Good afternoon. I’m Magne Skjæran, and when you last heard from me I was talking about our quality of life improvements to the Intrigue screen. I’ve had a great time on the CK2 team since then, and today I’ve got the opportunity to share with you further quality of improvements we’ve made. Some were already done or mostly done when that dev diary were written, while some were in the works, and a handful inspired by comments from members of the community to the dev diary itself. I’d like to thank everyone who suggested further improvements; while not all were implemented, they were at the very least considered.
Today’s quality of life changes are to many different parts of the game rather than having a singular focus. There’s quite a few of them, so we better get started.
First up is a feature inspired by EU4: a battle indicator.
This will show up whenever a unit entering a province (or two units, if they’re entering the same province) will cause a battle to occur. Hovering over it will show the date it starts, and what two realms will be fighting. If any bonuses or penalties apply (terrain or river/strait/naval landing), this will be shown as well as who it will be applied to.
This should help ensure that you don’t end up in combat without expecting it, though note that it does obey the fog of war rules, so it won’t warn you if an unseen enemy is approaching the province you’re entering!
Next up, the garrison tooltip is now more helpful.
Before it’d only show the garrison, but now it also shows the levy, and the garrison+levy since this is the number you have to beat in order to actually be able to siege the holding:
Further, we’ve added an “Embark All” button for when you’ve got multiple units selected, even if they’re spread across many different provinces. This will load as many as possible of the units selected onto the fleets in their provinces, then select the loaded fleets so you can easily merge them together:
The game rules screen has also seen some improvement. First of all, the game rules are now categorized, allowing you to select an individual category so that you can easily find the rule you’re looking for. Second, you now have four save slots for game rules, allowing you to have different pre-sets for easy switching between campaigns:
Mirroring our “prisoner filters” feature, we’ve also made some improvements to the Character Finder.
First, we’ve added a “reset filters” button just like the prisoner filter screen has.
Second, like we’ve done for the game rules, we’ve added the ability to save up to four character finder configurations.
Third, we’ve added the ability to filter by diplomatic range.
Fourth, we’ve added the ability to filter by whether characters will join your court.
Fifth, the icon indicating whether characters will join your court will now show if giving them a bribe gift would be enough to change their response from “no” to “yes”.
Sixth, the “Great House” filter now also lets you filter out anyone of your dynasty rather than just the inverse.
Fun fact that most people don’t seem to know: You’ve always been able to search for claims; just put in the name of the title you want to find claimants for.
Note that the art is a work in progress; the final version will definitely not have buttons floating outside the window:
Further, for owners of Conclave we’ve improved the councilor selection screen a little bit. Each candidate will now have an icon representing their likely voting pattern, and hovering over it will show everything making each possible pattern less or more likely. Note that since the act of appointing someone will change a number of factors, the most likely position isn’t completely guaranteed to be the position they take, but since the factors changed are almost entirely positive it is exceedingly rare to end up with a worse position than indicated:
Another nice feature for Conclave owners is the ability to send laws to council consideration. This will show you how your council would vote without you having to have an actual vote. If you’re satisfied with the result, you can then start the actual vote from the same screen:
Also new on this screen is that it shows how the members of the council are voting, and hovering over the icon will show why they’re voting that way, making it simpler to figure out how you can influence their vote:
Beyond this, there’s one more Conclave QoL improvement: the childhood education screen will now show you which traits the child has got that positively or negatively influence the different education choices, so you no longer need to cross-reference the child’s traits with the description of each education choice:
One more small improvement has also been made to the Intrigue screen. Known and backed plots will now show their plot power on the plot entry itself rather than requiring you to hover over the plot:
Another new feature I know many fans, me included, have long wanted is the ability to randomize the name of newborn children. This has now been added, with four options: Randomize (uses the culture’s naming list), Name after Parent, Name after Grandparent, and Name after Random Ancestor. Note that the art for this is not yet done; the final version won’t look like this:
Now there’s only one last QoL change I’d like to illustrate: commander auto-assignment.
The Minor Titles tab now has a checkbox to auto-assign commanders. This will ensure you always have all your commander slots filled out with the best commanders available in your court. It will of course obey your restrictions on councillors to not lead armies.
To also make commander assignment a bit easier, the old “show commanders” checkbox has been changed to “show only commanders”. Since commanders are at the very bottom of the list anyway, hiding them didn’t make too much sense:
As I said, this is the last QoL change I wanted to illustrate, but it doesn’t cover every QoL change we’ve made. There’s numerous other small improvements made, and this I thought best to simply copy from the changelog rather than spend yet more pages illustrating. So here’s close to all QoL changes from the changelog:
It is possible I’ve missed some, or that some things you’d consider a QoL change I simply considered a “bug fix”, but this should certainly cover most.
And with that, I leave you for today. Hopefully you enjoyed this DD as much as I enjoyed writing it.
If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in this thread, though note that I can rarely say all that much about potential future features, but I can give my thoughts on why I (or someone else) implemented something a specific way.
Today’s quality of life changes are to many different parts of the game rather than having a singular focus. There’s quite a few of them, so we better get started.
First up is a feature inspired by EU4: a battle indicator.
This will show up whenever a unit entering a province (or two units, if they’re entering the same province) will cause a battle to occur. Hovering over it will show the date it starts, and what two realms will be fighting. If any bonuses or penalties apply (terrain or river/strait/naval landing), this will be shown as well as who it will be applied to.
This should help ensure that you don’t end up in combat without expecting it, though note that it does obey the fog of war rules, so it won’t warn you if an unseen enemy is approaching the province you’re entering!
Next up, the garrison tooltip is now more helpful.
Before it’d only show the garrison, but now it also shows the levy, and the garrison+levy since this is the number you have to beat in order to actually be able to siege the holding:
Further, we’ve added an “Embark All” button for when you’ve got multiple units selected, even if they’re spread across many different provinces. This will load as many as possible of the units selected onto the fleets in their provinces, then select the loaded fleets so you can easily merge them together:
The game rules screen has also seen some improvement. First of all, the game rules are now categorized, allowing you to select an individual category so that you can easily find the rule you’re looking for. Second, you now have four save slots for game rules, allowing you to have different pre-sets for easy switching between campaigns:
Mirroring our “prisoner filters” feature, we’ve also made some improvements to the Character Finder.
First, we’ve added a “reset filters” button just like the prisoner filter screen has.
Second, like we’ve done for the game rules, we’ve added the ability to save up to four character finder configurations.
Third, we’ve added the ability to filter by diplomatic range.
Fourth, we’ve added the ability to filter by whether characters will join your court.
Fifth, the icon indicating whether characters will join your court will now show if giving them a bribe gift would be enough to change their response from “no” to “yes”.
Sixth, the “Great House” filter now also lets you filter out anyone of your dynasty rather than just the inverse.
Fun fact that most people don’t seem to know: You’ve always been able to search for claims; just put in the name of the title you want to find claimants for.
Note that the art is a work in progress; the final version will definitely not have buttons floating outside the window:
Further, for owners of Conclave we’ve improved the councilor selection screen a little bit. Each candidate will now have an icon representing their likely voting pattern, and hovering over it will show everything making each possible pattern less or more likely. Note that since the act of appointing someone will change a number of factors, the most likely position isn’t completely guaranteed to be the position they take, but since the factors changed are almost entirely positive it is exceedingly rare to end up with a worse position than indicated:
Another nice feature for Conclave owners is the ability to send laws to council consideration. This will show you how your council would vote without you having to have an actual vote. If you’re satisfied with the result, you can then start the actual vote from the same screen:
Also new on this screen is that it shows how the members of the council are voting, and hovering over the icon will show why they’re voting that way, making it simpler to figure out how you can influence their vote:
Beyond this, there’s one more Conclave QoL improvement: the childhood education screen will now show you which traits the child has got that positively or negatively influence the different education choices, so you no longer need to cross-reference the child’s traits with the description of each education choice:
One more small improvement has also been made to the Intrigue screen. Known and backed plots will now show their plot power on the plot entry itself rather than requiring you to hover over the plot:
Another new feature I know many fans, me included, have long wanted is the ability to randomize the name of newborn children. This has now been added, with four options: Randomize (uses the culture’s naming list), Name after Parent, Name after Grandparent, and Name after Random Ancestor. Note that the art for this is not yet done; the final version won’t look like this:
Now there’s only one last QoL change I’d like to illustrate: commander auto-assignment.
The Minor Titles tab now has a checkbox to auto-assign commanders. This will ensure you always have all your commander slots filled out with the best commanders available in your court. It will of course obey your restrictions on councillors to not lead armies.
To also make commander assignment a bit easier, the old “show commanders” checkbox has been changed to “show only commanders”. Since commanders are at the very bottom of the list anyway, hiding them didn’t make too much sense:
As I said, this is the last QoL change I wanted to illustrate, but it doesn’t cover every QoL change we’ve made. There’s numerous other small improvements made, and this I thought best to simply copy from the changelog rather than spend yet more pages illustrating. So here’s close to all QoL changes from the changelog:
- Reaper's Due: The Hospital icon in the province view will now open the hospital buildings screen if the province has a hospital. If it does not, it will toggle the Extended Province View
- Clicking the Nomad Agitation alert will now select the relevant province, not just pan to it
- The event where you ask your court physician to save your sickly child will now show the child's portrait
- Clicking a council action again will now cancel job assignment
- Recalling someone from their council action while having a job selected for assignment will now cancel job assignment
- The border highlighting of selected CBs now takes precedence over selected provinces or titles
- Fixed retinues in getting split apart into sub-units upon succession if the dynastic successor and the successor for the primary title aren't the same person
- Fixed scrollbars not being visible in some cases where they should be
- Updated the condition tooltips for the decisions "Mend the Great Schism" and "Restore the Roman Empire" to shorten the tooltip and make them easier to read
- Now only possible to hit "Ready" in multiplayer when the save has finished loading
- Fixed the character UI not fully updating if the character died while you were looking at them. Before this would result in the plot button still being available, as well as a number of other issues
- Build Time and Build Cost modifiers now show as percentages (E.G., -10.0% instead of -0.1)
- Fixed the Declare War interaction not telling you when realm peace is stopping you from declaring war; instead being grayed out with no explanation
- Fixed the "pause" message setting having no effect for the close family and special interest characters
- Fixed the "pause" message setting not working for low priority and log alerts. It will still do nothing for disabled alerts
- Event options will now list both trait icons and affected character portraits
- Added alert for councillors having no job assigned to them
- The tooltip for religion in the province window now provides the same info as the religion tooltip in the character religion
- The title shields on the law page now no longer change order when you click any of them, instead making the selected one bigger
- Fixed councillor actions continuing to be greyed out if the reassignment cooldown expires while the council screen is open
- Fixed the predicted morale gain for units almost always being very slightly wrong
- Fixed clicking on someone's primary title sometimes not taking you to their capital
- Clicking on a character's plot on the character screen will now take you to the target of the plot
- Made so prisoner icon is now clickable and takes you to the imprisoner
- The "Mod" and "Version" checkboxes in the multiplayer browser have been clarified to "Same Mods" and "Same Version"
- Improved the tooltip for the "Revoke Vassal Title" plot
- Clicking the Nomad Agitation alert will now select the relevant province, not just pan to it
- The event where you ask your court physician to save your sickly child will now show the child's portrait
- Clicking a council action again will now cancel job assignment
- Recalling someone from their council action while having a job selected for assignment will now cancel job assignment
- The border highlighting of selected CBs now takes precedence over selected provinces or titles
- Fixed retinues in getting split apart into sub-units upon succession if the dynastic successor and the successor for the primary title aren't the same person
- Fixed scrollbars not being visible in some cases where they should be
- Updated the condition tooltips for the decisions "Mend the Great Schism" and "Restore the Roman Empire" to shorten the tooltip and make them easier to read
- Now only possible to hit "Ready" in multiplayer when the save has finished loading
- Fixed the character UI not fully updating if the character died while you were looking at them. Before this would result in the plot button still being available, as well as a number of other issues
- Build Time and Build Cost modifiers now show as percentages (E.G., -10.0% instead of -0.1)
- Fixed the Declare War interaction not telling you when realm peace is stopping you from declaring war; instead being grayed out with no explanation
- Fixed the "pause" message setting having no effect for the close family and special interest characters
- Fixed the "pause" message setting not working for low priority and log alerts. It will still do nothing for disabled alerts
- Event options will now list both trait icons and affected character portraits
- Added alert for councillors having no job assigned to them
- The tooltip for religion in the province window now provides the same info as the religion tooltip in the character religion
- The title shields on the law page now no longer change order when you click any of them, instead making the selected one bigger
- Fixed councillor actions continuing to be greyed out if the reassignment cooldown expires while the council screen is open
- Fixed the predicted morale gain for units almost always being very slightly wrong
- Fixed clicking on someone's primary title sometimes not taking you to their capital
- Clicking on a character's plot on the character screen will now take you to the target of the plot
- Made so prisoner icon is now clickable and takes you to the imprisoner
- The "Mod" and "Version" checkboxes in the multiplayer browser have been clarified to "Same Mods" and "Same Version"
- Improved the tooltip for the "Revoke Vassal Title" plot
It is possible I’ve missed some, or that some things you’d consider a QoL change I simply considered a “bug fix”, but this should certainly cover most.
And with that, I leave you for today. Hopefully you enjoyed this DD as much as I enjoyed writing it.
If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in this thread, though note that I can rarely say all that much about potential future features, but I can give my thoughts on why I (or someone else) implemented something a specific way.
. Those additions to the character finder in particular (but by no means by themselves - the other changes are tops too) have me anticipating more gameplay and less UI arm-twisting in future 
