CK2 Dev Diary #25: Man vs Machine

[Loderingo]

On the select commanders character window and appoint flank character window, please only show traits that have an impact on battles. I need to know a character is craven or patient but don't need to know they are lustful.

Also someone mentioned earlier about child naming. I would change this to an event as at the moment the AI chooses too many random names rather than family names. The event would have different options depending on the gender of the child and the names of existing children:

Name after myself - I get a small amount of prestige and small chance of getting proud
Name after a close family member (living) - They get a small amount of prestige and there is a relations boost on both sides
Name after a close family member (deceased) - I get a small amount of piety
Name after a friend/lover - They get a small amount of prestige and there is a relations boost on both sides
Name after a powerful vassal - They get a small amount of prestige and there is a relations boost on both sides
Name after a prestigious dynasty member from the past (died over 50 years ago) - The child gets a small percentage of the deceased dynasty member's prestige
Pick a random name of my culture - no effect

 

[prismaticmarcus]

What’s this, a dev diary on a Monday?! Yes, it’s true, we’ve moved them to Mondays so they’ll coincide with CK2 streams. The Reaper’s Due has been out for a while now, and I am very pleased with how both it and the free update were received (I wasn’t sure the focus on Death would be so universally appreciated!) As Game Director, I rarely have time to do much coding and scripting anymore, but I did help out with the optimizations and several of the Game Rules. The game is in safe hands though; the current CK2-team has done an amazing job so far!

Work has now commenced on the next expansion and I can already reveal it’s going to be something a bit similar to Way of Life, which I believe I actually mentioned in my previous dev diary. I also promised optimizations, AI improvements and quality of life stuff. Well, the optimizations are done for now, so the next major free update will feature AI and GUI improvements, which brings me to today’s topic; usability.

Now, we are aiming to tweak several interfaces and while I cannot go into much detail yet, I can say that I’d especially like to address the following main areas:

• Plotting (quality of life)
• Prisoner management
• Guardian vs Educator (clarity)
• More space for Traits and Character Modifiers

There are other things in the works too, but when you’ve worked on a game for so many years you tend to get blind to many usability issues and simply accept them as they are. That is why I’d like to hear from you, our faithful fans, what you find most annoying and clunky about the CK2 interfaces. Are there any actions you find hard to do, or useful information you cannot easily find (or not at all)? All feedback is welcome!

That is all for now; the floor is yours...

Don't miss today's livestream - Medieval Monday with Emil and Doomdark - 16:00CEST on https://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive

if i'm being invited to a war for 'Rolf's' claim on Scandinavia i'd like to easily see who Rolf is

 

[Ekkarin]

Just few things inspired by EU4 that I'd like to see in the game,:
Nextsong button
Randomize heir/child button
See the list of possible achievements

 

[Cederian Hendrikus]

Just few things inspired by EU4 that I'd like to see in the game,:
Nextsong button
Randomize heir/child button
See the list of possible achievements

There actually is a nextsong button already, down in the bottum right corner.
I imagine the Randomize heir/child button is for names?
List of achievements possible, definetly! I want!

 

[Correl]

I have always problem when I want the council vote for something (for exemple war), need a button to by the cheapest favorand request cuncil support in automatic way

 

[brandonbbbbb]

I would like a way to arrange vassal contracts. Ie if you are an emperor, and hold within your empire the various kingdoms in France. Have a way too change which vassals adhere to a certain liege title before you hand it out.

 

[VoodooEconomist]

Oh, and I think the battle screen could at least give us some info WHY a certain tactic was chosen - was it a trait? Is it the troop composition? That way one could adjust flank composition and leader without checking the wiki and memorising tactics!

 

[ThePinkPanzer]

A HUGE HUGE HUGE thing would be the ability to add a scroll bar to events for event descriptions / choices, so we can have nice long narrative events without worrying about it being cut off.

 

[fishface60]

I wish there was a way to convert culture but keep ethnicity. If I am France and conquer Mauretania, it only makes sense that they would start speaking French and eating (a local variant of) baguette after a while, but their skins shouldn't be getting lighter.

Mechanically culture conversion is not the inhabitants of the region picking up new languages and customs, it's people of your ethnicity replacing the local population.

The text for the adjacent county conversion implies it's picking up languages and customs of the ruler, but mechanically it requires either an adjacent county of that culture, or that the county were conquered by a foreign culture, which implies people of your culture settling in the area and replacing the local population.

A more transparent way of representing this would be to model cultures with more depth, so rather than it being ruler's culture, county culture and conquest culture, you could model the population of counties including their culture, with conquest adding some measure of culture drift, as would adjacent counties with rulers of the same culture as the county holder.

Frankly, a tooltip saying what the conquest culture of the province is (defined by whether conquest culture the liege title has) which describes what effect this has on culture conversion would be a massive improvement on the transparency of the culture conversion mechanics.

 

[Chimeric]

I'm sure a lot of good ideas have already been posted and I feel sorry for @Doomdark if his goal is to create a "Community Whishlist"

Anyway my 2 cents:

• A mean (possibly a dedicated window) to handle Favors instead of the crude top notification : Who has unclaimed favors on me, favors I have and most importantly HOW they can be used (mostly for my character use).
  Still with Favors, a QoL addition could be a mean to signal (popup ? But we already have a lot of them) if a currently impossible action I'm trying to do could be possible if I had a Favor on the target or his liege (examples : ask for Counselor position, or arranged marriage). Remembering the Wiki is too often a bad solution in those cases but hey, CK2 is a complex game after all.
• Similar to the idea, perhaps a method to redistribute titles in my realm. It's not just a QoL change but an addition but I'll say it : Asking for transfer or exchange of vassalage (with notifications of possible agreement with Favor) between my direct or indirect vassals.
  Could incur tyranny or big hit on relation if the end results in a lose of relative power between 2 vassals. As an Emperor or King perhaps I just want to shuffle my realm a bit (lunatic !!!) or spite a rival or even reward a duke... It's already possible one at a time but we can't "exchange" vassalage between 2 dukes. Too often I see the duke of Brabant having count vassals in Brittany while the Duke of Anjou is the liege over Holland. Give me a way to clean this heresy without having a civil war ^^

That's it for me, I have great hopes in the QoL changes that will come, CK2 is a bit daunting atm due to complex and rich interactions (not a fault). Unfortunatly, the interface does really slow the gameplay sometimes...

 

[Enriador]

What about making the College of Cardinals appear on the Religion tab? To increase that one would be cool as well, since a large ream has dozens of bishops and they too few of them show up on the screen at any given time.

 

[knppel]

I am freaking out ever since the army-reorganisation was changed to drag&drop. When playing on laptop it even gets as bad as that the unit icons fully disappear, so I have to reopen the army organizer (and pray for it to work).

 

[hupernikao]

- Supporters list. Today is boring find who is not voting like you, or voting for someone specific.
- Find heirs that would accept go to your court.
- Find claimants that would accept go to your court (today I must search kingdom by kingdom).

 

[Dresen]

Searching for a wife is too cumbersome. It should be easier to set the filters and you should be able to save your preferred filters.

 

[Egro Goodies]

I dont know if this was already said but... What I personally dislike is how in the prisoner menu when you click release prisoner, it takes you to a complete different menu to actually release a prisoner. after this you have to go and release another prisoner. Basicly what i am trying to say is that for me personally it would be better if buttons actually do what they say instead of taking you to another menu to click the button. I know this is a small thing but i think it makes it more clunky.

 

[Mortegro]

I would love an event where you can go all Mad Scientist and create your own plague. You could have little lead up events where you invite people from your court down to your dungeon to test out some new experiment. That sounds like it would be a lot of fun.

 

[Lieutenant Lyon]

I don't know if this was a bug, but I'd like to have the mouseover information for different faction types to be available again.

Also, I don't know if this is already possible, but it would be neat if we could see the current laws and crown authorities of other independent states.

Finally, it would be cool if we could click on the little prison bars icon on a character portrait to see who imprisoned them, much like how the red skulls can be clicked on to see who murdered them.

 

[Pandoricus]

This is less of a UI but technology could be redone. It is probably the one feature that seems to have not seen much improvement, more like things tacked on to it.

 

[Mimwing]

Might as well throw in my two cents - saveable filter sets in the character finder. There's a certain combination of filters (Male, Not in prison, Not Married, Not a Ruler, etc.) that works very well for finding characters to land, but every time you restart the game or just want to change a few filters to look for something else (e.g. a potential spouse) you need to rebuild this filter set. If you use the character search screen for a number of different things (spouses and landing characters, characters to invite, searching the world for certain traits, checking your dynasty to make sure everyone is paired off - thanks for that filter by the way) the amount of time spend flipping filters can grow pretty quickly.
I envision 3-5 small buttons in the upper right corner of the character search screen, hold shift and click the button to save the current filter set as a preset, click to restore from saved preset.

 

[faljen_isus]

advanced WoL for immortal characters
- for a player who is a master seducer or master schemer for a century or two there should be a additional bonus, and a different trait than for a character who has been at it for 30-40y, also just imagine if someone was a strategist for a 100 years... he probably picked some things up that the others couldn't learn
- a single WoL trait for an immortal is kind of underwhelming IMO (adding more than 1 might be OP for immortals but they are by default stronger than the average bear)
- making a immortal able to get a higher tier WoL trait than regular mortal character and giving them the ability to have 1 additional standard WoL trat (or 2) is making them absurdly strong (in some instances) but this could be altered by additionally reducing the chances of achieving immortality and adding events that are specifically aimed at vassals figuring out something is not natural and aiming to oust the immortal and take all his land
- if the last part could be implemented also a immortal reconquest (ie taking your land back from the mere mortals and mounting them on a pike) could be a fun storyline (maybe even special CB even tho you would have strong claims on your previous titles) and could add a lot of fun for plotting or for adventurer play

i have seen many request for an improved character display (mostly for the great number of traits and children) which i second, it gets absurd when having many wives, seduction focus and/or immortality

it would be awesome if there would be a possibility to fund our vassals wars
- i have done this time and again when i have a couple of feuding vassals and i dont want to owe favors, i simply shove money at them in hope they take mercs and drag the war on thus weakening both and ultimately sending both vassals in states of civil war
- also it would be great if i could have an option to ask my vassal to start expansionistic wars (be them holy or claim) that they would not ordinarily do cause of their lack of funds (this would be a nice way for empires to expand without having issues with coalitions), also this could eventually turn into proxy wars (imagine a holy roman empire and the byzantine empire at war via their vassals)

send gift rework enabling us to modify the amount of money we want to send without having to repeat the action 50x

dynastic events and additions
- enable powerful dynasties to have holdings similar to those of merchant patrician families (ie empire tier dynasties or multiple kingdom dynasties)
- add pater/mater familias trait (vassal and dynasty opinion bonus, diplobonus)
- intrafamily plots, disputes for large dynasties
- this one is not my suggestion but i saw it a couple of months ago and loved it: dynasty mansion events where you get ousted from it and the new owner has trouble with the possessed mansion (this became much more possible with Reapers Due) and vice versa when you expel a dynasty out of their own holding and get possibly paranoia and possessed traits (lunatic also)
- imagine a dynasty holding 2-3 kingdoms and the king of England making the dynasty holding in wessex and his cousin the king of aquintane getting pissed about it and decides he should have the right to build it in bordoaux and declaring war on them to destroy the false pater familias holding just to have the right to build it in his de iure kingdom or perhaps decides he should replace his degenerate cousin on the throne
- dynastic traits (not my idea but fits here)
- feuding dynasties / rival dynasties with dynasty level alliances or NAPs and interdynasty relations (friendly, neutral, hostile etc)
- abandong dynasty mansions and holdings give certain bonuses or debuffs depending on county owner relation to holding owners dynasty

title grants
- viceroyalty kingdoms and duchys being a checklist cause giving the same vassal 3 viceroyalties is quite tedious
- hereditary viceroyalties: the bloodline has a right to a viceroyalty and you dont want to give the same title each generation, you do however have the possibility to revoke the title for free if the viceroy misbehaves
- also county granting being a checklist for the same reason

university improvements (could mean a tech overhaul if taken to the extreme)
- cities get school system instead of university with more or less the same bonus
- university becomes like a hospital holding
- university events
- 1 uni per de iure level
- uni improves child education and allow character development after coming of age
- secular or religious uni's
- vassal education at your uni can earn you money
- different university levels depending of ruler tier
- imperial university for top tier rulers (max improvements unlocked)
- royal university (mid level unlocks)
- university (basic unlocks)
ie the byzantine empire has 1 slot for imperial uni, 1 slot per DI kingdom for royal unis, and 1 per DI duchy
- educate your personal doctor from his youth or be able to become a doctor yourself (have fun in your dungeon as a maniacal doctor or become your lieges official torturer and interrogator)

trade
- add trade goods similar to what you have in EU4, this could improve not only merchant republics but also give more to the trade system than the silk road and add more diplo actions than war marriage etc

i will probably remember more sooner or later