Simplify micromanaging an Empire!
This is probably to summarize one kind of requests. As you know, CKII can be played as a grand strategy game as well as a role play game. With The Reaper's Due there is finally a goal for Roleplayers in the game, namely achieving immortality, But for the grand strategy players, the goal is still expanding as wide as possible. In CKII, this results in a special kind of micromanagement. While a roleplayer might very well be happy playing a duke or a king, not even an independent one, our grand strategy player will, if he/she is halfway competent, end up with a character that is Emperor of a large Empire after a few generations. While our average roleplayer might only have to hand out titles or holdings a few times during the reign of each of his/her characters, our grand strategy player has to do this often... very often.
Therefore one of the most common requests in the thread was for an improvement of the character finder. High stewardship or high martial characters are easy enough to find (more difficult if you want to find characters that are good in both categories), but the more important aspect of a character's chance of inheriting titles and having landless heirs is not clearly visible in the character finder. When writing for
http://www.ckiiwiki.com/Roman_Empire_walkthrough , I had phrased the issue this way:
Granting counties can require some effort to find appropriate characters. The ideal character would be of your dynasty, of course unlanded, but also neither heir to another title, nor second or third in line to inherit a title. Furthermore, he would already have children, who can inherit his titles, but until then don't own any titles themselves. This is all necessary to keep the Empires vassals from accumulating titles through inheritance. If the province is of a foreign culture, the new count should have a stewardship skill of 15+, to maximize the chance the the province adapts the Greek culture. Since every count should rule over only one province (!), you will need to find appropriate characters quite often.
To look for appropriate characters, go to the 'find character' interface, set culture to 'my culture', religion to 'my religion', ruler to 'no', click on 'search realm' and sort by stewardship. To display only members of your dynasty, enter your dynasty's name in the top box. Most of the time, the imperial dynasty won't have enough unlanded members with high stewardship, that aren't already heir to a county title, so that some counties will have to be granted to other landless characters, preferably ones from a small dynasty. In the exceptional case that there aren't enough high stewardship characters in your whole realm, you can create new characters with good stewardship by using the 'invite noble to court' decision in the intrigue tab. Whereas characters that are heir to a title can easily be recognized, a character who is second or third in line to inherit a title is far more difficult to figure out. This is a point where one can comprise, if one doesn't want to spend the time required to check the potential counts family relations.
I didn't skip through the whole thread, but I think an update for the character finder that makes a character's chance of inheriting titles and having landless heirs more visible was requested two or three times. I wanted to point this out more strongly.
Don't get me wrong, I like CKII exactly for this. The micromanaging in CKII quite unique. It is the only 4x game I know, where the success does not depend on the optimal placement of buildings or cities or that like, but on selecting the proper vassals or the right spouse. But this doesn't mean that I want to spent the time necessary to click through dozens of characters when this issue could be fixed with an improved ui. This would probably require two checkboxes in the character finder: 'Display only characters very unlikely to inherit a title' (trimming everyone that is 1st, 2nd or 3rd in line to inherit a title from the list) and another checkbox to make sure, that you don't give that 50 year old, 14-stewardship character a county, when you already have given his 20 year old, 17-stewardship son a rich county.
Of course, we could also be talking about improvements to the game rules to address the underlying issue. I see no reason, why, in an centralized Empire with very high legalism and majesty, it should be possible to enact a law that makes revocation of county titles possible, when a character, that is not the Emperor, has several of them spread out over more than one duchy. But this thread was meant for suggestions to UI improvements, so I don't really want to get started on the question on this.
What really could be done with the gui would be an alert to hand out viceroyal duchies. Currently finding these duchies requires two mouse clicks. The first one on your character portrait, the second one the title icon in the list of you titles.. since these icons are small and the title only shows up when hovering with the mouse over one icon, the second click takes more than a few seconds. An alert on the top screen, just like the current 'You can create titles', would make this more simple. Its description could be 'You should hand out viceroyal duchies', its tooltip 'You have titles to duchies where you don't have any holdings', and clicking on it would zoom to the respective de jure duchies, one after the other.
