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.

[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.

[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.

[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!

 

[Stormbound5]

This is fantastic news.

 

[Karlington]

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.

View attachment 717370
[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.

View attachment 717374

[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.

View attachment 717375

[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!

Thank you for this, @KnightOfTheLions! The return of saved game rule and character search presets are among the best things I've heard in any dev diary, and I just had a drink of water and toasted in your honor!

(It's just after 16:00/4 PM on a Tuesday here, so water it was. )

Do you have any plans to also restore message settings to the game as in CK2? And if not, then could you please, please, please, in the name of all that is holy and just, at least reply and tell us no, and if so, hopefully even why not?

I don't want to sound demanding, it's just that their absence really puts a damper on the experience for many of us, and despite us asking for it and discussing it frequently since the release in September, we have never received a response to this as far as I know.

 

[MarkFranz]

I hope you were at least a little embarrassed to put the ability to save your game rules in a dev diary

It's should be embarassing not include that ability into base game, but fact what it's finnaly gonna be added in game, is certainly worth to mention in DD.

 

[ProfMoriarty]

it still comes with some limitations, we are not able to save the dynamic objects in the filter (Dynasty, House and Custom Faith).

Does this mean, that it will not possible to have "Own Dynasty" as a preset filter? Or does that only apply to specific dynasties (e.g. Habsburger)?

 

[KnightOfTheLions]

Awesome! Thank you.

Do you know offhand if the preset saving will work with mods that add game rules? Or will it only apply to vanilla rules?

Hi IntoTheStars, as long as the game rules rules from the mod have been added to the appropriate database, it should work!

 

[DavidD97]

Awesome! Do you also work on customizable dynasty/house CoA? I really really really miss this feature.

 

[Shake Appeal]

Good features. Setting my custom rules for every start is kind of a nuisance.

 

[Riamus]

Awesome to hear about all those QoL improvements coming with azure.

One question i have though: is it gonna be possible to set a specific set of gamerules as "default". (E.g. as it is in my case, Ironman On, Enclave Independence Significant.... stuff I pretty much always turn on) or do we have to change to our "default" setup manually every time.

Yes, this was my question when I read the DD. Saving settings is nice and can be useful, but it's the ability to save a default settings option that is far more important. I've seen numerous people posting about how they got hours into a game only to realize they never enabled Ironman, for example. Saving presets doesn't help with having your normal settings saved as default and I think that's what more people are interested in. I mean, even if you do want a "mongol-free" game, that's a single setting to change. If you have your personal default settings there, you can change one setting and be good without much need to save it as a preset. It's your normal settings that could have numerous different settings that you don't want to have to keep changing each game. Now, it's true that with presets, you can save a default preset, which is a plus, but it still would mean you'd have to continually remember to load that preset every game. I think having a way to save a default setup of settings that load automatically would be far more useful for people. After all, I think most people end up using a single setup every game with only the rare occurrence of changing something.

 

[Veldmaarschalk]

Good stuff !

 

[thebadmiral]

Wow, two great Dev Diaries in a row! Very excited about 1.4—the MaA changes alone will probably add a couple of years to the life of my mouse...

 

[InsidiousMage]

It would be nice if players could also raise a limited number of levies as well. Say you want a thousand levies the game will raise levies from surrounding counties until it gets to around a thousand of them on based on the levies from each county.

 

[Tiax]

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?

Is this a power move or a sign that levies are basically useless after a certain point?

 

[grommile]

Now all we need is Message Settings ~nya

 

[guinea prince]

Will the most recent rules preset be active by default or is the player still expected to manually change it each game?

 

[Corithna]

Really appreciate the raise only men at arms update that rocks. Now how about in the custom ruler creation screen giving players a better way of choosing a coat of arms rather than just a random button? You know like being able to just choose the background pattern and color, the foreground icon and it's colors. I've only owned the game for about six days but it feels like I've spent nearly an hour and a half clicking that one little button trying to get what I want only to have to settle of something similar.

If anyone knows of a good fix for this please let me know. I'll check back in a few days. Thanks!

 

[Corithna]

Will the most recent rules preset be active by default or is the player still expected to manually change it each game?

From the images it looks like you get to save your own presets and then load it on demand either in a game your currently running or an entirely new play through.

 

[TravlingCanuck]

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 an 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.

I feel like the best way to handle this for tiered traits would be for the search to always find the specified trait or any higher ranked traits in that same group. So if you're looking for Intelligent, it would also find and report characters with the Genius trait because, really, it would be a weird edge case when you'd want to find the lower tiered trait and only the lower tiered trait.

On the other hand, if you search for Genius, you wouldn't get characters with the lower tiered Intelligent trait.

 

[Belth]

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.

View attachment 717370
[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.

View attachment 717374

[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.

View attachment 717375

[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!

The raise Men at arms i sjust brilliant. Especially in late game when you blob and you have like 30 k troops, having to wait for all those damn militia to get summoned before you can get to the Tebuchets is just so annoying. Well done.

 

[Videogames]

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.

Yes, so many times I want to find a physician character and I'm not picky about skill level, and I have to search through all three levels of the trait in sequence in order to see if I have anyone. It's the same when I want to find a spouse who is smart/strong/attractive at any level of the trait. I know for religions you can search for example "Christian" instead of searching for "Catholic," "Orthodox," etc - we need some sort of category search for these traits that come in multiple tiers as well.

 

[filcat]

Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for future updates on the Azure patch. Until next time!

Magnificent, sincerely grateful!

Thank you for the news, and the changes are much appreciated.

Stay safe, stay healthy.

(Apologies for disrupting the thread with the following light-hearted joke. It is only for some laughs to cheer up. Again, sincerely grateful for the news on the changes; and asking for more, of course)

[*]
(For a quick look at the problems due to the absence of message settings, shamelessly recommending this thread, if/when time is available)



[*] Mahmud Ghazni receiving a robe as a gift from the Caliph Al-Qadir, miniature from Jami al-Tawarikh - Compendium of Chronicles by Rashid al-Din Hamadani (1247-1318)