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CK2 Dev Diary #60: Rally up

Good morning, all. I’m Magne “Meneth” Skjæran, the programmer on CK2. In the past I’ve written dev diaries about modding, optimization, and quality of life improvements, as well as a few diaries this summer about the team, the bug fixing process, and what we’re doing for modders.

We’re now returning to regular dev diaries, so today I’ve been given the opportunity to reveal a new feature: rally points.
And to maintain my tradition from the summer, at the end of this dev diary will be five changelog entries from the 2.8 patch.

Rally points are a rather classic strategy game feature which can do a lot to make troop management more manageable. While in the early-game, there usually isn’t much of a need for such a feature in CK2, as you grow larger collecting your troops at the start of a war increasingly becomes more tedious. This is especially the case in multiplayer, where you don’t have the luxury of pausing.

In 2.8, we’re finally rectifying this by adding the ability to define rally points, both for land units and ships.
image1.png

Now, when you raise your troops and have rally points defined, the raised troops will immediately start walking towards the nearest rally point by travel time. Once they get there, they will merge with any troops in the province.

While rallying, they will not appear in the outliner, but instead the rally point entry will show how many troops are incoming.
image2.png


If you disable the “rally points” section of the outliner, the individual armies will show as before.

You can define any number of rally points, and can put them anywhere in your realm, so you can set them up to suit any layout.
Units will only rally to provinces they can walk to (sail, in the case of boats); they will not use transports to get there. So you might for example want one rally point on the British Isles, and a handful in mainland Europe.

Now, as promised, here are 5 changelog entries from 2.8:
  • Fixed old Byzantine women's hair being unable to change color
  • Taught the Pope that lifting his own excommunication when he becomes the Pope makes him a better role model for other Catholics
  • The AI no longer thinks that just because a province is someone's capital, it's a good target; it is now more discerning and only cares if it is the capital of an enemy
  • When you have a unit selected and are hovering over a province it can't move to, the game will now try to explain why you can't move there
  • Fixed it being possible to gift cursed diamonds and crowns
I hope you will all enjoy the rally point feature. That’s all for today.
 
Ok, there is another reason why I want this feature: The uphold for transport ships is very expensive, so you normally want to raise only as many ships for transporting your entire army as needed. The rest of the ships should stay in their holdings when I automatically raise ships.
 
I understand but I think that's really too bad. Of course it only matters in those particular situations but I think this might make the system a bit tedious to use.

Maybe I don't understand this system completely yet but if I set up a rally point in a lone county that's closer than any other rally points will my troops will be attracted to it and may cross enemy territory to walk to it? In that case I'll need to put closer rally points to my border to attract those troops in but then I have the trouble of having them rally in places I don't want them to.

I don't know how much work it would be but a toggle to use ai enemy avoidance on stacks could really be handy for these rally points. Otherwise maybe some way to exclude certain counties or non connected lands would make things easier than balancing out rally points on the fly.

Honestly a 'Move here and avoid enemies when possible' command would be handy across all paradox series. Like instead of shift clicking a path around enemies you could just alt click for your troops to find a path without enemies in the way. Maybe that would be too complicated too but I figure that's what the AI already does.

Thanks for your reply anyways though! I'm so glad to have these content dev diaries back.
Yes, and we all know how well the AI avoids enemy armies. They never run into armies when they're attempting to join up together, never.
 
Will Dniester river be fixed? here's a map of what it really looks like.
Dniestras.png
Rivers do change their course over years, surprisingly quickly in fact. The way the river looks now may not be the way it looked in the majority of the timespan of the game, there are rivers that have changed in the US just since the 1770s, or in even less time.
 
Now, I would like to know this. How are armies divided among multiple rally points? Are they sent based on proximity, or are they divided as evenly as possible amongst the amount of rally points set, or hopefully some combination of the two. I know from V2 that the purely proximity based rallying basically makes me only ever use 1 rally point at a time, because it's a pain to try and remember all the provinces close to where I want the troops to gather.
 
Rivers do change their course over years, surprisingly quickly in fact. The way the river looks now may not be the way it looked in the majority of the timespan of the game, there are rivers that have changed in the US just since the 1770s, or in even less time.

The Dniester didn't change THAT much. Or do you have any source that the Dniester did change?
 
Now, I would like to know this. How are armies divided among multiple rally points? Are they sent based on proximity, or are they divided as evenly as possible amongst the amount of rally points set, or hopefully some combination of the two. I know from V2 that the purely proximity based rallying basically makes me only ever use 1 rally point at a time, because it's a pain to try and remember all the provinces close to where I want the troops to gather.
Proximity.
 
Damn, I was hoping for a semi even division. Ah well, I guess I'll just have to carefully pick and test where to put my rally points to figure out how to get the most even distribution.
 
What I think would be absolutely awesome is to have the ability to assign the levies of certain vassals to certain rally points and then have each vassal levy default to the nearest rally point by proximity.