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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.



MAA-button.jpg

[Image of the Raise all Men-at-Arms action]
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.


Game-Rules-presets.jpg

[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.

Search-Presets.jpg

[Image of the new Character Search Preset buttons]
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!
 
Thanks for the DD and QoL improvements, a plus for It were requested a lot by the community. We need now notifications manager from CK2.
 
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Good improvements, thanks Paradox.
 
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Finally!

This may really be the best patch ever, if they don't break anything.
 
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Amazing update! Finally, I'll be able to enjoy the game (especially with the properly saved game rules)!
 
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Brilliant news. Thanks guys.

One thing I'd like to see on the character search would be for the finder to allow for "OR" statements in the traits.

When searching for a guardian for a child, I want to find someone with the "Genius" trait or - failing that - "Intelligent" or Quick. At the moment, searching for those three traits at once returns zero results (as the traits are mutually exclusive). It'd be good if there was some way of returning all characters (within the other parameters) who have one of those three traits, rather than having to run the search multiple times.

Could either be that the finder notices any mutually exclusive traits that you've included and treats those as "OR" - or by creating something in the interface that let's the player switch between "one of" or "all of" when selecting multiple traits.
 
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Goodbye forever, levies.
I feel like I must be missing some kind of meta thing in CK3 that everyone else is using. So many comments over the last few months from people who say they never use levies. I don't think I've ever reached a point where my MaA are so big/powerful that they're all I'd ever need.
 
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I feel like I must be missing some kind of meta thing in CK3 that everyone else is using. So many comments over the last few months from people who say they never use levies. I don't think I've ever reached a point where my MaA are so big/powerful that they're all I'd ever need.
Well MAAs are powerful and get many bonuses over time while levies start sucky and stay sucky all the way to the end date because they never get a single bonus ever. At a certain point, levies only exist to drain your bank account if you accidently raise them.
 
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I feel like I must be missing some kind of meta thing in CK3 that everyone else is using. So many comments over the last few months from people who say they never use levies. I don't think I've ever reached a point where my MaA are so big/powerful that they're all I'd ever need.
Certainly you'd want your levies for most wars. But, there are occasions where you don't need all of your armies; such as when Raiders attack. At most, Raiders will have maybe 2,000, and if you have total forces of 60,000, and maybe MaA of 3,000 to 4,000, the MaA, and knights, can certainly take care of the raiders themselves.
 
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Well MAAs are powerful and get many bonuses over time while levies start sucky and stay sucky all the way to the end date because they never get a single bonus ever. At a certain point, levies only exist to drain your bank account if you accidently raise them.
Maybe I need to revisit the numbers and work out if there's a point where the levies aren't actually contributing anything. Maybe I've reached the point I don't need levies without really noticing?
 
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Certainly you'd want your levies for most wars. But, there are occasions where you don't need all of your armies; such as when Raiders attack. At most, Raiders will have maybe 2,000, and if you have total forces of 60,000, and maybe MaA of 3,000 to 4,000, the MaA, and knights, can certainly take care of the raiders themselves.
Totally. I was more refering to people who seem to be saying they never use levies (unless I'm misunderstanding what they're saying).
 
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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.
 
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