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CK2 Dev Diary #32: Intriguing quality of life changes

Good afternoon. I’m Magne Skjæran, and you might remember me from my modding and optimization dev diary at the end of summer. My last day at Paradox was a few days after that, but since I had a great time working there this summer, I returned to the CK2 team about a month ago to work on the game part-time.
Today I will be covering a topic that’s been briefly mentioned earlier in the Easing Executions dev diary: quality of life changes in regards to the intrigue screen and plotting.

While the image shown in that dev diary was a mockup, the planned changes have now been implemented. However, the actual art isn’t done yet, so most images in this dev diary are touched up based on mockups rather than showing my programmer art. There is after all a reason I work as a programmer rather than an artist.

So let’s go through all the changes we’ve made to the Intrigue screen in detail:
upload_2016-11-28_14-56-40.png

I’ve numbered the changed aspects.

First, at #1, we’ve got the new decisions menu. It now shows 6 decisions at once rather than the old 4, making it easier to find what you’re looking for.

At #2, you can see that each decision now has a button allowing you to mark it as important or not important, thus allowing you to control which decisions you get alerts for. Marking a decision as important will change the background to gold, enable alerts, and move it to the top of the list. The last bit only happens once you exit and return to the decisions screen, since decisions jumping around when you click on them would be rather annoying.

#3 is a button allowing you to reset the priority settings to default.
What decisions are important is saved across campaigns, so you won’t have to mark decisions as important or not important every single game.

Further, at #4, we have a new tab: My Plots. This mostly just moves the plot functionality out of the way to give more space to the decisions list, but it does have one new addition: you can now clearly see who the target of each backed plot is, shown at #5.

Next, let’s go to the Prisoners screen:
upload_2016-11-28_14-59-28.png

At #1, 2, and 3 you can see the new prisoner mass actions. These allow you to release, ransom, or execute all prisoners currently shown on the screen, except those that have been marked as locked using the button you see at #4.

Further, prisoners can now be filtered by the eight different criteria you see at and below #6. This can then of course be reset back to being unfiltered using the button at #5.
A minor change is that this tab now fits 6 prisoners at once rather than 5.

When using the mass actions you’ll be asked to confirm and told about the ramifications of your actions:
upload_2016-11-28_14-57-29.png

This ensures you’re never caught unawares by tyranny or similar.

Next up, Known Plots:
upload_2016-11-28_14-58-2.png

Here there’s two new additions. At #1, we’ve got a new button that lets you ask the plotter to end their plot, saving you a few clicks.

At #2 we’ve got a new feature: if you know about a plot and you’re in the group of people that’s possible to invite, you can ask to join. The AI will always accept this, while if you’re playing multiplayer the other player can refuse if they want to.

The “auto stop plots” button has also been moved to only show up within this tab.
As to the Threats tab there’s nothing new there except for six threats being shown at once rather than five.

That’s it for the Intrigue screen, but we still have a couple of tidbits related to plotting left.
upload_2016-11-28_14-58-36.png

When invited to a plot you’ll now be able to see who the target is, saving you from having to use the character or title finder in order to figure it out.

Finally, when a plotter tries and fails to kill your spymaster due to them discovering their plot, you now have the option to keep the plot a secret, which is ideal for cases where you would rather join the plot than expose it.

That sums up all the changes we’ve made to make the intrigue aspects of the game simpler to interact with, and providing you the information you need to make decisions. Hopefully you’ve found this dev diary as intriguing to read as it was to write!
 
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Up from 4 to 6! GROUNDBREAKING!. Or just get a mod and make it use the entire screen.
All the rest looks awesome though - good work.
 
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This DD gave me a tickle in my potty place.

I cannot WAIT for this xpac. Nice to see so much work and dedication to continue to flesh out CK2 even as it nears the end of cycle.
 
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I'm really excited about these changes. God knows the intrigue menu needed some love.

Will these changes be made to the base game or it will be exclusively part of the next DLC?
 
They should recruit you full time to improve the quality of life of all PDX games.

Seriously, that matters. Seems they forgot that for Stellaris for instance.
 
Up from 4 to 6! GROUNDBREAKING!. Or just get a mod and make it use the entire screen.
All the rest looks awesome though - good work.
Well, the "official" version needs to work on all supported resolutions. And from what I can tell, the engine doesn't really allow scaling the UI to the resolution and instead just pastes static images on the screen, let alone changing the number of items displayed in a list dynamically (I could be wrong though). A mod, OTOH, doesn't need to think about it; users that can't use the modded UI simply don't use the mod.
 
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Love these changes, but it's missing one thing I've wanted for a long time: an easy way to highlight/find plots against yourself (and possibly your heirs/family/persons of interest). I can't tell you how many times as a powerful emperor I hear that there is a plot to kill me and I have to squint and scroll through 150 plots of people trying to discredit random courtiers across the empire before I can find the plot against the emperor's life.
 
Next, let’s go to the Prisoners screen:
index.php
Am I assuming correctly that the 8/8 means that all 8 of your prisoners are currently visible?
Finally, when a plotter tries and fails to kill your spymaster due to them discovering their plot, you now have the option to keep the plot a secret, which is ideal for cases where you would rather join the plot than expose it.
What do you mean? Why would the spymaster not reveal the plot to assassinate himself when it's discovered?
Great House lets you select your dynasty, though not currently the inverse. I'll note it down as something that would be a good idea to do.
No promises that it'll get done though.
What do you mean? So it is possible to solely exclude your dynasty?
 
Further, prisoners can now be filtered by the eight different criteria you see at and below #6.

What would be a huge QoL thing here is if the adult/child filter had an option for children aged 6 and up. Getting those prisoners, especially heirs, educated in the correct religion and culture is something people will want to get started on as soon as possible. Ideally the best QoL change in this regard would be a notification when a prisoner is ready for their (re)education, just like you get with your own children.
 
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Cheers for the DD Meneth, and thanks for the quality-of-life improvements :D. You'll be known as "QoL Meneth" if you keep this up ;). All the changes sound tops, handling prisoners is definitely one of the fiddlier things in my CK2 games at the moment, looking forward to being able to handle things more easily :).
 
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Am I assuming correctly that the 8/8 means that all 8 of your prisoners are currently visible?
Yep.

What do you mean? Why would the spymaster not reveal the plot to assassinate himself when it's discovered?
A plot against someone else, who the spymaster happened to stumble upon, but the plotter noticed and tried to kill the spymaster to keep the plot safe. You might want that plot to actually continue.

What do you mean? So it is possible to solely exclude your dynasty?
Like the character finder, you can currently have it only list people of your dynasty.
But you can't currently have it only list people not of your dynasty.

Will mass execution make all prisoners scream at the same time?
It did during early development, but it was rather horrifying. Now only the first death sound gets played.
 
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It did during early development, but it was rather horrifying. Now only the first death sound gets played.

But, maybe we shall have it as a game rule. :p
Some cruel rulers enjoy horrifying things.
 
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Wanting to exclude someone is a less common usecase than wanting to include someone, thus everyone is included by default.

If that's what testing shows, I'll trust it. My arguments lie entirely on my own experience and assumption. A good lawyer I would not make.

It isn't determined by the scrollbars, of course. By "visible" I mean not filtered out. I should probably have written "listed" instead.

I'm deeply relieved to find out I misinterpreted. Thanks Meneth!
 
I'd have expected the exact oppositeresult of the process if I hadn't been told this. Ticking multiple checkboxes and clicking a button to apply to all of them is something I've seen in UI's for years, this is selecting exceptions and applying a command to the rest.

I think that you are right in the sense that this is where our minds naturally go when we see a UI with checkboxes. That a check signifies our choice, an affirmative that we want this person for these actions.

Wanting to exclude someone is a less common usecase than wanting to include someone, thus everyone is included by default.

But based on my experiences this is more correct, and more true to our behavior within the scope of this game. There are always a handful or one or two prisoners that I want to keep among a trove of other tash prisoners like peasant leaders, or lunatics who plotted against the wrong person.

Consistently there are usually way more prisoners that I don't care about compared to the handful of people I want to keep. Be it about war score, or keeping them for concubinage, or now to recruit them into court. Care has always been needed during dungeon mangement simply to not execute anyone who you wish to keep and this UI reflects years of that caution.

This may be a way that requires less clicks to achieve a desired result once it's learned, but isn't an intuitive way of applying an action to a group. This is going to add to the all ready steep learning curve of a complex game in the genre of grand strategy.

Oh come now that is a bit inflated isn't it? After all this is simply the UI for one aspect of the game. An aspect that is worth it to micromanage but one in which you don't actually have to micromanage. This will be at best a mistake made once, not something that will push the learning curve even further.

I did briefly think to myself that a new player might get confused once. But then I realized no the checkbox just has to come with a very clear tooltip saying "Check this tooltip to exclude this prisoner from all actions" and probably indicating if it has been checked or not. And once you realize this it will be a breeze to just check the ones you want to keep and come in and purge the rest. The player will learn you use the checks to save the ones you want, then you filter into whatever you want to punish or execute.
 
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