Hello and welcome to this Dev Diary that will mainly focus on the Quality of Life improvements we will add to the game with 1.6. The improvements for this update are mainly focused on three areas: Diplomacy, the Outliner and the Census Data panel, with some additional bug fixes and improvements sprinkled on top.
Diplomacy
The “Start Diplomatic Play” popup has gotten an overhaul that should make it much easier to get an idea of how likely any Country is to side for or against you. The “Relative Preference for Country” tooltip has also been polished up. It now gives you more information on the first level of the tooltip, which in turn should make it clearer which factors go into the AI’s decision making process.
Outliner rework
The Outliner now has tabs (Pinned / Economy / Politics / Diplomacy / Military / All). Most Outliner items also had a design pass, and most of them now show some additional information. We have also added a new Outliner item for Countries, showing their Rank, Attitude towards you and Relations.In addition to these changes, you are now able to unpin Political Movements, Diplomatic Plays etc, giving you more control over what is shown in the Outliner. We have also added an option to move the Notification feed to the left of the Outliner, similar to what Nugget’s mod “Notifications not over Outliner” does.
The Census Data panel, formerly known as The Pop Browser
In the previous Dev Diary we introduced the Pop Browser (which has been renamed to the “Census Data” panel, based on a suggestion by forum user Buladelu). Since then we have also added Literacy, Job Satisfaction and Needs as columns in a second “page” in the spreadsheet. The common suggestion of visualization of Interest Group membership sadly had to be postponed to a later date due to implementation difficulties and performance concerns. You can of course still see which pops are part of an Interest Group through the Population tab and on the relevant Interest Group details panels, like before. For upcoming updates we are looking at the feasibility of implementing similar screens for other central types of data, with Buildings, States, Countries, and Goods currently being in the very earliest stages of planning.
Misc improvements
Scroll positions within the left-side panels are now saved and restored when opening/closing or navigating between panels, which results in less unnecessary scrolling.
In 1.6, we now always show something we call ‘Employable Qualifications’, which is Qualifications held by Pops that are reasonably able to take a job, defined by meeting the following criteria:
- Isn't already the relevant pop type
- Is unemployed or a jobseeker
- Is not enslaved
- Isn't working in a government building or subsidized building
- If employed, wouldn't consider the change in pop type to be a downgrade (ie, Aristocrat qualifications for Farmers aren't likely to be considered - based on wage weight and how well their current workplace is paying)
What this means is that when you get a warning for a building that’s to be constructed not having enough Qualifications to fill, that warning can actually be trusted, and you’ll have a much easier time determining which Professions are a bottleneck for your industrialization efforts.
The Construction Interaction now has two modes for the list items: “Condensed” (which is what is currently in game in 1.5) and the new “Full” mode, which has additional information like State Traits, Employment, Production Methods and Local Prices for Input and Output Goods.
- Text input box (write the number you want immediately)
- Slider + Arrow buttons (slide the number to whatever you need it to be)
- A list of all individual Units (if you want to be really nitty gritty and select/deselect individual units)
Closing thoughts
Working on the Quality of Life improvements for 1.6 has been both really fun and rewarding, as it includes some improvements with a high positive impact on the overall UX of the game. The high point for me was either finally seeing the Census Data panel take shape (after having been one of those features that we have had scheduled for “the next patch” for a very long time) or solving how to move the Start Diplomatic Play predictions out from the tooltips into the popup panel.That’s it for this week! In two weeks Alex will discuss the upcoming changes to the migration mechanics and their impact on game performance.
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