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If you have too many daughters, your best options are to marry them to secure alliances, or replace a dynasty via inheritance. You can also make them councilors, knights, or vassals, depending on your religion and laws.
Those interested in collecting inheritable traits could use daughters to help through strategic marriages, as well.
Marriage
Just as in old times, you can marry your daughters to foreign families to create alliances. In CK3, there are a few other reasons to marry depending on which type of marriage you choose.
Normal Marriage – Alliances
The main reason for marrying off your daughters is to secure powerful alliances with other rulers. Allies can be called during war and will fight alongside you.
An ally fighting alongside the player in a war, providing a significant troop bonus
In a normal marriage, children are from the father’s dynasty.
While this means you won’t be able to inherit through your daughters, it’s easier for other characters to agree to the marriage.
The acceptance score for this marriage proposal is broken down. Normal marriages are more easily accepted.
Matrilineal Marriage – Alliances and Inheritance
This type of marriage allows children to inherit the mother’s dynasty. In this way, you can inherit through your daughters.
Matrilineal marriage is necessary for those playing as women or those with no sons. Otherwise, you won’t have any dynastic heirs, and the game will end.
A player with only daughters and no sons. The first daughter is the heir
Of course, matrilineal marriages can be used to secure alliances, too.
However, it’s sometimes impossible to get other rulers to agree to the marriage if their son is an heir.
Important male characters or heirs will usually reject matrilineal marriage, as above
Rulers will often let you matrilineally marry their second or third heir, so if your neighbors have enough children, you still have a chance at an alliance.
This second son is not a direct heir, so a matrilineal marriage will be accepted
Tip: If you matrilineally marry your dynasty member to a secondary heir in another realm, you can murder the heirs before them. Then, after two generations, your dynasty will rule!
Councilors
Your daughters can often be assigned to your council, depending on your religion.
Some players will be able to assign daughters as Spymasters only, and others will be free to place daughters in other positions.
The Equal preference is highlighted in the Reform Religion window. This allows women to be appointed to the council
This is useful if you have a very strong dynasty with high attributes, since they’ll be more effective than other candidates.
The Coterie dynasty perk tree also buffs your family members further, making them even more powerful as councilors.
This tree is from the Iberia DLC and is only available for Iberian heritages or those with realm capitals in Iberia.
The first-tier Inner Circle perk and tooltip from the Coterie dynasty legacy tree
Beware of opinion debuffs from powerful vassals who want council seats! Reserving them all for family can make vassal management harder.
Shieldmaidens & Knights
In some cultures and religions, you can make high-prowess women from your family into shieldmaidens.
This allows them to serve as knights, just like men.
The player’s daughter, who has been made into a Shieldmaiden
Depending on your religion, all women may be able to become knights by default.
A mixed selection of male and female champions
This is especially useful if your heirs are male. You don’t need to risk their lives in battle, and can instead raise your daughters as powerful knights.
Vassals
Most of the time, women can become vassals in CK3. This is usually caused by succession when there are no male candidates left in the dynasty.
The player’s sister, an unmarried vassal
If succession is set to “Male Only,” this is never possible.
The Male Only succession law is highlighted, which completely removes women from inheritance
However, with the correct laws, you can also grant women titles freely.
You can make your daughters vassals with this law.
The Equal succession law, making men and women equal in inheritance
Refining Your Bloodline
You can use daughters to breed good traits into your dynasty, like Beautiful or Herculean.
This is achieved by marrying them to a man with one of these traits, preferably one or more that your daughter does not have.
This pairing could result in children with both traits instead of just one
Their children might inherit good traits from both parents.
In this case, you can keep marrying these children to other characters, adding more traits or strengthening them.
Once you have characters with good traits, marry them back into your main line when possible. Ideally you have focused on one trait in your main line, and a different trait in your daughter’s line.
The Beautiful trait has been strengthened in the main line, while the Hale trait is from a cousin
Using this technique, you can focus on several inheritable traits at once.
This reduces the number of generations you’d spend collecting traits!
Of course, extra sons can be used for this technique as well.
Samantha is a Scottish writer, editor, and lifelong gamer living in Czechia. She loves to travel around Europe and enjoy the outdoors, as long as it's not too hot! She can usually be found constructing her next CK3 dynasty, carving some tails in Monster Hunter, or enjoying a horror show or two.
