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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!
 
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.
Take a look at my mod "Advance character search". It has that option. https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/mod-advance-character-search.1449747/
 
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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?
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.
 
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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.
Oh that's too bad. It would be a game-breaking feature IMO.
 
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Can you look into adding filters to prisoners?

Stuff like "ransom only prisoners who are not my vassals", or "execute everyone that I will not be viewed as a tyrant for killing", or "ransom everyone except someone who gives me warscore".
 
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Is it any advantage in raising only men at arms? I'm thinking in avoiding the popular opinion and vassal opinion hit from offensive wars, since you're only using your personal army and not the kingdom's levy.
The aspect that first struck me on this one is expense. Once you have many divergent counties, the number of levies can become really large meaning that for every war declaration you're having to do management on your army size prior to getting your men in motion for the target. Unless of course you really want to spend the money on six thousand troops just to take a single county with only two or three hundred men defending.
 
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I would like both an Or and a without for searching. Sometimes multiple things will do for a job like physicians and sometimes I'm looking for someone without the witch trait to keep the number of witches as high as possible.
 
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Now if only we could get a way to disallow councilours from being knights like we could in ck 2....... also a way to make it so your heir is not allowed to be a knight by default
 
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I'm finally gonna start playing a ton of CK3 after this release. Now I don't have to go through that damn menu anymore!

Unless one of you devs is literally satan and disguise and programmed setting default as the default preset so you gotta pick your custom preset every time :p
 
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AMAZING CHANGES! Been wanting presets for character finder for a while!
Can get we a forbid combat button on character screen? I keep accidentaly killing good sons by forgetting to turn it off the Knights section of combat.
 
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AMAZING CHANGES! Been wanting presets for character finder for a while!
Can get we a forbid combat button on character screen? I keep accidentaly killing good sons by forgetting to turn it off the Knights section of combat.
Ooh. that would be a great place for forbidding and forcing knighthood. Am I a bad Empress to force vassals I don't like into the front lines whenever possible?
 
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Ooh. that would be a great place for forbidding and forcing knighthood. Am I a bad Empress to force vassals I don't like into the front lines whenever possible?

Not in CK3, where that's a reasonable strategy. In many cultures of this era, getting to serve on the front line would mean the opportunity to win extra prestige and capture valuable enemies for ransom, so I suspect historical "bad" rules wouldn't give underlings they dislike this sort of opportunity as often as one would in CK3.
 
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So, can we also raise just levies and leave the men at arms home? You know, for those times when you could pay one competent but expensive man to solve the problem, but you'd rather throw five peasants into the grinder instead because they're dirt cheap and you have peasants to spare. Of course, I would never dare suggest that the lord's purse could come before the serf's life.
 
I know I'm late but please give us the option to raise only the levies and only specific men at arms as well. When my big kingdom invades a tiny neighboring de jure county I only raise artillery and enough levies for the siege, no need to pay my expensive troops to sit and die from attrition for a castle that cant raise any troops. Likewise whenever I invade scotland or cross the alps theres no point in bringing the cavalry along.
 
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