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CK2 Dev Diary #25: Man vs Machine

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
 
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Would you believe me if I said I was just about to post a "where's the DD?" thread?

It would be nice to have a release/ransom (if possible)/execute all prisoners.
 
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Decisions - there's too little room for them. it was good while we had just a few, but with new ones coming with each DLC enough space for just 4 or so is way too little. Also a way to mark them as unimportant, so they would not show up on the top bar.
 
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Hm not really important stuff but I always wished culture conversion would be a bit better. Like let's say you are the greek Byz emperor, you reconquer Armenia from muslims, and you roleplay and want to resettle them with armenians so you appoint armenian counts (hey they are your culture group after all). Then you wait and wait and wait and those provinces will never flip back to armenian because you, the top level liege are greek.....
 
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When giving out titles, I wish I could click on a barony or province and have an icon there that allows me to select from people in my court or otherwise eligible -- there exists for baronies a button to create a new vassal, but that isn't usually what I want to do.
Constantly having to click on my portrait and then traverse the court or dynasty screen to find the right person, then choose from a text list of titles is frustrating when there are a lot of titles to hand out, and works in the opposite way of how I would want to do it.
Working from the map would be so much easier.
 
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Can you split the minor titles tab into two tabs? I hate having to click that checkbox or scrolling to find my commanders. Maybe put commanders in the military tab?
 
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Hm not really important stuff but I always wished culture conversion would be a bit better. Like let's say you are the greek Byz emperor, you reconquer Armenia from muslims, and you roleplay and want to resettle them with armenians so you appoint armenian counts (hey they are your culture group after all). Then you wait and wait and wait and those provinces will never flip back to armenian because you, the top level liege are greek.....
Yeah, culture conversion's pretty unsatisfying due to how uninteractive it is. Sure, it's there (maybe even too much of it; it really shouldn't work within culture groups) but as a player you can't really do much with it.
 
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Especially with immortals now I end up having so many children that the portraits are so close together you only really see if the border is different and then carefully and slowly move cursor to click. Been resorting to checking mother or dynasty instead. Not sure what the best way to make it usable again is but maybe a way to hide the dead ones?
 
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Oh and a "reroll" button when naming your child would be great. If you don't like the suggested name, you have to open the culture file to get other suggestions. People have asked for this for years.
 
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I spend a lot of time managing my court in the game, and while you can go to the find tool and search for characters in your realm, I would love filters in the court list itself so I could find that particular ward or courtier I had in there! The new event popup for hired courtiers is great, though when you're saving them for later it would be good to have an easy way to reach them quickly again.Some nice things to be able to filter by would be age, marriage status, of your dynasty, has claims, etc.
 
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Do translations count towards GUI improvements? Because I'd love if you'd get in contact with community members to improve the translation of your games for people who are sadly not that fluent in English (and therefore mostly don't really articulate themselves on these forums that much).
A good example would be this:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=249142132

Thanks in advance for all the little improvements you will bless us with in the next expansion and patch though, keep up the good work!
 
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Since you are looking at interface atuff, being able to add modifier graphics like traits, with a file per icon instead of a single strip with all of them would be incredibly handy to improve compatibility between mods. And add support for having multiple province major modifiers (you can apply them, but only one will be shown currently
 
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Will you guys/ladies organize the DLC list just like the one for EU4?

Any news when patch 2.6.2 will come out of Beta?
 
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This will probably be covered in the "plotting section" but it often annoys me that I can't seem to know which titles I can plot to usurp and which I can't and WHY. The greyed out plots and short tooltips don't help.

I'd also love an Electors screen like the Councillors when debating on a decision like Title Revocation - one that would tell me why the AI is voting for their candidate AND what they don't like about mine. If the Favour system could be used to influence the choice that'd be swell, but even just a UI change and explanation would go a looong way in making all elective gameplay a bit more strategic.
 
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I quit my last nomad game when my nomad vassal died heirless and I had to give his former land to a new clan, paying attention to only giving away land with very little empty slots. It turned out to be too annoying to complete

Edit: find character window could use a "Will accept invitation: Yes/No" option!
 
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If we are to give suggestion I think that making it so that the subjugation casus belli is available outside your de jure kingdom even after you used it inside of it (with the "become a king" ambition) would be good. This is how it was before but now you must use it on someone outside of the kingdom first so as to use it to it's fullest extent.
 
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I often find myself wanting to split my demesne troops from my vassal troops. For instance, I want to disband my demesne navy to save money. Or I want to send my vassal troops back into friendly territory so I can disband them and start to reduce the negative opinion modifier. Doing this right now is really tedious. Can you add a button similar to the split special troops button?
 
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