Players can certainly die in battle (I've had it happen to me) I believe the game will only cold clock you if your clan is too large though. You take over whoever would be second in command (Usually your wife) As for death and birth rates, Birth rates are incredibly easy to modify. I'd rather create the outline for death rates and simply modify birthrates around that instead since that seems significantly easier. Part of the problem I see with not having a chance to kill lords immediately is that it's very immersion breaking that for the first couple years lords simply don't die then all the sudden they start falling left and right as kids come into fruition. I think the chance of killing older lords in battle can provide it's own merits even early in the game but we'd need to actually provide AI lords with some personality so players care about them in the first place since it should only take 1 interaction to build a basic idea of a character through their first impression.
I think part of the problem with this method would be that every lord would be absolutely destroyed incredibly quickly from battle, and it'd significantly slow the actual gameplay part of the game down which would end up not being very fun for the player who wants to fight battles or in the opposite direction, this system could be abused very easily by decimating enemy armies and taking them out of the game for longer causing heavier snowballing from the lack of response these newly wounded lords can't muster causing the player to steamroll entire kingdoms by themselves. The concept of a temporary wounded state could have a lot of merit for lord personality, quest purposes, and relation purposes but you'd need to be incredibly careful when affecting how it impacts battles since that's a very delicate scale.
I believe wounded AI lords attempt to seek shelter and recover. I could be wrong but I remember it in one of the patch notes.
I should have been clearer, I meant no increased death chance on being wounded not the ability to enter battle wounded. 1HP AI lords in battle would be pretty goofy.
On one hand a universal system like that would be good for immersion in the world, but the AI might need a little buff behind the scenes (no wounded penalty maybe?) since AI lords get knocked out so often they'd all be at the 20% cap before the first year and that'd probably result in a massive swathe of deaths.
Great! Can't wait for the next major update boys. Keep it up!
The issue isn't actually solved, the other poster just said how a player could manually fix the bug on their end by editing the xml file but it is still a bug that should be fixed officially (And shouldn't be too difficult to fix either since it's a simple labeling problem)
This is still an ongoing issue with all save files across all versions. Your Companions and family that win tournaments don't receive rewards in any form.