Actions in the right-click menu seem randomly populated

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Scrapulous

First Lieutenant
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Aug 30, 2011
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When you right click on a character portrait, you get a menu populated with various options. For each option that can appear, one of three things happens:
  1. Action appears, is selectable.
  2. Action appears, is not selectable. In this case the game often at least tries to explain why you can't take the action.
  3. Action does not appear in the menu.
The distinction between 2 and 3 confuses me. What determines when an action will appear or not?

Here's an example:
1600295443286.png


The action menu for Cher:

1600295534998.png


Action menu for Luntiga:
1600295607016.png


Very different options. Why?

Also notice that Cher is "visiting" my court, while Luntiga is "at" my court. What's the difference, please? For what it's worth, dad (or is he??? lol) is also "at" the court, as is mom. Both are shoorveer (Rajputi equivalent of knights).

This confusion happens a lot, and seems to be related to some extremely weird behavior in the game surrounding where a person is and where that person's children are. In a lot of cases I see children hanging out at a court independently of their parents despite not having a guardian. It happens sometimes that both parents are at my court but their kid is someplace else and that means that I can't find a spouse for the kid or arrange a guardian for him.

Naravarma's expression captures my feelings pretty well, I think:
1600296035216.png

Dude is disappointed.
 
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Actions that are never going to be available without a significant change (such as joining your court) won't appear. Actions that are possible if more minor conditions change (such as getting enough piety, prestige, or gold) appear but are grayed out until you can use them. That may not be the best explanation of it, but essentially if it's possible, you will see it, if it's not possible, you won't. What is possible or not can change, of course.

In your example, Dismiss is a possible option for the person who is a member of your court, while it isn't a possible option for someone who is not a member of your court.

As to the difference in that, someone who is part of your court is no longer a wanderer and will stick around longer than someone who is visiting. It doesn't mean they'll never leave, but they are more likely to stay. If you've paid a knight or claimant to join your court, you see the difference. Until you pay them to join, they are still just visiting and won't stick around for very long. If you pay them to join, they'll stick around at least for awhile. As to why your particular situation has one child as a courtier and one as a visitor, it's hard to really say from the information you've provided.
 
Your short answer is that it's determined completely on a case-by-case basis.

The long answer is that every character interaction has a set of explicit is_shown and is_valid_showing_failures_only triggers, which determine what criteria cause it to show up in the list and be selectable respectively. For example, dynasty head interactions don't show up if you're not the dynasty head, but there can be other arcane criteria (like being the same faith for some reason.) Most interactions won't be selectable, and it will tell you so, if the character is "busy" doing certain things (leading troops being the most common of these, pilgrimage is another that comes to mind right away.)
 
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Thank you both. These are coherent answers, but I think they just shift the UI incoherence to a different place.

I found the distinction between "visiting" and "at" in the case of these brothers. I am already Cher's ward, but Luntiga doesn't have a ward. So Cher is "visiting" my court. What makes this silly is that, if he was no longer my ward, he would presumably shift to the more significant "member of my court" status, the way Luntiga is, and I would have more control over him than I do in the current situation where he is "just" my Ward.

So I think I have two complaints.

One is that the hierarchy of states which determine the is_shown and is_valid_showing_failures_only values doesn't have a meaningful sense of priority. I.e. if both "visiting due to being a Ward" and "part of the court" are true, show the superset of actions allowed by those states.

The second is that the game is using "at your court" to mean "a part of your court," which conceals a big part of what you two explained to me. "At" conveys the sense of location, but not in any way the sense of avocation or belonging. Put another way: in English being "at" a place is not necessarily more significant than "visiting" a place and could easily be less significant, depending on the circumstances.
 
"Visiting" people are in the pool and treated differently than those who belong to your court (courtiers.) There's a limit on the latter, and it's not very large, which seems to cause lots of strange issues for me. It probably helps to do some ... spring cleaning ... now and then. I miss Reaper's Due, the epidemics did a lot of this cleanup for us. Pool characters tend to get shuffled around without a lot of sanity checking. Or maybe it's just me who has a problem with the AI trying, and failing, to marry their children to pool characters, who then end up in utterly bizarre situations.

Now, there does seem to be some kind of priority rules for who gets to be a courtier. Councillors and children of the ruler always seem to get a spot. I've never had my own children wander off. Knights stay put if they're courtiers rather than vassals. Wards seem to be low priority. I'm not sure how prisoners factor into this, but I think they're completely separate in some way.
 
It's still kinda clunky how I have to click into it and open more options when the entire list could fill on my screen. Not sure who this was made for tbh.
 
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Or maybe it's just me who has a problem with the AI trying, and failing, to marry their children to pool characters, who then end up in utterly bizarre situations.

Is that what's going on? I just know that whatever is influencing how characters move around is out of control. A father, mother, child 1, child 2 family can simultaneously exist in three separate locations despite none of them being tied to any of the locations with the possible exception that one of the kids might have had a guardian - I didn't check for that. But why the fragmentation in the family? It drives me nuts.

It's still kinda clunky how I have to click into it and open more options when the entire list could fill on my screen. Not sure who this was made for tbh.

I definitely think that they may have outsmarted themselves with the menu. I understand the thinking - it could become a huge menu if every option was always there. But there are two problems with it, to my mind. First is that, in such a rules-dense game, you miss an opportunity to explain why certain actions aren't available. The second is that the player really has no reason to trust that this game is following its own rules because of some of the profoundly questionable event mechanics that shipped with the game. This has a corrosive effect on user trust, so then when you have things like menus changing without explanation, it's easy to default to suspicion.
 
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It's still kinda clunky how I have to click into it and open more options when the entire list could fill on my screen. Not sure who this was made for tbh.

I agree with you. When I first saw the screenshots and videos showing the right click menus and saw that there were the "More" options, I didn't think it was a smart decision. I'd much rather see all available options (not the options that are completely hidden from the menu - just all available options and all grayed out options) in a single menu without having sub menus. I like being able to quickly see what options I have without having to mouse over the sub menus to determine what additional options I have. Granted, in CK2, even though it was one menu, you had to scroll and that ended up giving a similar effect and in the end, I like this way better without the scrolling. But the way the menu is now, they could easily show all options without sub menus and without scrolling. I would definitely prefer that.
 
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When you right click on a character portrait, you get a menu populated with various options. For each option that can appear, one of three things happens:
  1. Action appears, is selectable.
  2. Action appears, is not selectable. In this case the game often at least tries to explain why you can't take the action.
  3. Action does not appear in the menu.
The distinction between 2 and 3 confuses me. What determines when an action will appear or not?

Here's an example:
View attachment 627493

The action menu for Cher:

View attachment 627494

Action menu for Luntiga:
View attachment 627495

Very different options. Why?

Also notice that Cher is "visiting" my court, while Luntiga is "at" my court. What's the difference, please? For what it's worth, dad (or is he??? lol) is also "at" the court, as is mom. Both are shoorveer (Rajputi equivalent of knights).

This confusion happens a lot, and seems to be related to some extremely weird behavior in the game surrounding where a person is and where that person's children are. In a lot of cases I see children hanging out at a court independently of their parents despite not having a guardian. It happens sometimes that both parents are at my court but their kid is someplace else and that means that I can't find a spouse for the kid or arrange a guardian for him.

Naravarma's expression captures my feelings pretty well, I think:
View attachment 627496
Dude is disappointed.
When you right click on a character portrait, you get a menu populated with various options. For each option that can appear, one of three things happens:
  1. Action appears, is selectable.
  2. Action appears, is not selectable. In this case the game often at least tries to explain why you can't take the action.
  3. Action does not appear in the menu.
The distinction between 2 and 3 confuses me. What determines when an action will appear or not?

Here's an example:
View attachment 627493

The action menu for Cher:

View attachment 627494

Action menu for Luntiga:
View attachment 627495

Very different options. Why?
Much simpler ... Luntiga is in your court and Cher is a "guest". He is a guest because he is actually assigned to another court and you are just his educator.

The options make sense ... for instance if you pick arrange marriage, that will be to marry someone in your court for both, but for Cher his actual liege will answer for him. For Luntiga you get to answer for both sides. Find Spouse means find someone outside your court for them to marry. Since Cher isn't in your court, you don't see that choice for him.

Looks like they are both in your domain, so you can give them a title.

Remove guardian ... you can only educate two wards, so if, 5 years from now you'd rather educate Luntiga you need to pass Cher off to another educator. His liege has already said its okay to educate him in your court, so you can just pass him off.
 
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Much simpler ... Luntiga is in your court and Cher is a "guest". He is a guest because he is actually assigned to another court and you are just his educator.

What other court is he assigned to? His parents and brother are all in my court. Where would he go if I dismissed him as my Ward? To his parents, right? Who are in... my court. It's a situation where, if I dismissed him as my Ward, my control over him would increase, which is a little weird given that it's a situation where he'd be going from being a kid for whom I am explicitly responsible for to being just another person living at my court. The notional responsibility and the actual control are not in sync.

How does this happen, where his court is out of sync with his family's?
 
What other court is he assigned to? His parents and brother are all in my court. Where would he go if I dismissed him as my Ward? To his parents, right? Who are in... my court. It's a situation where, if I dismissed him as my Ward, my control over him would increase, which is a little weird given that it's a situation where he'd be going from being a kid for whom I am explicitly responsible for to being just another person living at my court. The notional responsibility and the actual control are not in sync.

How does this happen, where his court is out of sync with his family's?
Where is his grandfather/mother (I assume your child)? When you click on the portrait, his liege is there, who is it? In the screenshot, I definitely see a green tree icon so he is in a court related to you. If you stop being his guardian, that is where he will go.

One thing I've noticed is that if kids (depending on personality) get to their mid-20s and have nothing to do, I sometimes get a warning they may leave my court. Sometimes they take all/some/none of their kids with them. Are you sure his parents are in the court and not guests? If guests, invite them and see if their kids come with them.

I agree it seems weird that parents leave kids behind, but I think that things like adventurer personality traits impact if they take them with them or leave them behind while they go off and adventure.

How/why do they have two different religions? Not sure if the religion difference is impacting the choice of court. His father may have been banished from court as well. Lots of times I find my kid's spouses in different courts. And sometimes it is tough to get the spouse back if she doesn't like me. They won't join my kid until the kid is holding a title.
 
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I've noticed this issue, but it doesn't seem too bad here - maybe because I'm already familiar with CK2 and what characters can do where. Where I always have huge problems is in Imperator Rome. What shows or not seems triply confusing compared to CK3.

What I don't like in CK3 is that usually the one you want to do is under the "more options." For example, once you get the ability to friend someone, that's always in the second row; as is revoke vassal which I use more often than revoke title. What's weird is that there's not alot of options under that, so it kinda should be on the main menu already.
It would be nice if there was kinda a dynamic menu where options you use more come to the top.