The Eunuch nerf is ill-considered and should be done differently

[heavy obsidian]

The castrate and recruit nerf that makes impossible for the vast majority of characters to do it is, in my opinion, a misguided nerf. Force castration will still let you invite back a character if you have high amenities most of the time anyway. The nerf mainly makes getting eunuchs more inconvenient.

The OP things about making Court Eunuchs are twofold; being able to trade them for huge amounts of influence, and the free Dread you gain from them. Unlike executing, which was nerfed to only give dread against important characters, Castrate will give you Dread for doing it to anyone, making it an OP source of Dread. This Dread income should be removed, only giving Dread under the same conditions executions give Dread.

Second, at 100-200 Influence per Eunuch, turning every male prisoner into a source of influence is OP. This amount should scale a lot more with eunuch quality, and simply only give you the full amount if given to your liege or top liege; with vassals awarding much less influence at 1/10th or so.

I believe these changes would nerf the actually OP aspects of Court Eunuchs (and its cultural variants) instead of the currently palliative, annoying version we have with the things actually making it OP still unsolved.

[low comet]

Agreed! And I reckon a way to balance Court Machinations giving the ability to castrate characters, could be to scale accept chance for Castrate Kin with diplomacy, intrigue, prowess and primary title tier with a bigger bonus for title tier

[heavy obsidian]

that's another potential avenue as well; it could be a diplomacy perk, scale with title etc. yes, you are being a eunuch, but you are also going to be entrusted with real power and that's trade a lot of people took irl; we have records of people asking to be castrated and put into palace employment. usually low-lifes or peasants or people who otherwise would have been really desperate, but yeah

[low comet]

Just realised I misread and thought you also suggested giving Court Machinations the ability to castrate (which I didn't expect AUH to remove from Han culture, and would love to know if there's any historical reasons involved!)

[heavy obsidian]

they already did that in the current patch, which was great, but they gave with one hand and took back with the other. now you can't really castrate and recruit anyone who isn't a coward and with kids anymore, which is not really interesting or balanced for the reasons i mentioned. mainly because you can still do the trick of castrating them and re-inviting them.

but yes, irl eunuchs would have generally been war captives or children sold by desperate people, so it definitely tracks that you should be able to castrate and employ your prisoners as eunuchs. the OP aspects are the dread you gain and the influence you get from trading those eunuchs away. and that's what should be addressed imho.

and you should definitely be able to castrate a baby(toddler, since they wouldn't be in a position to refuse or really hold much of a grudge because it would be the only life they'd have known. that was a large number of eunuchs in employ

[low comet]

ohhh i hadn't noticed since i took Palace Politics in my hybrid culture.

and completely agree

[heavy obsidian]

edit: never mind, didn't realize it was against the rules to ask people to join the discussion. apologies, leaving an edit instead of just deleting to avoid a ghost ping + for posterity

[pale frost]

I want to echo the sentiment that the current nerf does not make sense, and I want to stress that apart from everything else, eunuch characters themselves are useful when the liege has the correct cultural tradition. They make better courtiers compared to characters with same stats.

In context of China, lowborn and children of obscure houses who are not house heads or house heir should be allowed made into beardless eunuchs, because that's the realistic representation of them. Also, there are way too many bearded eunuchs in China, when in reality the vast majority of them should be beardless eunuchs.