After playing a couple 400+ games, I think I wanted to mention some problems that I see with Dynasties and offer some possible solutions. Under the current setup, once your Sovereign marries you can have up to 4 children that will be magic users and can be married off to other fractions for political alliance. Here is some problems I see with the current system.
1. First, if you have a son and allow your son to get married to the daughter of another fraction, YOUR fraction gains another magic Channeller but if you marry off your daughter to the son of another fraction you lose one. There does not seem to be any incentive other than some closeness of partnership that you gain through this union. It's obvious in this sitution it's better to marry off your sons and keep your daughters. A fraction that has 4 sons ends up with 8 extra channellers, however the fraction that ends up with 4 daughters ultimately ends up with nothing. The solution is for the fraction that is offerring up the daughter receive something in return, either gildar, materials, units, Champions or Diplomatic capital or something that makes the two fractions partners instead of traders.
2. We should be able to see the stat card of potential matches to determine what sibling is the best match. Stats should matter and increased stats should require a higher dowery.
3. The level of the Son/Daughter match should be taken into account. In my games, as soon as my sons and daughters become of age, I send them out to gain experience. A 4th level daughter should be worth more dowery than a 1st level daughter. This also encourages the fractions to use their most important assets in order to make stronger alliances. For example, once you get your daughter to say, 4th level, offers for her hand could come from multiple AI fractions that wish to have a powerful asset added to their kingdom or empire.
4. Son's and daughters should NOT inhereit their parents spell books. Either give them one randomly or perhaps one randomly selected from each parent. Then allow them a method to gain additional spell books (perhaps through quests). It would probably be a nightmare to have each son/daughter learn their own subset of spells, but at least granting them only one or two spell book types and all their fractions researched spells for that book should be fine for the game.
5. Why note 'in line for the throne' for each child without using it? Either eliminate this because it has no meaning within the game OR use it. My idea is that if your Sovereign dies then your next in line heir within your fraction takes his place (again, this encourages players and AI alike to use and increase the levels of their heirs). If your sovereign dies and you have no living heirs within your own fraction, then the kingdom passes to the player or AI that has the highest married heir within their fraction. If AI sovereign dies with no heirs, then the kingdom/empire is conquered and vanishes.
Those are my thoughts.
