

As country rank increases or decreases the number of allowed families in a country may change. Falling from Grace
If a country has a higher number of families than it is allowed to have then the least prestigious family will be removed. This will not be immediate but will happen through an event firing and removing the family from all members of the appropriate family (they will turn into minor characters and eventually die since they cannot have children). Rising from Obscurity
If a country has a lower number of families than it is allowed to have then an event will pop to let you pick a successful Minor Character to found a new family. The selection of characters will depend on your government type, in a Republic the senate will propose candidates, in a Monarchy the most powerful characters will be selected, and in a Tribe Clans are going to be Great Families.
Another example of major vs minor characters. In this case as shown when selecting a candidate for a job. All in all this creates a game in which families are a lot more present and a lot more relevant. Heads of families now wield considerable power and scorning a family will be a big deal. Together with Statesmanship this makes the choice of who to assign to a particular job harder. We feel that focusing on Families and the role of character's within them rather than all individual characters is both relevant to our era and something that will give Imperator: Rome a more unique take on characters going forward, different from what Crusader Kings II (and III) yet more involved than in the pure country level games such as Europa Universalis. As we move forward we hope to build more on this system and incorporate families in new mechanics we add, make them relevant in missions, etc. That was all for this week! :) Next week we will be back to talk about Roman Missions. You can read and discuss this diary on our forums here.