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!

 

[tdp2]

Is it any advantage in raising only men at arms? I'm thinking in avoiding the popular opinion and vassal opinion hit from offensive wars, since you're only using your personal army and not the kingdom's levy.

 

[Kronoz]

Amazing news, this is what I was hoping for! Is pre-summer still the target for release date? Late june?

 

[priam11]

Pet peve but please add a filter for betrothed. Nothing like doing the wife hunt and finally finding "the one" only to have that soul crushing moment that she is already taken.

I have enough of that in my personal life Paradox....

 

[Videogames]

Is it any advantage in raising only men at arms? I'm thinking in avoiding the popular opinion and vassal opinion hit from offensive wars, since you're only using your personal army and not the kingdom's levy.

In CK2 that would be the case - you accumulated individual opinion penalties with your vassals for raising their vassals. In CK3 though, the opinion penalty for being at war offensively ticks up with all vassals regardless (unless you have a religion without such a penalty). Instead the benefit for not calling up levies (or for calling up only a portion of them) is that you save gold by not having to support excess cannon fodder troops, and it's easier for you to keep your fighting forces within the supply caps of provinces so you don't have a micromanagement nightmare keeping supply levels in a good place.

It's not that you never need levies - particularly in the early game they're still useful, and later on it's often good to have a separate stack with just levies + siege MAAs so that you can siege stuff down faster and more conveniently. But, oftentimes they're a big expensive hassle.

 

[fodazd]

In CK2, you didn't have to pay the gold-upkeep of your vassal levies. Instead, you got an opinion penalty with vassals when their troops were raised. In CK3, you pay the gold upkeep of levies regardless of where they come from.

Given that levies cost a lot of gold upkeep relative to their stats, and that they tend to have trouble with the supply limit, most of the time it isn't worth it to raise them, especially if your enemy is much weaker than you. Which is usually the case after the early game.

 

[BrotherJonathan]

Nice! I especially like the option to raise only MAA, since for large realms these are usually sufficient to deal with raids and minor rebellions without needing the expense of levies.
In the same vein, would it be possible to add an option to raise only troops from your holdings like there was in CKII?

 

[vandevere]

Nice! I especially like the option to raise only MAA, since for large realms these are usually sufficient to deal with raids and minor rebellions without needing the expense of levies.
In the same vein, would it be possible to add an option to raise only troops from your holdings like there was in CKII?

That was wonderful too! If I had raiders in Norfolk, I would raise only the levies in the surrounding counties individually, and merge them right on top of the raiders. Sometimes, if the raiders were close enough to Middlesex, I could just raise Middlesex's levies, and that would be enough to put the raiders down.

Having that kind of utility back would've been my first request. Failing that, just raising MaA is good enough...

 

[Senfmann]

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.

Adding to that, it would be nice to have a "NOT" option. I got headaches from going through hundreds of characters of my family that didn't have the "Witch" trait yet, to create my Witch Coven. This would be perfect.

 

[snaxcyy]

When do we get the saga of Ragnarr 'Lodbrok' expansion? would attract so many new players to the game. and ofc the ones that have already played CKII and CKIII, will come back to enjoy this beautiful game!

 

[WarwolfOmega]

I'm not a religious man but,

Alleluia!​

 

[Mindel]

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.

Would it be possible to allow the game to have multiple floating windows? This is discussed in more detail here.

This would make life much less painful for things like arranging marriage with char search, where opening the betrothal window automatically closes the char search, and vice versa.

 

[lykchen]

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)?

“Own dynasty” etc will work.
Only specific dynasties, houses and faiths cannot be saved in the filters for now. (The problem is that these objects are somewhat dynamic, so not always valid between different campaigns, or even different saves of the same campaign.)

We decided to skip these entirely for now so we can roll out the rest of the feature.
And we have the option to make this more clever in the future if it seems important enough, e.g. saving filters mentioning historic objects that are generally around (though mods and game updates might still change that, and give you unexpected results when you apply your saved filter). Or perhaps we could offer to save some filters in a save game instead of globally? We didn’t quite have the time to figure out those details yet. But at least the rest of the filter options will be available with the Azure patch.

 

[lykchen]

Amazing news, this is what I was hoping for! Is pre-summer still the target for release date? Late june?

Still aiming at before summer vacation, which starts in July.
There is also always some buffer in the schedule, so we don’t release a thing and then are all gone while possibly having messed up and some important feature is broken for a month.

 

[KarlMarxy]

Why have they not figured out a way to demand all Vassals convert at once? Late game this takes forever, doing it one by one. You should be able to found a religious school and send huge amounts of your vassals their to demand their conversion all at once.

 

[KarlMarxy]

Another headache that does not make sense is the peasant revolt that is less than 2% of your army numbers in strength. Why do they declare war with such a small peasant army? It is unrealistic suicide.

 

[Tilarium]

Wonderfully wonderful set of Quality of Life improvements right there! This update is looking like it's going to be a very good one that will be very well received! Thanks!

 

[KarlMarxy]

Does character population factor in to the slow crawl later in the game, for instance when I'm going for world conquest? Or is it all the fighting and battles and chasing that the AI is processing? I figured there would be less unique players making AI decisions late game so I think it is the population that slows it down or perhaps the calculations of the taxes and income. Maybe a thranos button or event late game to clear up the crawl?

 

[Noumenon]

How about a Shattered World-esque Game Rule Preset? Randomized/fictional Cultures? Randomized/fictional Religions?

 

[blacksheepcosmo]

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!

This is awesome. Well done. Hopefully soon we can search to see who wants to join our court.

 

[CaptainChiatrol]

I'm looking forward ALOT to just raising my men at arms.