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CK2 Dev Diary #42: The Ever Changing Changelog

Greetings fellow crusaders!

This dev diary will be rather short, as I won’t be talking about anything new and exciting. With us getting ever closer to a release (and before you ask: no, I will not tell you when it might be just yet), I thought it might be a good time to start highlighting some of the stuff we have in our changelog.

First off, some balance changes:
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# Balance
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- Minor clan revolt troops are no longer inherited, and the leader of the uprising now has more money, prestige, population and manpower as well as two sons to succeed him
- If you grant a title and all titles below it to a child while following a religion that uses bishops, the temples will now have bishops generated rather than not get handed to the recipient
- "Cultural Bonds" no longer causes an alliance, but instead allows other independent characters of the conqueror's culture to join them in defensive wars. The AI is likely to do this if their opinion of the defender is positive and they're not busy with wars of their own
- Allowed vassals to press de jure claims against their fellow vassals again (though the AI won't)
- You'll now lose some Threat if dying causes you to lose land
- When the holder of a viceroyalty dies, they'll now be replaced in wars by their regular heir, not their liege
- The "Ask to Leave Court" diplomatic interaction will now cause the character's spouses to leave as well, and has the same requirements of the spouses as the character being asked to leave
- Increased the duration of the "War Taxes" modifier to five years (up from three), for completing the "Build a War Chest" Ambition
- Overthrow Ruler will now give the ruler a claim on the title if they accept the demands
- No longer possible to usurp titles from the vassals of a revolting vassal
- Capitals can now be moved every 50 years rather than once per lifetime. Nomads still get to move it every 10 years
- Merchant Republics with too few patricians will no longer draft people who are heir to a title to become patricians, since this risks disinheriting them
- No longer possible to ask to join a war against someone you have a non-aggression pact with
- The "make my court/vassals speak English" events can now trigger if one's a vassal of Britannia rather than England, and can trigger for the king/emperor as well, not just their vassals
- The prestige you get from being a consort now scales with the tier of your spouse. Reduced the prestige to half. Now it ranges from 0.5/month from a baron to 2.5/month from an emperor
- The capital duchy of a title, if held by the title holder, will under elective/tanistry law now always follow that title's succession, even if your heir is not playable for you. Counties, baronies, and other duchies will still revert to primogeniture in that case
- Now possible to give temple holdings to children if that does not risk disinheriting them
- No longer possible to appoint someone to your council when they're part of a faction that's sent you an ultimatum; this could be exploited to have them leave the faction, giving you an easy win in the faction war, or invalidating it entirely
- When non-primary war participants die, their primary heir will now stay in the war if the inherited title ends up as their primary title, and it'd be possible for them to ask to join the war, or be called in by the war leader
- When eating your prisoners, you can now attract a non-serious disease
- No longer possible to join or start factions while you have a truce with your liege
- Landed characters now pick a plot if they have none considerably more often; on average after 12 months

Not too much to add. Most of them should speak for themselves. Overall some nice changes and fixes.

To go along all of the quality of life additions we’ve made for 2.7, there are a bunch of smaller changes for the interface as well. Most of these should make the game slightly more user-friendly and easier to use:

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# Interface
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- The levy tooltip now shows all modifiers to levy size rather than just the influence of martial and the location of the holding compared to one's capital
- The council job actions now say their name at the top of the tooltip even if the councilor is currently performing the action
- "Favorite map mode" buttons will now be highlighted if the associated map mode is selected via the regular button rather than the custom button
- The game will no longer occasionally change the selected tab for no apparent reason on the character screen if you have a non-ruler selected
- When part of a faction revolt, the faction leader's units will look allied rather than neutral
- Updated the "Grant Viceroyalty" interaction to include the "Include Vassal Titles" checkbox
- Added support for accented ASCII characters and similar (E.G., é, å, ü) in the Character Finder's search field
- The holding view will now show the influence of stewardship on the holding's tax income, and the income summary in the province view will acount for the stewardship bonus
- Updated the Focus window to avoid some cases were it wouldn't explain why you are unable to select a given focus
- 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
- The main menu music will now start playing if you unmute it using the main menu settings, even if you started the game with music muted
- Fixed game rule titles sometimes going across two lines on the game rule screen for some languages
- Updated the dynasty view for the Indian religions, as they would use the Christian dynasty ornament
- Clicking the Nomad Agitation alert will now select the relevant province, not just pan to it
- Made the list of titles in the character view slightly wider
- The event where you ask your court physician to save your sickly child will now show the child's portrait
- Known/backed plots now show their plot power in the UI entry itself, not just the tooltip
- Clicking a council job action again will now cancel the 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
- 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
- The realm peace tooltip will now tell you how long it has been since you used realm peace if it is on cooldown
- Build Time and Build Cost modifiers now show as percentages (E.G., -10.0% instead of -0.1)
- Added a unique skin for the Republic view when playing as Indian
- Added a sound for gaining a new trait
- Event options will now list both trait icons and affected character portraits
- Fixed the "Call to Arms" text sometimes not fitting the letter window
- Changed the color of the mosaic at the top of the Muslim Clan/Nomad interface, to make it different from the Council interface
- 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
- Interface shortcuts that require the SHIFT key to be used now more clearly indicate that's the case. In the past a capital letter shortcut meant SHIFT was used, but now it'll say for example "SHIFT+A" rather than just "A"
- Removed "Show Commanders" choice in the Minor Titles View and changed the "Show Honorary Titles" to "Show Commanders Only" to only display commanders
- Added new option to the Minor Titles View "Auto-assign Commanders", which will replace a commander automatically with the best available candidate whenever a commander dies
- You no longer have to resign a commander first in order to replace them in the minor titles view
- Switched the placement of the title shield and the voter stance for the council in the My/Liege Council tab, to keep consistency with other portraits
- 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
- Fixed the decision to donate to the Knights of the Sun not having an icon
- The religion screen will no longer show the title of the religious head if there is no religious head
- The "Mod" and "Version" checkboxes in the multiplayer browser have been clarified to "Same Mods" and "Same Version"
- Moved the scrollbar slightly in the different law tabs, to make them somewhat easier to see
- Removed the "double" click sound you would get when clicking a province if the Extended Province View was opened already
- Added a sound effect when turning the pages in the Chronicle
- Added indicators for good and bad childhood traits in the Education Focus picker
- Removed the additional important minor title portraits at top of the Council View
- Made so the prisoner icon is now clickable and takes you to the imprisoner
- Improved the tooltip for the "Revoke Vassal Title" plot
- Updated character tooltip so it mentions whether you have educator/guardian (with name and location) and removed redundant tooltip that gave the same information
- Educate character interaction tooltip now use Conclave description if Conclave is enabled

This is not the full changelog, mind you. There are still plenty of bug fixes and other things in the changelog that isn't listed here. Should any entry be unclear, I’ll try to answer any question you might have about them.
 
Release date next week then, I hope?
 
Can we get some clarification on the changes to elective monarchy and its capital duchy? As MGoods mentioned on page 2:
That depends if it means de jure capital, or de facto capital. If de jure, and you are king of england, then just don't upgrade london and put your actual capital in another county, you won't loose anything if you loose an election, but if de facto then yeah, you need to be careful to avoid loosing it, and again upgrade other holdings in other duchies that you hold directly.
The exact wording of the patch note makes it sound as though it only applies to the de jure capital duchy, in which case I suppose nothing will change if the player (or AI ruler) doesn't own that particular title. Also, is it only the duchy title that goes to the newly elected king, or do they get the associated counties as well (if those were held by the previous king)?
 
I have +100 opinion of Paradox, let alone for the +50 bonus for the whole dev diary thing and announcing with such great detail an incoming piece of work. The thing is not done yet, that is great because we are sure we get the best product possible (can I say "product"? Pdx games are more like art equivalents in video games entertainment). I mean, there are those hotifixes after every release but I NEVER got the impression of a thing xx% done. Every following dlc and every following patch meets my expectations if not exceeding them. And then there are patches that make the experience even more "full" and satisfying.
Some people actually complain about that (specially around conclave release, figures). About how it is like an artist that doesn't know when to end his work when its good and then make it worst.
 
- When eating your prisoners, you can now attract a non-serious disease

I think this is the only game where a change log includes a change that starts with "when eating your prisoners..."
 
Clicking on a character's plot on the character screen will now take you to the target of the plot
Made so the prisoner icon is now clickable and takes you to the imprisoner
Very nice, hours of ingame investigations Adé :) Now I can close the R.E.I.S. (Roman Empire Investigation Service)
A better linking system is always welcome, for example when a province got converted in the important news section in the outliner etc.

Added a sound for gaining a new trait
Beautiful ! The game still needs some minor ambience sounds, e.g. when throwing a prisoner into dungeon ( a creaked dungeon door shut)

Many thanks for your efforts so far!
 
Please allow filtering out characters not within diplomatic range in the character finder. I use restricted range in my games because it's more historical. But it does involve a ton of scrolling as the character finder is usually 70-90% characters that are out of range.

They, thank the bloody maker, already announce the addition of that feature in an earlier diary.
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:
Hr2q8Pz.png
 
When eating your prisoners, wouldn't it be awesome to have a small chance of gaining the prisoners congenital trait? So for example if the prisoner is strong you have a 10% chance when eating him to get strong yourself.
 
- When the holder of a viceroyalty dies, they'll now be replaced in wars by their regular heir, not their liege
Sad. My favorite (among accepted by home rules) exploit to prefer to give most of possible viceroyalty titles to any vassals having external offensive wars in hope inherit them without coalition triggered :)
 
Please allow filtering out characters not within diplomatic range in the character finder. I use restricted range in my games because it's more historical. But it does involve a ton of scrolling as the character finder is usually 70-90% characters that are out of range.

Ps. I use the character finder all the time to find spouses with good genetic traits or just better councillors. This is something that should've been nerfed years ago IMO.
As mentioned, this has been talked about in a previous dev diary. Additional filter allows you to filter for if they would accept a court invite or not, as well as being able to save and load set filter configurations.

This concerns me because it was the only way to see the missing requirements for becoming caliph (without using the console). As http://www.ckiiwiki.com/Religious_head#Creating_a_caliphate says:

"Players who meet all requirements will see a Title can be created alert. Players who are unsure which requirements are unmet can open the Religion tab, click the crown icon under 'No Head', and hover the 'Create Title' button."

What's the reason for this change?
The Coat of Arm of the title should still be visible, so you can click it and check out the creation conditions. I think it refers to the actual name of the religious head.

Did you fix the game rule bug for vassal limit not working?
Yes. Should be included in 2.7.

Any plans for further optimization of the game?
We did some optimizations. Not as much as for Reaper's though. But performance should be about the same.
 
So, if I never use mods, should the game-breaking bug of shattered retreat enabling itself disappear with the new patch?

It's pretty annoying if you give us game rules to get rid of the unwanted rules and then the game sneakily enables shattered retreat during the game.
 
Worst dev diary (excluding the sound/music and "where we got this idea from" types) ever!!!
They're not obliged to show us anything, so any info is good
I am sure they said they would announce the release date today in last weeks 5 years of Crusader Kings video.
I'm pretty sure they said:
"We believe that you'll get the release date in the next diary."
Or something like that...
They didn't really confirm it for today ( yesterday).
 
- The capital duchy of a title, if held by the title holder, will under elective/tanistry law now always follow that title's succession, even if your heir is not playable for you. Counties, baronies, and other duchies will still revert to primogeniture in that case
Why? So, if I create elective empire (like HRE) I will lose my main duchy when I lose election?
 
Greetings fellow crusaders!

This dev diary will be rather short, as I won’t be talking about anything new and exciting. With us getting ever closer to a release (and before you ask: no, I will not tell you when it might be just yet), I thought it might be a good time to start highlighting some of the stuff we have in our changelog.

Chronicles of your Dynasty: Nice features with bad design (upgrade it please!).
Ideas (I use that features less then I would like): Give the ability to the player to choose which event get recorded by a little button on top of each "event". "My first son is born" I want to remember it, so I put a check on that single event and add it to my family Chronicles. (Plus the events that already automatically are recorded).
Give me the ability to navigate by different "Years" so I do not get lost in ages of history.
Let me add personalized post!! I would like actually to write something in my Chronicles! Maybe just like a Post it, like "Iceling were your first opposing to your claim on England." So that I can remember that I hate Iceling... Stuff like that. "That characters has been a great benefactor and gave me 400 gold for my warchest".
 
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