Honestly, I think that is where a lot of confusion and frustration with the game comes from, I think. A few examples are pregnancies, workshop income, diplomacy and fief decisions, perks, combat behavior... a lot of stuff happens under the hood but you can never tell while playing the game.
Right. I'm starting to see why it's designed this way. You don't want the next generation populated with so many lords that the game balance breaks. In other words, they don't want you just to breed your opposition out of existence.
While we are looking at the age of time when it wasn't unusual for women to have anywhere from 10 to 15 pregnancies, the game also doesn't appear to have a mechanic for early childhood deaths that were also common and kept population unfortunately low.
It's just very frustrating when you don't know exactly how you're supposed to start the "process." For example, the game will stop all pregnancy chance if she's given birth less than a year ago or something. Something simple where you can say, "Okay, the best chance of your spouse getting pregnant is..." So you end up waiting with your spouse for crazy amounts of time because that's how the previous version worked. If they had set rules that the player could understand, that would be helpful, especially if people are testing mods where they tweeked a few of the basic mechanics.
And I agree, that's a problem in a lot of other areas. How do you predict the success of a workshop? You don't! In well designed games, you're looking at factors like How often is a city invaded, which region it's located in, and your player's own stats as factors. This allows players to design strategies like, If you put a workshop in a city on the border where it's likely going to be targeted for attack, you will earn large, but inconsistent gains. One day you'll earn +1000 deners, but for the next 30 days while the war rages on, you'll earn < 40 deners. Meanwhile in cities that are in the middle of a territory and less prone to attack, you earn 200 deners per day, but it's consistent. Or some products becoming more in demand if there's an active war and others when there's considerable peace. This puts players at position where they're making calculated decisions based on the game mechanics.
Especially since wars actually make sense in this game. In Warband enemies just waltz right into the middle of your territory, burn your villages and sack your castle. You can barely hang onto anything. In this one, they mostly attack what's right on the border, they will venture into the middle of territories, but usually not a good idea without an army. And it would be nice if economies took advantage of these improvements.
