CK2 Dev Diary #38 - My Kingdom for an Interface

[Meneth]

Good afternoon. I’m Magne Skjæran, and when you last heard from me I was talking about our quality of life improvements to the Intrigue screen. I’ve had a great time on the CK2 team since then, and today I’ve got the opportunity to share with you further quality of improvements we’ve made. Some were already done or mostly done when that dev diary were written, while some were in the works, and a handful inspired by comments from members of the community to the dev diary itself. I’d like to thank everyone who suggested further improvements; while not all were implemented, they were at the very least considered.

Today’s quality of life changes are to many different parts of the game rather than having a singular focus. There’s quite a few of them, so we better get started.

First up is a feature inspired by EU4: a battle indicator.
This will show up whenever a unit entering a province (or two units, if they’re entering the same province) will cause a battle to occur. Hovering over it will show the date it starts, and what two realms will be fighting. If any bonuses or penalties apply (terrain or river/strait/naval landing), this will be shown as well as who it will be applied to.
This should help ensure that you don’t end up in combat without expecting it, though note that it does obey the fog of war rules, so it won’t warn you if an unseen enemy is approaching the province you’re entering!

Next up, the garrison tooltip is now more helpful.

Before it’d only show the garrison, but now it also shows the levy, and the garrison+levy since this is the number you have to beat in order to actually be able to siege the holding:

Further, we’ve added an “Embark All” button for when you’ve got multiple units selected, even if they’re spread across many different provinces. This will load as many as possible of the units selected onto the fleets in their provinces, then select the loaded fleets so you can easily merge them together:

The game rules screen has also seen some improvement. First of all, the game rules are now categorized, allowing you to select an individual category so that you can easily find the rule you’re looking for. Second, you now have four save slots for game rules, allowing you to have different pre-sets for easy switching between campaigns:

Mirroring our “prisoner filters” feature, we’ve also made some improvements to the Character Finder.
First, we’ve added a “reset filters” button just like the prisoner filter screen has.
Second, like we’ve done for the game rules, we’ve added the ability to save up to four character finder configurations.
Third, we’ve added the ability to filter by diplomatic range.
Fourth, we’ve added the ability to filter by whether characters will join your court.
Fifth, the icon indicating whether characters will join your court will now show if giving them a bribe gift would be enough to change their response from “no” to “yes”.
Sixth, the “Great House” filter now also lets you filter out anyone of your dynasty rather than just the inverse.
Fun fact that most people don’t seem to know: You’ve always been able to search for claims; just put in the name of the title you want to find claimants for.
Note that the art is a work in progress; the final version will definitely not have buttons floating outside the window:

Further, for owners of Conclave we’ve improved the councilor selection screen a little bit. Each candidate will now have an icon representing their likely voting pattern, and hovering over it will show everything making each possible pattern less or more likely. Note that since the act of appointing someone will change a number of factors, the most likely position isn’t completely guaranteed to be the position they take, but since the factors changed are almost entirely positive it is exceedingly rare to end up with a worse position than indicated:

Another nice feature for Conclave owners is the ability to send laws to council consideration. This will show you how your council would vote without you having to have an actual vote. If you’re satisfied with the result, you can then start the actual vote from the same screen:

Also new on this screen is that it shows how the members of the council are voting, and hovering over the icon will show why they’re voting that way, making it simpler to figure out how you can influence their vote:

Beyond this, there’s one more Conclave QoL improvement: the childhood education screen will now show you which traits the child has got that positively or negatively influence the different education choices, so you no longer need to cross-reference the child’s traits with the description of each education choice:

One more small improvement has also been made to the Intrigue screen. Known and backed plots will now show their plot power on the plot entry itself rather than requiring you to hover over the plot:

Another new feature I know many fans, me included, have long wanted is the ability to randomize the name of newborn children. This has now been added, with four options: Randomize (uses the culture’s naming list), Name after Parent, Name after Grandparent, and Name after Random Ancestor. Note that the art for this is not yet done; the final version won’t look like this:

Now there’s only one last QoL change I’d like to illustrate: commander auto-assignment.
The Minor Titles tab now has a checkbox to auto-assign commanders. This will ensure you always have all your commander slots filled out with the best commanders available in your court. It will of course obey your restrictions on councillors to not lead armies.
To also make commander assignment a bit easier, the old “show commanders” checkbox has been changed to “show only commanders”. Since commanders are at the very bottom of the list anyway, hiding them didn’t make too much sense:

As I said, this is the last QoL change I wanted to illustrate, but it doesn’t cover every QoL change we’ve made. There’s numerous other small improvements made, and this I thought best to simply copy from the changelog rather than spend yet more pages illustrating. So here’s close to all QoL changes from the changelog:

Spoiler: QoL changelog

- Reaper's Due: The Hospital icon in the province view will now open the hospital buildings screen if the province has a hospital. If it does not, it will toggle the Extended Province View
- Clicking the Nomad Agitation alert will now select the relevant province, not just pan to it
- The event where you ask your court physician to save your sickly child will now show the child's portrait
- Clicking a council action again will now cancel job assignment
- Recalling someone from their council action while having a job selected for assignment will now cancel job assignment
- The border highlighting of selected CBs now takes precedence over selected provinces or titles
- Fixed retinues in getting split apart into sub-units upon succession if the dynastic successor and the successor for the primary title aren't the same person
- Fixed scrollbars not being visible in some cases where they should be
- Updated the condition tooltips for the decisions "Mend the Great Schism" and "Restore the Roman Empire" to shorten the tooltip and make them easier to read
- Now only possible to hit "Ready" in multiplayer when the save has finished loading
- Fixed the character UI not fully updating if the character died while you were looking at them. Before this would result in the plot button still being available, as well as a number of other issues
- Build Time and Build Cost modifiers now show as percentages (E.G., -10.0% instead of -0.1)
- Fixed the Declare War interaction not telling you when realm peace is stopping you from declaring war; instead being grayed out with no explanation
- Fixed the "pause" message setting having no effect for the close family and special interest characters
- Fixed the "pause" message setting not working for low priority and log alerts. It will still do nothing for disabled alerts
- Event options will now list both trait icons and affected character portraits
- Added alert for councillors having no job assigned to them
- The tooltip for religion in the province window now provides the same info as the religion tooltip in the character religion
- The title shields on the law page now no longer change order when you click any of them, instead making the selected one bigger
- Fixed councillor actions continuing to be greyed out if the reassignment cooldown expires while the council screen is open
- Fixed the predicted morale gain for units almost always being very slightly wrong
- Fixed clicking on someone's primary title sometimes not taking you to their capital
- Clicking on a character's plot on the character screen will now take you to the target of the plot
- Made so prisoner icon is now clickable and takes you to the imprisoner
- The "Mod" and "Version" checkboxes in the multiplayer browser have been clarified to "Same Mods" and "Same Version"
- Improved the tooltip for the "Revoke Vassal Title" plot

It is possible I’ve missed some, or that some things you’d consider a QoL change I simply considered a “bug fix”, but this should certainly cover most.

And with that, I leave you for today. Hopefully you enjoyed this DD as much as I enjoyed writing it.
If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in this thread, though note that I can rarely say all that much about potential future features, but I can give my thoughts on why I (or someone else) implemented something a specific way.

 

[Meneth]

Any chance this means we might be getting EU4's movement locking as well? Also, will we be able to see when a naval invasion like the one in the picture will actually arrive? Currently there is no way to tell.

Movement locking will not be in this patch.

Please say this is checked by default. (Personally, I think the commanders should be assigned on the Military page, instead of a subtab on the Council page, but if they have to be there, I hope they are easily accessible.)

By default minor titles and commanders both are shown. Checking the box makes it commanders only.

Does this fix the weirdness with needing to set the battle and siege pop up setting to pause for all three character types to get it to auto-pause at all?

Possibly; not sure.

Does this close the exploit where you can move a councilor to a new location while the pop-up is present to retarget who the action applies to? (This can be used for getting claims without risking angering the target, or county conversions.)

Don't think so.

One request I didn't see in the list, though I might have overlooked it: When selecting the court chaplain's proselytize job, can it bring up the religions mapmode in addition to the "valid placement location" overlay? Being able to easily see what provinces need to be converted would be very nice.

It's something we'd like to do, but it is a bit tricky, especially without breaking modding of job actions. So it is unlikely it'll be in this patch. Whether it'll be in a future patch I don't know.

Also, it occurred to me while reading this: Would it be possible to mod the alert for open council position, so it takes me to the councilors tab with the job buttons and stat numbers instead of the one that just shows their portrait?

Doubt it is likely to be made moddable.

A while a go we lost the ability in observer mode to click on titles and go to their owners or to the title screen (the one telling us what vassals the title holds, if we can claim it from the pope, its claimants and the title history). We'll we ever get that functionality back?

Sounds like a bug to me. I'll ask around to see if it is deliberate.

Another question, from the streams it appears there is a hand symbol beside the portrait in the province view. What does that mean?

You'll probably hear about that in another dev diary.

 

[Meneth]

Are there any plans to implement interface scaling like in Stellaris or HOI4?
Unfortunately with 4K playing no-mods game is a pain.

No current plans that I'm aware of.

Have you considered adding a "will accept invitation to court" option when you search for characters?

I mentioned that in the dev diary:
"Fourth, we’ve added the ability to filter by whether characters will join your court."

 

[Meneth]

e. This just seems to be changing the wording next to the checkbox, so if there isn't a way to hide the minor titles by default, what is the point?

I honestly don't remember how it used to work, so I'm not entirely sure what's changed.

Hmm. Would it be possible to put a command in the job's script to keep the job assignment button from overriding the map overlay? That way I could turn on the religious mapmode, and still have it up when assigning the job.

Wouldn't show you what provinces are eligible, hence the problem.
My vague thoughts was something like scriptable colors, or cross-hatching (like occupation).

The revoke plots and what their requirements are.

"- Improved the tooltip for the "Revoke Vassal Title" plot"

 

[Darkrenown]

Hey @Meneth did my suggestion make it in by any chance? https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/notable-kills-list-idea-with-pictures.874045/

And on the topic of the game, these changes are making me more and more excited for this new patch/expansion. Paradox have a lot of great DLC in the works right now for multiple games!

We looked into a kills list, but while we liked the idea we decided against due to both memory requirements and time.

 

[Meneth]

Would it be particularly computationally expensive to just calculate what their likely position would be assuming you appointed them to the councilor seat you are considering them for?

Near impossible, because appointing someone can have all sorts of effects.

First there's the obvious part: The opinion bonus from granting it. That one is relatively simple.
Second, you've got any appointment effects. If they have an ambition to become a councilor for example, that'll give you another opinion bonus.
Then you've got less obvious stuff. Once they're your councilor, their opinion of you will be based on your personal diplomacy, rather than realm diplomacy.
And then you've got any number of other factors that might change. Some of them base themselves on actual military power. Appointing someone councilor is likely to change the amount of troops they provide you, so suddenly that changes too.
Add on top of that that the modifiers are highly scriptable as well, and it becomes effectively impossible to simulate what the result would be without literally copying the whole gamestate, making the change, and seeing the result (which would take tons of memory and quite a bit of CPU power).

Plus the whole system is built around regular MTTHs/weights, which are not designed for any kind of simulation, just checking the current state.

 

[Meneth]

Anyway. @Meneth, would it be possible to add the other effects of traits like Craven and Brave to the interface? (Specifically, the effect they have on surviving battle. There's another trait with a similar effect, but I don't remember which off the top of my head. )

That's more a matter of the description than anything, since those are script effects.
So many things affect MTTHs that it's not really feasible to list for every trait and such what MTTHs it affects.

In this case, I feel common sense applies; if you're craven you're more likely to try to stay out of harm's way.

 

[Meneth]

I would also love to see an option like the include lower titles for handing out vice-royalties. e.g. Handing out the vice-royalty essex + include lower titles: would result in the character gaining all counties as landed titles and the viceroyal title of the duchy of essex.

I think the lack of that might actually be a bug.

 

[Meneth]

I've often been asked to back a plot but not known the target

My previous dev diary (linked at the start of the OP) showed that that character interaction now shows the portrait of the target, BTW.

 

[Meneth]

When filtering will it show only characters willing to immediately join or will it include ones that would be won over with a bribe?

Only those immediately willing to join.

Nice, will that include people that you can (force) invite after buying a favor from them?

Not at the time of writing, no.

Something like this :

That'd use quite a lot of memory, so probably isn't very likely to happen.

A very small detail to the title screen would be a star or some other icon to show where is the capital of a duchy, kingdom or empire.

That's something I want too, so might happen at some point. No promises.

How do I do the ae thing with my American keyboard?

If you've got a NumPad, hold ALT and type "145". Or "146" for the capital Æ.

Great improvements, could you also add the option to save messenger rules settings?

Not slated for this patch. You can manually save them though, as they're contained in a text file in your documents. My Documents\Paradox Interactive\Crusader Kings II\interface\messagetypes_custom.txt.
So to "save" it you could make a copy of it. To "load" it, you'd shut down the game and rename the copy back to "messagetypes_custom.txt".
Not as good as having the game able to handle it, but better than nothing.

 

[Darkrenown]

While you are changing the UI is there any chance that you could make vice royalties work more like free investiture does for Catholics, with a specific list of relevant titles and an easy way of selecting inheritors.

I figure you could have it so that the current holder’s heir is the default inheritor, but that yourself and the current holder’s vassals are also options. I think this change would make larger vice royalty heavy empires a bit easier to manage.

I'd really like that, but it's also a fair bit of work and won't be in 2.7. It's possible we'll do it alongside a future DLC, but I can't promise it.

 

[Meneth]

Just wondering, (and I hope you don't mind all my questions) is there any chance there might be some clarification to the expanded army interface with regards to subcommanders, and what it is they actually do and how they work? I never really could figure out that mechanic.

I honestly have no idea how that works either.

 

[Meneth]

but finding the button in the files can be a pain.

Open the console.
Write "guibounds".
Hover over the button.

It'll tell you what its name is, what GUI file it is defined in, and on what line