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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!
 
It's in the devdiary.

"We know it’s dangerous to go adventuring alone, so raising Men-at-Arms will also raise your knights along with them."
Heck. Sometimes you read a whole thing and then read some comments and your mind loses part of what you just read.

I can see where the confusion comes from, especially if one focuses on how the new UI looks. While minor, IMHO it'd be better for the button to say "Raise All Men-at-Arms and Knights" to reduce any potential confusion. There's even plenty of space for it. And the UI should be able to handle the fact the name for knight changes based on culture.

edit: note I'm saying to just change the text on the button shown, not add another new button.
 
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I can see where the confusion comes from, especially if one focuses on how the new UI looks. While minor, IMHO it'd be better for the button to say "Raise All Men-at-Arms and Knights" to reduce any potential confusion. There's even plenty of space for it. And the UI should be able to handle the fact the name for knight changes based on culture.
Or.... knights are always raised when armies are (which is currently the case). No need to complicate the matter.
 
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Or.... knights are always raised when armies are (which is currently the case). No need to complicate the matter.
I'm not saying to have two buttons. Still just one button. Just make it clear that the button raise both Men-at-Arms and Knights (as of right know only reading the button one could be forgiven for assuming it raised only Men-at-Arms).
 
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The most important element of the game by far is essentially eugenics. We love it as your customers so I am not sure why it wasnt really that invested in as much as it could have been. Its like you are scared of making it obvious its not really a fighting game. To me you should develop that even more. Make it more like a soccer management game but for medieval characters and armies.
TLDR: This seems like a good move but you could do a lot more without spending much money on coding or assets.
 
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Awesome stuff! The current army raising mechanic gets annoying during the late game, really looking forward to the upcoming update. I'll be able to leave my peasant horde at home where they belong! :)
@KnightOfTheLions Thank you for the update! I think it would be great if we could also have presets for armies down the road. Being able to adjust size and composition in advance would be really helpfull instead of having to do it at the start of each war. Having a predefined siege army (a few levies & siege weapons) and a field army (maa, champions, a number of levies) for instance would be such a huge QoL improvement. Adjusting the size in advance to avoid wasting gold or running out of supplies; I would really like to have that level of control, disbanding works but it's tedious. I also think the army reorganization menu could really use shortcuts (shift/ctrl click) to move all knights/all levies. I'm really happy with the UX overall but due to the scale of the armies in the late game, I feel I'm wasting a lot of time reorganizing/disbanding troops over and over. Keep up the good work!
 
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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.
Will it be possible to place restrictions on the buttons? So that for modding, we can make smaller scale conflicts and offensive wars can be restricted to armsmen as would be historically accurate?
 
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These look great. What are the chances of a "Call all Allies" button being added alongside? When you're an Emperor calling your dynasty members for a war it ends up being a *ton* of clicking.
 
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OMG! ... how much I waited for these UI fixes! ... many thanks!!!

And please, please: change the „feature“ that every menu/window sets back to default sorting/state or jumps back to top! ... like the pinned characters, the spouse finder, court menu, character finder (should be ok with presets) ... and make the „show only useable hooks“ checkbox remeber it‘s state!
 
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These look great. What are the chances of a "Call all Allies" button being added alongside? When you're an Emperor calling your dynasty members for a war it ends up being a *ton* of clicking.
It couldn't hurt but without filters paying 75 renown to a bunch of someones with 21 troops would feel as bad as accidental mass executions.
 
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Cool, now add nameplates and I'll be happy. I don't know how anyone functions without that mod.
 
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Great! Very nice QoL features that make me waiting for Azure patch even more :D but tbh I can't rid off feeling that some of them should be already at launch... and it's not complaint, rather wondering how development roadmap worked if these kind of features were thrown into backlog...
Aaaaaanyway, it's good that we will have them :D
 
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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.
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.
 
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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?
 
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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.

Thank you for clarifying how it works.

I think that while remembering the last setup isn't exactly the same as setting a specific set as default, it pretty much does what I wanted out of it in most cases. So I'm happy
 
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