The dynasty stuff deserves more weight

May be something could be taken from Mount & Blade: Bannerlord.  Your children may want to have their own cities and even form their own kingdoms which could be loyal or not.

That is the version of it I want. An heir who might not stay loyal gives you a reason to care which child inherits, instead of just watching the name carry over.

I have not played Bannerlord so I cannot say how well it works there, but a second son who goes off and founds his own city and then decides how he feels about you is a better story than anything my Ashborne line has managed so far.

Cool ideas!

The instinct is right, but I think it is aimed at the wrong system. What made characters matter in the older games was never the family tree. It was that they were units standing on the map and you could lose them.

Elemental already has that for the sovereign and for champions. You take them out, you use them, and you can get them killed. The dynasty is the one piece with no exposure attached to it at all. The name carries over whatever happens, which is exactly why it stops registering after two generations.

The Bannerlord version is a bigger ask than it looks. For a son to found his own city and then decide how he feels about you, the game has to spin a new faction up out of your own territory partway through a match, hand it cities you built, and run diplomacy for it afterwards. That is not a flavour feature, that is a whole faction lifecycle, and it tends to cost far more than it returns.

The cheap version of the same idea is to give the heir the exposure the sovereign already has. Make him someone you have to keep alive and find work for. Then who inherits stops being a name in a list and becomes a consequence of where you sent him. A second son who died at nineteen holding a border fort is the family drama, and it asks the game for nothing it does not already have.