CK3 Dev Diary #59 - Fantastic presets and where to save them

[KnightOfTheLions]

Hello friends,

Isn't it satisfying when things just work smoothly? If you agree then this Dev Diary will be right down your alley. I’m one of the jolly UX designers working on CK3 and today I’m very excited to give you a sneak peek of some of the quality of life improvements we have in store for the Azure free patch.

We wanted to focus on some of the requests you've brought up, so we’ve worked to find organic ways to implement these in the game. While we can’t address all at once in a single patch, we still wanted to make some meaningful adjustments that will improve your time spent as medieval rulers, master strategists, and efficient trackers. Keep on reading to understand this last one.

Today I’ll be covering Raise Men-at-Arms, Game Rules Presets, and Character Search Presets.

Raise only Men-at-Arms
We had already mentioned that now you will be able to start your games with contingent Men-at-Arms regiments, but these troops have another nifty trick under their sleeves. Now you will be able to raise only Men-at-Arms, allowing you to subdue your enemies without having to bother your levies. Quite a power move, right?

We know it’s dangerous to go adventuring alone, so raising Men-at-Arms will also raise your knights along with them. This ensures that you have a perfectly capable army to take on different challenges.

This is how it works; you will find a button that allows you to raise only Men at Arms in your Military menu, clearly labeled “Raise all Men-at-Arms”. This button will also be present when selecting Rally Points. Hopefully, this will give you more freedom when planning the perfect military strategy.

[Image of the Raise all Men-at-Arms action]
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Game Rules presets
We all have different playstyles and sometimes it’s nice to spice things up by changing up the rules a bit. Sometimes we want to ask the Mongols to hold their horses and stay at home by turning off the Mongol Invasions, or maybe you want to see if you can withstand yearly visits from your friendly neighbors, the Norse invaders. To allow you to quickly change the rules, now you can save rules presets.

To create your Game Rules presets, all you need to do is set the specific combination of rules that you want, and then click the save button at the top of the window. Doing this will open up a secondary window that lets you name, and save your presets. Loading the presets is very straightforward, all you need to do is to select the desired preset from the dropdown menu at the top of the window.

[Image of the Game Rules Presets being saved] ​

Character Search presets
I said that the Azure patch will improve your tracking skills, and this is thanks to the introduction of Character Search Presets. Much like Game Rules Presets, the idea is to allow you to save different combinations of search filters into presets you can easily select.

You can save and load presets by using the 2 new buttons you’ll find at the top of the search filters window. That means that if you find yourself constantly searching for a specific mix of traits or any other search criteria, then keeping tabs on them will be much easier.

[Image of the new Character Search Preset buttons]
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While this feature is very useful to streamline the process of recurrent searches with the same criteria, it still comes with some limitations, we are not able to save the dynamic objects in the filter (Dynasty, House and Custom Faith).

That’s all for today, I sincerely hope these quality of life improvements help you try other gameplay styles and that character search presets will make it easier for you to find that special someone somewhere in this fantastic medieval world.

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for future updates on the Azure patch. Until next time!

 

[KnightOfTheLions]

Awesome! Thank you.

Do you know offhand if the preset saving will work with mods that add game rules? Or will it only apply to vanilla rules?

Hi IntoTheStars, as long as the game rules rules from the mod have been added to the appropriate database, it should work!

 

[lykchen]

Does this mean, that it will not possible to have "Own Dynasty" as a preset filter? Or does that only apply to specific dynasties (e.g. Habsburger)?

“Own dynasty” etc will work.
Only specific dynasties, houses and faiths cannot be saved in the filters for now. (The problem is that these objects are somewhat dynamic, so not always valid between different campaigns, or even different saves of the same campaign.)

We decided to skip these entirely for now so we can roll out the rest of the feature.
And we have the option to make this more clever in the future if it seems important enough, e.g. saving filters mentioning historic objects that are generally around (though mods and game updates might still change that, and give you unexpected results when you apply your saved filter). Or perhaps we could offer to save some filters in a save game instead of globally? We didn’t quite have the time to figure out those details yet. But at least the rest of the filter options will be available with the Azure patch.

 

[lykchen]

Amazing news, this is what I was hoping for! Is pre-summer still the target for release date? Late june?

Still aiming at before summer vacation, which starts in July.
There is also always some buffer in the schedule, so we don’t release a thing and then are all gone while possibly having messed up and some important feature is broken for a month.

 

[Meneth]

Awesome to hear about all those QoL improvements coming with azure.

One question i have though: is it gonna be possible to set a specific set of gamerules as "default". (E.g. as it is in my case, Ironman On, Enclave Independence Significant.... stuff I pretty much always turn on) or do we have to change to our "default" setup manually every time.

With this new system, the game will remember your last game rule setup and default to that. You don't need to hit "save" either; it'll just be the game rules you have active when you hit "Apply".
There's no way to mark a specific set as default, but it remembering your last setup should come pretty close.

 

[Meneth]

One question : The game rules info file indicated you can change the defines and showed how to change it. But it doesn't work as of now. Is it fixed in the patch?

No. We originally wanted to support that, but due to a variety of technical concerns, it never actually made it into CK3's release. We currently have no plans to introduce it, though who knows what the future might bring.