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CK2 Dev Diary #60: Rally up

Good morning, all. I’m Magne “Meneth” Skjæran, the programmer on CK2. In the past I’ve written dev diaries about modding, optimization, and quality of life improvements, as well as a few diaries this summer about the team, the bug fixing process, and what we’re doing for modders.

We’re now returning to regular dev diaries, so today I’ve been given the opportunity to reveal a new feature: rally points.
And to maintain my tradition from the summer, at the end of this dev diary will be five changelog entries from the 2.8 patch.

Rally points are a rather classic strategy game feature which can do a lot to make troop management more manageable. While in the early-game, there usually isn’t much of a need for such a feature in CK2, as you grow larger collecting your troops at the start of a war increasingly becomes more tedious. This is especially the case in multiplayer, where you don’t have the luxury of pausing.

In 2.8, we’re finally rectifying this by adding the ability to define rally points, both for land units and ships.
image1.png

Now, when you raise your troops and have rally points defined, the raised troops will immediately start walking towards the nearest rally point by travel time. Once they get there, they will merge with any troops in the province.

While rallying, they will not appear in the outliner, but instead the rally point entry will show how many troops are incoming.
image2.png


If you disable the “rally points” section of the outliner, the individual armies will show as before.

You can define any number of rally points, and can put them anywhere in your realm, so you can set them up to suit any layout.
Units will only rally to provinces they can walk to (sail, in the case of boats); they will not use transports to get there. So you might for example want one rally point on the British Isles, and a handful in mainland Europe.

Now, as promised, here are 5 changelog entries from 2.8:
  • Fixed old Byzantine women's hair being unable to change color
  • Taught the Pope that lifting his own excommunication when he becomes the Pope makes him a better role model for other Catholics
  • The AI no longer thinks that just because a province is someone's capital, it's a good target; it is now more discerning and only cares if it is the capital of an enemy
  • When you have a unit selected and are hovering over a province it can't move to, the game will now try to explain why you can't move there
  • Fixed it being possible to gift cursed diamonds and crowns
I hope you will all enjoy the rally point feature. That’s all for today.
 
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Rags17 said:
It's OPTIONAL !!!

If you don't like it - DON'T USE IT !!!
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The same can be said of fabricating claims. :p

All I am saying in two cases it might actually turn out to do more harm than good. In the same sense that allowing AI character can pick seduce focus and do wacky things to annoy or benefit you. I never saw it as mandatory and I never said rally point was.

So all I am saying might want to think about changing how calling your levy to action works otherwise it would be back to square one for some and other will use it fine. IE: Using rally on a coastline that viking likes to raid often might just hate rally while those more further in-land and less civil war, ie more stable realm, might just love it.

I can understand why you might have somehow misread my intent. I just have those moment of clarity about how thing comes together is all.
 
Meneth said:
If you were to select them and hit Shift+V, the coastal ones that are able to would go on boats and stop moving. The rest would keep rallying.
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Will this cancel the ships' movement to their rally point?
 
Meneth said:
The A* implementation we use does not have an admissable heuristic, and as such it is not guaranteed to find the shortest path. It will come quite close in most cases, but it usually isn't quite the shortest. It's a trade-off between performance and shortest path. So it's a somewhat risky thing to change, as optimal pathfinding can be quite slow.
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I understand why it is not necessarily relevant to use the shortest path, however, you could you please, please, please fix the complete ignorance of boats for the AI?

A striking exemple is the AI of any Danish ruler: since the lands pathway does not allow to avoid ennemies with lands, if the ennemy army is larger than the Danish army, then the Danes will "simply" walk through Sweden, cross through Aland, then crossing Finland, all the Baltic countries just to end up in Southern Danemark to free occupied provinces. Of course it involves a very long travel time, attrition and sometimes the sudden realization that actually it's better to go back to North Danmark all the way through the Baltic coast, Finland,...

Either the AI should play defensively and form a bottleneck in the Danish islands, trying to benefit from the crossing malus of the attacker, or actually use boats. Taking attrition to avoid a larger army only makes the difference in size bigger and usually means smaller armies get picked appart if they get separated for some reason.
 
Meneth said:
There's a hotkey and button for that already when you've got troops selected. Shift+V will do the trick.
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Good to know, thanks!
 
What limits are there on how many rally points we can create? Are we allowed to set rally points in provinces we do not control? If no to that one, what happens during a civil war when our rally points are now in enemy provinces?
 
Rockphed said:
What limits are there on how many rally points we can create? Are we allowed to set rally points in provinces we do not control? If no to that one, what happens during a civil war when our rally points are now in enemy provinces?
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No limits on number.
You can only set them in provinces you control.
What happens when you lose control hasn't been decided yet; most likely the rally point will get removed.
 
Any chance boarding ships will get a function to trim levies that are slightly too big? That is, if you have 25 ships and 2501 troops, the game will disband the one guy and send him back to the holding, instead of him blocking all the others from boarding too?
 
It is a pity that rallying army can't use transports. For a coastal empire like Byzantium, it is really tedious to raise coastal armies, embark and gather them to a specific province.
 
Please add a function to prevent automatically raising troops in certains areas or holdings!
E.g. I do not want to raise troops on Orkney Islands every time I use the button for raising all levy troops.
 
Tira said:
Please add a function to prevent automatically raising troops in certains areas or holdings!
E.g. I do not want to raise troops on Orkney Islands every time I use the button for raising all levy troops.
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Part of me agrees with this.

Part of me says this on us the players it is a simple micro to remember to check if all troops are down after war.

Or to remember that you raised them all, or to only raise what you need.
 
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