Welcome back to our two-parter on the features of Star Dynasties’ new Bloodlines DLC. If you missed our intro dev log about the new family designer, you should definitely check it out. Today, I’ll describe the remaining DLC features: child upbringing, managing inheritance, and bloodline upgrades.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1852400/Star_Dynasties_Bloodlines/
Child Upbringing
In Bloodlines, we want to make children a more important part of your house and your story. To achieve this, we’re giving you the ability to mold the children in your family, influencing their traits and skills as they grow into adults. Children will now be a source of story events, and you can use them as political pawns with other rulers. Of course, one child will be particularly important - your heir - and these features will bring them to life like never before.
For each child related to you, you will be able to assign one of your council members, or yourself, as the guardian of that child. Guardians influence children in two ways. First, they give their ward a gradual stat increase in the guardian’s best and second-best skills. Secondly, the guardian also has an influence on the personality traits that the child will acquire as they grow. Let’s talk about both in some more detail.
When a child is born, they have a predisposition to be good in one skill and not another. Unless you designed them yourself as part of your starting family, you won’t know what their strength is - but you will sometimes learn this information when the child demonstrates their aptitude in a particular area. For example you might find them fixing some machinery, indicating an affinity for Technology, or trying to resolve conflict via persuasion, suggesting a strength in Diplomacy. If you learn what skill they are best at, it’s often a good idea to assign them a guardian that reinforces that skill, or instead focus them in some other area to balance your house or their strengths.
In the base game, characters adopt traits from their parents. If a child has two Humble parents, that child is very likely to become Humble as they grow, and exceedingly unlikely to be Proud. With Bloodlines, the guardian will also influence the traits a child is likely to adopt, by making choices during story events representing seminal moments in the child’s upbringing. If you happen to be the guardian, you’ll be the one making those decisions: for example, deciding that it’s worth denying yourself a small boon now to demonstrate honorable behaviour to your ward, in the hope they’ll become honorable themselves.
You can also ask another ruler to be the guardian of one of their direct children. Having a ruler’s child as your ward is a great way to keep that ruler friendly: you could arrest the child, or even execute them, if their parent acted against you. Similarly, you may find yourself giving another ruler your child as a hostage… erm, ward, if you want something from them in return.
Managing Inheritance
You’ve done your best to raise your heir into a fine scion of your house, ready to take the reins when you pass away. Then they go and get caught murdering another noble, ruining their reputation and making them a distinctly dicey prospect as the next ruler of your empire. What’s a prudent parent to do? In Bloodlines, we give you the tools to change who will inherit your house.
Ruling houses - that is, those which rule at least a single star system - now have a succession rule that determines who will inherit the house when the current ruler dies. In the base game, all houses use the “Oldest Child” rule, where unsurprisingly the oldest child (or their oldest child, if they are deceased) inherits the house. In Bloodlines we have four cardinal succession rules (Oldest Child, Youngest Child, Closest Relative, and Oldest Sibling), and each rule has variations by gender, e.g. Youngest Son, or Oldest Sister.
Changing a succession rule might be the right call, but it will incur a significant political cost. If you are desperate to get rid of your current heir, but are in a precarious political position, you may instead choose to disinherit them. Disinheriting an heir simply removes them from the succession list without changing the current succession rule of the house. If your heir has committed a crime against you, this will even be seen as a just punishment.
But what if none of your would-be heirs are particularly appealing? Your son may be a murderer, but his sister is a half-wit, and your brother is old and childless. Never fear: you will now be able to appoint any member of your house, or any kin member in your empire, as your heir. However, this comes with the most significant political cost of all. If you’re going to tear up centuries of tradition to hand-pick some nobody as your successor, you’d better have plenty of goodwill with your vassals.
And of course, since you will have the power to alter House inheritance, your family members will naturally try to exploit this themselves. Look out for events where House members try to disinherit each other!
Lastly, if you are playing on Custom difficulty you can choose to Abdicate your rule, causing your heir to immediately inherit. This is only available on Custom difficulty because, to be honest, it can break the game. Use it responsibly as part of a role playing run, or abuse it to inherit into a stronger character… the choice is yours.
Bloodline Upgrades
One element that some have felt was missing from the game is some kind of tech-tree of upgrades. Now, as I’ve said before, this is a really awkward fit for Star Dynasties: in our universe technology is stagnant and no significant research is taking place. In response to this feedback we built the Expeditions systems during Early Access, which was our way of bringing technology to the forefront in Star Dynasties.
In Bloodlines, we now introduce an upgrade tree tied to something that is at the heart of the game: your dynasty.
Bloodline upgrades should be rare, and you will not be able to acquire the entire tree in one sitting. Thus you’ll need to decide whether to go deep into specific branches (the final upgrade in each branch is stronger than the remaining upgrades), or whether to spread your points around more tactically.
Bloodline upgrades can complement a themed run by making a particular playstyle more powerful. It’s also a great way to experiment with different playstyles, as it makes assignments or strategies you don’t normally use more attractive.
You earn bloodline upgrades in two ways. First, by expanding your dynasty: every ruler who is related to you will earn you bloodline upgrade points each turn. Secondly, by earning status: every kin member who commits an act that earns status will also earn you bloodline upgrade points. When you collect enough points, you can choose an upgrade from the tree.
Thus you acquire bloodline upgrades by expanding your dynasty and seeing them do well. In the base game you had some motivation to place kin members in positions of power, and to support them: being kin, they tended to like you and would act in your favour by eg. not rebelling, or helping in combat. But you were unlikely to, for example, install your brother (a skilled House member!) as the ruler of a conquered system, and if a kin ruler’s opinion of you declined it was easy to just write them off.
Bloodline upgrades gives you a natural motive to install and maintain your kin members in positions of power in your empire and elsewhere: the more kin you have ruling systems, the more Bloodline upgrades you get! It also motivates you to find marriages that establish relationships with higher ranking rulers.
Pick up Bloodlines!
This DLC has been a long road for us! We’re excited to finally share it with you, and we hope when you get your hands on it you’ll agree that these features enrich the base game and make ruling the cosmos all the sweeter.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1852400/Star_Dynasties_Bloodlines/
Let us know what you think of Bloodlines when you get a chance to play!
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