Crusader Kings II - BjornB


Greetings fellow crusaders!

This dev diary will be rather short, as I won’t be talking about anything new and exciting. With us getting ever closer to a release (and before you ask: no, I will not tell you when it might be just yet), I thought it might be a good time to start highlighting some of the stuff we have in our changelog.

First off, some balance changes:
################### # Balance ################### - Minor clan revolt troops are no longer inherited, and the leader of the uprising now has more money, prestige, population and manpower as well as two sons to succeed him - If you grant a title and all titles below it to a child while following a religion that uses bishops, the temples will now have bishops generated rather than not get handed to the recipient - "Cultural Bonds" no longer causes an alliance, but instead allows other independent characters of the conqueror's culture to join them in defensive wars. The AI is likely to do this if their opinion of the defender is positive and they're not busy with wars of their own - Allowed vassals to press de jure claims against their fellow vassals again (though the AI won't) - You'll now lose some Threat if dying causes you to lose land - When the holder of a viceroyalty dies, they'll now be replaced in wars by their regular heir, not their liege - The "Ask to Leave Court" diplomatic interaction will now cause the character's spouses to leave as well, and has the same requirements of the spouses as the character being asked to leave - Increased the duration of the "War Taxes" modifier to five years (up from three), for completing the "Build a War Chest" Ambition - Overthrow Ruler will now give the ruler a claim on the title if they accept the demands - No longer possible to usurp titles from the vassals of a revolting vassal - Capitals can now be moved every 50 years rather than once per lifetime. Nomads still get to move it every 10 years - Merchant Republics with too few patricians will no longer draft people who are heir to a title to become patricians, since this risks disinheriting them - No longer possible to ask to join a war against someone you have a non-aggression pact with - The "make my court/vassals speak English" events can now trigger if one's a vassal of Britannia rather than England, and can trigger for the king/emperor as well, not just their vassals - The prestige you get from being a consort now scales with the tier of your spouse. Reduced the prestige to half. Now it ranges from 0.5/month from a baron to 2.5/month from an emperor - The capital duchy of a title, if held by the title holder, will under elective/tanistry law now always follow that title's succession, even if your heir is not playable for you. Counties, baronies, and other duchies will still revert to primogeniture in that case - Now possible to give temple holdings to children if that does not risk disinheriting them - No longer possible to appoint someone to your council when they're part of a faction that's sent you an ultimatum; this could be exploited to have them leave the faction, giving you an easy win in the faction war, or invalidating it entirely - When non-primary war participants die, their primary heir will now stay in the war if the inherited title ends up as their primary title, and it'd be possible for them to ask to join the war, or be called in by the war leader - When eating your prisoners, you can now attract a non-serious disease - No longer possible to join or start factions while you have a truce with your liege - Landed characters now pick a plot if they have none considerably more often; on average after 12 months

Not too much to add. Most of them should speak for themselves. Overall some nice changes and fixes.

To go along all of the quality of life additions we’ve made for 2.7, there are a bunch of smaller changes for the interface as well. Most of these should make the game slightly more user-friendly and easier to use:

################### # Interface ################### - The levy tooltip now shows all modifiers to levy size rather than just the influence of martial and the location of the holding compared to one's capital - The council job actions now say their name at the top of the tooltip even if the councilor is currently performing the action - "Favorite map mode" buttons will now be highlighted if the associated map mode is selected via the regular button rather than the custom button - The game will no longer occasionally change the selected tab for no apparent reason on the character screen if you have a non-ruler selected - When part of a faction revolt, the faction leader's units will look allied rather than neutral - Updated the "Grant Viceroyalty" interaction to include the "Include Vassal Titles" checkbox - Added support for accented ASCII characters and similar (E.G., é, å, ü) in the Character Finder's search field - The holding view will now show the influence of stewardship on the holding's tax income, and the income summary in the province view will acount for the stewardship bonus - Updated the Focus window to avoid some cases were it wouldn't explain why you are unable to select a given focus - Reaper's Due: The Hospital icon in the province view will now open the hospital buildings screen if the province has a hospital. If it does not, it will toggle the Extended Province View - The main menu music will now start playing if you unmute it using the main menu settings, even if you started the game with music muted - Fixed game rule titles sometimes going across two lines on the game rule screen for some languages - Updated the dynasty view for the Indian religions, as they would use the Christian dynasty ornament - Clicking the Nomad Agitation alert will now select the relevant province, not just pan to it - Made the list of titles in the character view slightly wider - The event where you ask your court physician to save your sickly child will now show the child's portrait - Known/backed plots now show their plot power in the UI entry itself, not just the tooltip - Clicking a council job action again will now cancel the job assignment - Recalling someone from their council action while having a job selected for assignment will now cancel job assignment - The border highlighting of selected CBs now takes precedence over selected provinces or titles - Updated the condition tooltips for the decisions "Mend the Great Schism" and "Restore the Roman Empire" to shorten the tooltip and make them easier to read - Now only possible to hit "Ready" in multiplayer when the save has finished loading - Fixed the character UI not fully updating if the character died while you were looking at them. Before this would result in the plot button still being available, as well as a number of other issues - The realm peace tooltip will now tell you how long it has been since you used realm peace if it is on cooldown - Build Time and Build Cost modifiers now show as percentages (E.G., -10.0% instead of -0.1) - Added a unique skin for the Republic view when playing as Indian - Added a sound for gaining a new trait - Event options will now list both trait icons and affected character portraits - Fixed the "Call to Arms" text sometimes not fitting the letter window - Changed the color of the mosaic at the top of the Muslim Clan/Nomad interface, to make it different from the Council interface - The tooltip for religion in the province window now provides the same info as the religion tooltip in the character religion - The title shields on the law page now no longer change order when you click any of them, instead making the selected one bigger - Interface shortcuts that require the SHIFT key to be used now more clearly indicate that's the case. In the past a capital letter shortcut meant SHIFT was used, but now it'll say for example "SHIFT+A" rather than just "A" - Removed "Show Commanders" choice in the Minor Titles View and changed the "Show Honorary Titles" to "Show Commanders Only" to only display commanders - Added new option to the Minor Titles View "Auto-assign Commanders", which will replace a commander automatically with the best available candidate whenever a commander dies - You no longer have to resign a commander first in order to replace them in the minor titles view - Switched the placement of the title shield and the voter stance for the council in the My/Liege Council tab, to keep consistency with other portraits - Fixed clicking on someone's primary title sometimes not taking you to their capital - Clicking on a character's plot on the character screen will now take you to the target of the plot - Fixed the decision to donate to the Knights of the Sun not having an icon - The religion screen will no longer show the title of the religious head if there is no religious head - The "Mod" and "Version" checkboxes in the multiplayer browser have been clarified to "Same Mods" and "Same Version" - Moved the scrollbar slightly in the different law tabs, to make them somewhat easier to see - Removed the "double" click sound you would get when clicking a province if the Extended Province View was opened already - Added a sound effect when turning the pages in the Chronicle - Added indicators for good and bad childhood traits in the Education Focus picker - Removed the additional important minor title portraits at top of the Council View - Made so the prisoner icon is now clickable and takes you to the imprisoner - Improved the tooltip for the "Revoke Vassal Title" plot - Updated character tooltip so it mentions whether you have educator/guardian (with name and location) and removed redundant tooltip that gave the same information - Educate character interaction tooltip now use Conclave description if Conclave is enabled

This is not the full changelog, mind you. There are still plenty of bug fixes and other things in the changelog that isn't listed here.

Read the original post


Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Crusader Kings II Development Diary Archive
Crusader Kings II - BjornB


Greetings fellow crusaders!

This dev diary will be rather short, as I won’t be talking about anything new and exciting. With us getting ever closer to a release (and before you ask: no, I will not tell you when it might be just yet), I thought it might be a good time to start highlighting some of the stuff we have in our changelog.

First off, some balance changes:
################### # Balance ################### - Minor clan revolt troops are no longer inherited, and the leader of the uprising now has more money, prestige, population and manpower as well as two sons to succeed him - If you grant a title and all titles below it to a child while following a religion that uses bishops, the temples will now have bishops generated rather than not get handed to the recipient - "Cultural Bonds" no longer causes an alliance, but instead allows other independent characters of the conqueror's culture to join them in defensive wars. The AI is likely to do this if their opinion of the defender is positive and they're not busy with wars of their own - Allowed vassals to press de jure claims against their fellow vassals again (though the AI won't) - You'll now lose some Threat if dying causes you to lose land - When the holder of a viceroyalty dies, they'll now be replaced in wars by their regular heir, not their liege - The "Ask to Leave Court" diplomatic interaction will now cause the character's spouses to leave as well, and has the same requirements of the spouses as the character being asked to leave - Increased the duration of the "War Taxes" modifier to five years (up from three), for completing the "Build a War Chest" Ambition - Overthrow Ruler will now give the ruler a claim on the title if they accept the demands - No longer possible to usurp titles from the vassals of a revolting vassal - Capitals can now be moved every 50 years rather than once per lifetime. Nomads still get to move it every 10 years - Merchant Republics with too few patricians will no longer draft people who are heir to a title to become patricians, since this risks disinheriting them - No longer possible to ask to join a war against someone you have a non-aggression pact with - The "make my court/vassals speak English" events can now trigger if one's a vassal of Britannia rather than England, and can trigger for the king/emperor as well, not just their vassals - The prestige you get from being a consort now scales with the tier of your spouse. Reduced the prestige to half. Now it ranges from 0.5/month from a baron to 2.5/month from an emperor - The capital duchy of a title, if held by the title holder, will under elective/tanistry law now always follow that title's succession, even if your heir is not playable for you. Counties, baronies, and other duchies will still revert to primogeniture in that case - Now possible to give temple holdings to children if that does not risk disinheriting them - No longer possible to appoint someone to your council when they're part of a faction that's sent you an ultimatum; this could be exploited to have them leave the faction, giving you an easy win in the faction war, or invalidating it entirely - When non-primary war participants die, their primary heir will now stay in the war if the inherited title ends up as their primary title, and it'd be possible for them to ask to join the war, or be called in by the war leader - When eating your prisoners, you can now attract a non-serious disease - No longer possible to join or start factions while you have a truce with your liege - Landed characters now pick a plot if they have none considerably more often; on average after 12 months

Not too much to add. Most of them should speak for themselves. Overall some nice changes and fixes.

To go along all of the quality of life additions we’ve made for 2.7, there are a bunch of smaller changes for the interface as well. Most of these should make the game slightly more user-friendly and easier to use:

################### # Interface ################### - The levy tooltip now shows all modifiers to levy size rather than just the influence of martial and the location of the holding compared to one's capital - The council job actions now say their name at the top of the tooltip even if the councilor is currently performing the action - "Favorite map mode" buttons will now be highlighted if the associated map mode is selected via the regular button rather than the custom button - The game will no longer occasionally change the selected tab for no apparent reason on the character screen if you have a non-ruler selected - When part of a faction revolt, the faction leader's units will look allied rather than neutral - Updated the "Grant Viceroyalty" interaction to include the "Include Vassal Titles" checkbox - Added support for accented ASCII characters and similar (E.G., é, å, ü) in the Character Finder's search field - The holding view will now show the influence of stewardship on the holding's tax income, and the income summary in the province view will acount for the stewardship bonus - Updated the Focus window to avoid some cases were it wouldn't explain why you are unable to select a given focus - Reaper's Due: The Hospital icon in the province view will now open the hospital buildings screen if the province has a hospital. If it does not, it will toggle the Extended Province View - The main menu music will now start playing if you unmute it using the main menu settings, even if you started the game with music muted - Fixed game rule titles sometimes going across two lines on the game rule screen for some languages - Updated the dynasty view for the Indian religions, as they would use the Christian dynasty ornament - Clicking the Nomad Agitation alert will now select the relevant province, not just pan to it - Made the list of titles in the character view slightly wider - The event where you ask your court physician to save your sickly child will now show the child's portrait - Known/backed plots now show their plot power in the UI entry itself, not just the tooltip - Clicking a council job action again will now cancel the job assignment - Recalling someone from their council action while having a job selected for assignment will now cancel job assignment - The border highlighting of selected CBs now takes precedence over selected provinces or titles - Updated the condition tooltips for the decisions "Mend the Great Schism" and "Restore the Roman Empire" to shorten the tooltip and make them easier to read - Now only possible to hit "Ready" in multiplayer when the save has finished loading - Fixed the character UI not fully updating if the character died while you were looking at them. Before this would result in the plot button still being available, as well as a number of other issues - The realm peace tooltip will now tell you how long it has been since you used realm peace if it is on cooldown - Build Time and Build Cost modifiers now show as percentages (E.G., -10.0% instead of -0.1) - Added a unique skin for the Republic view when playing as Indian - Added a sound for gaining a new trait - Event options will now list both trait icons and affected character portraits - Fixed the "Call to Arms" text sometimes not fitting the letter window - Changed the color of the mosaic at the top of the Muslim Clan/Nomad interface, to make it different from the Council interface - The tooltip for religion in the province window now provides the same info as the religion tooltip in the character religion - The title shields on the law page now no longer change order when you click any of them, instead making the selected one bigger - Interface shortcuts that require the SHIFT key to be used now more clearly indicate that's the case. In the past a capital letter shortcut meant SHIFT was used, but now it'll say for example "SHIFT+A" rather than just "A" - Removed "Show Commanders" choice in the Minor Titles View and changed the "Show Honorary Titles" to "Show Commanders Only" to only display commanders - Added new option to the Minor Titles View "Auto-assign Commanders", which will replace a commander automatically with the best available candidate whenever a commander dies - You no longer have to resign a commander first in order to replace them in the minor titles view - Switched the placement of the title shield and the voter stance for the council in the My/Liege Council tab, to keep consistency with other portraits - Fixed clicking on someone's primary title sometimes not taking you to their capital - Clicking on a character's plot on the character screen will now take you to the target of the plot - Fixed the decision to donate to the Knights of the Sun not having an icon - The religion screen will no longer show the title of the religious head if there is no religious head - The "Mod" and "Version" checkboxes in the multiplayer browser have been clarified to "Same Mods" and "Same Version" - Moved the scrollbar slightly in the different law tabs, to make them somewhat easier to see - Removed the "double" click sound you would get when clicking a province if the Extended Province View was opened already - Added a sound effect when turning the pages in the Chronicle - Added indicators for good and bad childhood traits in the Education Focus picker - Removed the additional important minor title portraits at top of the Council View - Made so the prisoner icon is now clickable and takes you to the imprisoner - Improved the tooltip for the "Revoke Vassal Title" plot - Updated character tooltip so it mentions whether you have educator/guardian (with name and location) and removed redundant tooltip that gave the same information - Educate character interaction tooltip now use Conclave description if Conclave is enabled

This is not the full changelog, mind you. There are still plenty of bug fixes and other things in the changelog that isn't listed here.

Read the original post


Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Crusader Kings II Development Diary Archive
Crusader Kings II - BjornB


Greetings everyone!

Today I’m here to talk about one of my favorite parts of our games (a very important one too) and something I’ve been working on. I’m going to talk about the map.

Looking at the work [USER=18587]@Trin Tragula[/user] does for the map on EU4, I started thinking. Why don’t we do something similar to CK2? So I went looking at the map for various possible improvements. I have not added anything new in terms of provinces or areas. Instead, I wanted to focus on improving the existing map and give it some needed polish.

The CK2 map is not perfect, so there are a quite a few places to look at. But I wanted to start with the terrain and topology. As there several places on the map that, frankly, look out of place. As such, I swooped the map of the most hideous offenders. Several lakes and most major rivers are now much smoother, avoiding ugly and sharp edges. The Ural Mountains are now mostly impassable.

Below you can see a few examples.

Ural mountains:


Lake Baikal, old and new:



The Ganges, old and new:




I also took this opportunity to make some smaller de jure adjustments (I know that not everyone will agree with me on these). These are done for gameplay reasons and considerations. The largest change will be for the kingdom of Cumania. Which I broke off slightly by giving the duchies of Itil and Sarkel to Khazaria, along with Crimea and Cherson (so Taurica no longer holds any de jure land).

A small shift in the kingdoms of the ERE. Greece is a very large kingdom, so I made it slightly smaller by moving Samos and Cibyrrhaeot to Anatolia, and in turn, made Anatolia stay close to the same size by making the duchies of Trebizond and Armeniacon de jure to the kingdom of Trebizond.




Last, and definitely not least. Let’s take a look at Hungary and the Danube. The first thing I did was to redraw parts of the Danube to make it more accurate (as we all know, the old Danube was not quite where it was supposed to be). It now flows much closer to its actual location. The counties along the river have been adjusted accordingly. Pecs, for example, is now located on the correct side of it. The rest of Hungary has also been adjusted so that the kingdom is placed within the Carpathians.

Instead of taking my word for it, you can see for yourself in the screenshot below, in which you can see the updated coast of Croatia as well.



Old Danube for comparison




Does this make the map perfect? No. But I do think it’s a step in the right direction and an improvement over the previous one.

Let me know what you think!

Complete list of changes
- The Ural mountains are now impassable
- Removed the duplicate island of Kolguyev, in the Barents Sea
- The most northern part of the Onega is now properly filled with water
- The mountains in southern Abyssinia no longer stretches onto the frame of the map
- Fixed an issue in the lower part of the river Don, where the river bed would go above water level
- Removed a bunch of trees that were placed in major rivers
- The terrain around lake Balkhash has been smoothed, to avoid sharp/rough edges
- The terrain around lake Baikal has also been smoothed, no longer will the steep cliffs surround the lake
- The Indus and the Ganges have both been cleaned up:
- The terrain now matches the actual river
- Smaller rivers no longer flow so far into the major rivers
- The borders of the rivers has been made smoother to avoid sharp/rough edges
- The Danube has been redrawn, to better represent its actual location (!)
- The county of Constantinople is now only located on the western side of the Bosphorus, merging the eastern side into the county of Nikaea, connected with a strait
- The duchies of Samos and Cibyrrhaeot are now de jure part of the kingdom of Anatolia, rather than Greece
- The duchies of Trebizond and Armeniacon is now de jure part of the kingdom of Trebizond, rather than Anatolia
- Removed the kingdom of Taurica
- The duchy of Crimea is now de jure kingdom of Khazaria
- The duchy of Cherson is now de jure kingdom of Khazaria
- The coastal counties of Croatia and Serbia have been adjusted and moved slightly to better represent their actual locations
- The eastern counties of Hungary and the surrounding area has been moved and adjusted in order to properly place the kingdom within the Carpathian mountains
- Changed the name of b_mirabel to "Majdal Yaba"
- b_mirabel will be named "Mirabel" if ruled by most European cultures
- b_mirabel will be named "Antipatris" if ruled by Byzantine cultures
- The county of Tobruk is now only located along the coast
- Moved the northern part of c_dalarna to c_herjedalen
- Moved k_venice to de jure e_italy

Read the original post


Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Crusader Kings II Development Diary Archive
Crusader Kings II - BjornB


Greetings everyone!

Today I’m here to talk about one of my favorite parts of our games (a very important one too) and something I’ve been working on. I’m going to talk about the map.

Looking at the work [USER=18587]@Trin Tragula[/user] does for the map on EU4, I started thinking. Why don’t we do something similar to CK2? So I went looking at the map for various possible improvements. I have not added anything new in terms of provinces or areas. Instead, I wanted to focus on improving the existing map and give it some needed polish.

The CK2 map is not perfect, so there are a quite a few places to look at. But I wanted to start with the terrain and topology. As there several places on the map that, frankly, look out of place. As such, I swooped the map of the most hideous offenders. Several lakes and most major rivers are now much smoother, avoiding ugly and sharp edges. The Ural Mountains are now mostly impassable.

Below you can see a few examples.

Ural mountains:


Lake Baikal, old and new:



The Ganges, old and new:




I also took this opportunity to make some smaller de jure adjustments (I know that not everyone will agree with me on these). These are done for gameplay reasons and considerations. The largest change will be for the kingdom of Cumania. Which I broke off slightly by giving the duchies of Itil and Sarkel to Khazaria, along with Crimea and Cherson (so Taurica no longer holds any de jure land).

A small shift in the kingdoms of the ERE. Greece is a very large kingdom, so I made it slightly smaller by moving Samos and Cibyrrhaeot to Anatolia, and in turn, made Anatolia stay close to the same size by making the duchies of Trebizond and Armeniacon de jure to the kingdom of Trebizond.




Last, and definitely not least. Let’s take a look at Hungary and the Danube. The first thing I did was to redraw parts of the Danube to make it more accurate (as we all know, the old Danube was not quite where it was supposed to be). It now flows much closer to its actual location. The counties along the river have been adjusted accordingly. Pecs, for example, is now located on the correct side of it. The rest of Hungary has also been adjusted so that the kingdom is placed within the Carpathians.

Instead of taking my word for it, you can see for yourself in the screenshot below, in which you can see the updated coast of Croatia as well.



Old Danube for comparison




Does this make the map perfect? No. But I do think it’s a step in the right direction and an improvement over the previous one.

Let me know what you think!

Complete list of changes
- The Ural mountains are now impassable
- Removed the duplicate island of Kolguyev, in the Barents Sea
- The most northern part of the Onega is now properly filled with water
- The mountains in southern Abyssinia no longer stretches onto the frame of the map
- Fixed an issue in the lower part of the river Don, where the river bed would go above water level
- Removed a bunch of trees that were placed in major rivers
- The terrain around lake Balkhash has been smoothed, to avoid sharp/rough edges
- The terrain around lake Baikal has also been smoothed, no longer will the steep cliffs surround the lake
- The Indus and the Ganges have both been cleaned up:
- The terrain now matches the actual river
- Smaller rivers no longer flow so far into the major rivers
- The borders of the rivers has been made smoother to avoid sharp/rough edges
- The Danube has been redrawn, to better represent its actual location (!)
- The county of Constantinople is now only located on the western side of the Bosphorus, merging the eastern side into the county of Nikaea, connected with a strait
- The duchies of Samos and Cibyrrhaeot are now de jure part of the kingdom of Anatolia, rather than Greece
- The duchies of Trebizond and Armeniacon is now de jure part of the kingdom of Trebizond, rather than Anatolia
- Removed the kingdom of Taurica
- The duchy of Crimea is now de jure kingdom of Khazaria
- The duchy of Cherson is now de jure kingdom of Khazaria
- The coastal counties of Croatia and Serbia have been adjusted and moved slightly to better represent their actual locations
- The eastern counties of Hungary and the surrounding area has been moved and adjusted in order to properly place the kingdom within the Carpathian mountains
- Changed the name of b_mirabel to "Majdal Yaba"
- b_mirabel will be named "Mirabel" if ruled by most European cultures
- b_mirabel will be named "Antipatris" if ruled by Byzantine cultures
- The county of Tobruk is now only located along the coast
- Moved the northern part of c_dalarna to c_herjedalen
- Moved k_venice to de jure e_italy

Read the original post


Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Crusader Kings II Development Diary Archive
Jan 30, 2017
Crusader Kings II - BjornB


Hello everyone, I’m Gwenael Tranvouez, the Tech Lead on CK2, and I’m here to introduce a new feature for this Dev Diary.

Don’t you hate it when you’re start a war against a neighbour, counting on your allies to come and help and they all decide the best idea is to attach to your army so that you’ll take attrition? So do we!

So we’ve taken another leaf from EU4’s big book of tricks and we’ve added Ally Orders. When you lead a war, you can tell other participants what to do:
  • Hunt down enemy armies
  • Or focus on sieging provinces.
  • Attach to a specific army
  • Siege a specific province
The first two orders are given through a new tab in the military screen, which also summarizes what orders all your allies have:



The last two are given through a new button on the unit or province screen:





As long as they’re in the war, your allies will try their best to fulfill your wishes, reverting to their default behavior when unable to comply. Unless, of course, they got bigger fish to fry, such as a big revolt in their own territory, or their own war to focus on.

The tooltip for AI units also mention what orders their owners have:




We’ve also improved the AI’s goal selection in wars, and general pathing so they’re more useful to have around in general.

That's it for this week.

Read the original post


Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Crusader Kings II Development Diary Archive
Jan 30, 2017
Crusader Kings II - BjornB


Hello everyone, I’m Gwenael Tranvouez, the Tech Lead on CK2, and I’m here to introduce a new feature for this Dev Diary.

Don’t you hate it when you’re start a war against a neighbour, counting on your allies to come and help and they all decide the best idea is to attach to your army so that you’ll take attrition? So do we!

So we’ve taken another leaf from EU4’s big book of tricks and we’ve added Ally Orders. When you lead a war, you can tell other participants what to do:
  • Hunt down enemy armies
  • Or focus on sieging provinces.
  • Attach to a specific army
  • Siege a specific province
The first two orders are given through a new tab in the military screen, which also summarizes what orders all your allies have:



The last two are given through a new button on the unit or province screen:





As long as they’re in the war, your allies will try their best to fulfill your wishes, reverting to their default behavior when unable to comply. Unless, of course, they got bigger fish to fry, such as a big revolt in their own territory, or their own war to focus on.

The tooltip for AI units also mention what orders their owners have:




We’ve also improved the AI’s goal selection in wars, and general pathing so they’re more useful to have around in general.

That's it for this week.

Read the original post


Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Crusader Kings II Development Diary Archive
Crusader Kings II - BjornB


Good afternoon. I’m Magne Skjæran, and when you last heard from me I was talking about our quality of life improvements to the Intrigue screen. I’ve had a great time on the CK2 team since then, and today I’ve got the opportunity to share with you further quality of improvements we’ve made. Some were already done or mostly done when that dev diary were written, while some were in the works, and a handful inspired by comments from members of the community to the dev diary itself. I’d like to thank everyone who suggested further improvements; while not all were implemented, they were at the very least considered.

Today’s quality of life changes are to many different parts of the game rather than having a singular focus. There’s quite a few of them, so we better get started.

First up is a feature inspired by EU4: a battle indicator.
This will show up whenever a unit entering a province (or two units, if they’re entering the same province) will cause a battle to occur. Hovering over it will show the date it starts, and what two realms will be fighting. If any bonuses or penalties apply (terrain or river/strait/naval landing), this will be shown as well as who it will be applied to.
This should help ensure that you don’t end up in combat without expecting it, though note that it does obey the fog of war rules, so it won’t warn you if an unseen enemy is approaching the province you’re entering!



Next up, the garrison tooltip is now more helpful.

Before it’d only show the garrison, but now it also shows the levy, and the garrison+levy since this is the number you have to beat in order to actually be able to siege the holding:



Further, we’ve added an “Embark All” button for when you’ve got multiple units selected, even if they’re spread across many different provinces. This will load as many as possible of the units selected onto the fleets in their provinces, then select the loaded fleets so you can easily merge them together:



The game rules screen has also seen some improvement. First of all, the game rules are now categorized, allowing you to select an individual category so that you can easily find the rule you’re looking for. Second, you now have four save slots for game rules, allowing you to have different pre-sets for easy switching between campaigns:



Mirroring our “prisoner filters” feature, we’ve also made some improvements to the Character Finder.
First, we’ve added a “reset filters” button just like the prisoner filter screen has.
Second, like we’ve done for the game rules, we’ve added the ability to save up to four character finder configurations.
Third, we’ve added the ability to filter by diplomatic range.
Fourth, we’ve added the ability to filter by whether characters will join your court.
Fifth, the icon indicating whether characters will join your court will now show if giving them a bribe gift would be enough to change their response from “no” to “yes”.
Sixth, the “Great House” filter now also lets you filter out anyone of your dynasty rather than just the inverse.
Fun fact that most people don’t seem to know: You’ve always been able to search for claims; just put in the name of the title you want to find claimants for.
Note that the art is a work in progress; the final version will definitely not have buttons floating outside the window:



Further, for owners of Conclave we’ve improved the councilor selection screen a little bit. Each candidate will now have an icon representing their likely voting pattern, and hovering over it will show everything making each possible pattern less or more likely. Note that since the act of appointing someone will change a number of factors, the most likely position isn’t completely guaranteed to be the position they take, but since the factors changed are almost entirely positive it is exceedingly rare to end up with a worse position than indicated:



Another nice feature for Conclave owners is the ability to send laws to council consideration. This will show you how your council would vote without you having to have an actual vote. If you’re satisfied with the result, you can then start the actual vote from the same screen:



Also new on this screen is that it shows how the members of the council are voting, and hovering over the icon will show why they’re voting that way, making it simpler to figure out how you can influence their vote:



Beyond this, there’s one more Conclave QoL improvement: the childhood education screen will now show you which traits the child has got that positively or negatively influence the different education choices, so you no longer need to cross-reference the child’s traits with the description of each education choice:



One more small improvement has also been made to the Intrigue screen. Known and backed plots will now show their plot power on the plot entry itself rather than requiring you to hover over the plot:



Another new feature I know many fans, me included, have long wanted is the ability to randomize the name of newborn children. This has now been added, with four options: Randomize (uses the culture’s naming list), Name after Parent, Name after Grandparent, and Name after Random Ancestor. Note that the art for this is not yet done; the final version won’t look like this:



Now there’s only one last QoL change I’d like to illustrate: commander auto-assignment.
The Minor Titles tab now has a checkbox to auto-assign commanders. This will ensure you always have all your commander slots filled out with the best commanders available in your court. It will of course obey your restrictions on councillors to not lead armies.
To also make commander assignment a bit easier, the old “show commanders” checkbox has been changed to “show only commanders”. Since commanders are at the very bottom of the list anyway, hiding them didn’t make too much sense:



As I said, this is the last QoL change I wanted to illustrate, but it doesn’t cover every QoL change we’ve made. There’s numerous other small improvements made, and this I thought best to simply copy from the changelog rather than spend yet more pages illustrating. So here’s close to all QoL changes from the changelog:

- Reaper's Due: The Hospital icon in the province view will now open the hospital buildings screen if the province has a hospital. If it does not, it will toggle the Extended Province View - Clicking the Nomad Agitation alert will now select the relevant province, not just pan to it - The event where you ask your court physician to save your sickly child will now show the child's portrait - Clicking a council action again will now cancel job assignment - Recalling someone from their council action while having a job selected for assignment will now cancel job assignment - The border highlighting of selected CBs now takes precedence over selected provinces or titles - Fixed retinues in getting split apart into sub-units upon succession if the dynastic successor and the successor for the primary title aren't the same person - Fixed scrollbars not being visible in some cases where they should be - Updated the condition tooltips for the decisions "Mend the Great Schism" and "Restore the Roman Empire" to shorten the tooltip and make them easier to read - Now only possible to hit "Ready" in multiplayer when the save has finished loading - Fixed the character UI not fully updating if the character died while you were looking at them. Before this would result in the plot button still being available, as well as a number of other issues - Build Time and Build Cost modifiers now show as percentages (E.G., -10.0% instead of -0.1) - Fixed the Declare War interaction not telling you when realm peace is stopping you from declaring war; instead being grayed out with no explanation - Fixed the "pause" message setting having no effect for the close family and special interest characters - Fixed the "pause" message setting not working for low priority and log alerts. It will still do nothing for disabled alerts - Event options will now list both trait icons and affected character portraits - Added alert for councillors having no job assigned to them - The tooltip for religion in the province window now provides the same info as the religion tooltip in the character religion - The title shields on the law page now no longer change order when you click any of them, instead making the selected one bigger - Fixed councillor actions continuing to be greyed out if the reassignment cooldown expires while the council screen is open - Fixed the predicted morale gain for units almost always being very slightly wrong - Fixed clicking on someone's primary title sometimes not taking you to their capital - Clicking on a character's plot on the character screen will now take you to the target of the plot - Made so prisoner icon is now clickable and takes you to the imprisoner - The "Mod" and "Version" checkboxes in the multiplayer browser have been clarified to "Same Mods" and "Same Version" - Improved the tooltip for the "Revoke Vassal Title" plot

It is possible I’ve missed some, or that some things you’d consider a QoL change I simply considered a “bug fix”, but this should certainly cover most.

And with that, I leave you for today. Hopefully you enjoyed this DD as much as I enjoyed writing it.
If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in this thread, though note that I can rarely say all that much about potential future features, but I can give my thoughts on why I (or someone else) implemented something a specific way.

Read the original post


Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Crusader Kings II Development Diary Archive
Crusader Kings II - BjornB


Good afternoon. I’m Magne Skjæran, and when you last heard from me I was talking about our quality of life improvements to the Intrigue screen. I’ve had a great time on the CK2 team since then, and today I’ve got the opportunity to share with you further quality of improvements we’ve made. Some were already done or mostly done when that dev diary were written, while some were in the works, and a handful inspired by comments from members of the community to the dev diary itself. I’d like to thank everyone who suggested further improvements; while not all were implemented, they were at the very least considered.

Today’s quality of life changes are to many different parts of the game rather than having a singular focus. There’s quite a few of them, so we better get started.

First up is a feature inspired by EU4: a battle indicator.
This will show up whenever a unit entering a province (or two units, if they’re entering the same province) will cause a battle to occur. Hovering over it will show the date it starts, and what two realms will be fighting. If any bonuses or penalties apply (terrain or river/strait/naval landing), this will be shown as well as who it will be applied to.
This should help ensure that you don’t end up in combat without expecting it, though note that it does obey the fog of war rules, so it won’t warn you if an unseen enemy is approaching the province you’re entering!



Next up, the garrison tooltip is now more helpful.

Before it’d only show the garrison, but now it also shows the levy, and the garrison+levy since this is the number you have to beat in order to actually be able to siege the holding:



Further, we’ve added an “Embark All” button for when you’ve got multiple units selected, even if they’re spread across many different provinces. This will load as many as possible of the units selected onto the fleets in their provinces, then select the loaded fleets so you can easily merge them together:



The game rules screen has also seen some improvement. First of all, the game rules are now categorized, allowing you to select an individual category so that you can easily find the rule you’re looking for. Second, you now have four save slots for game rules, allowing you to have different pre-sets for easy switching between campaigns:



Mirroring our “prisoner filters” feature, we’ve also made some improvements to the Character Finder.
First, we’ve added a “reset filters” button just like the prisoner filter screen has.
Second, like we’ve done for the game rules, we’ve added the ability to save up to four character finder configurations.
Third, we’ve added the ability to filter by diplomatic range.
Fourth, we’ve added the ability to filter by whether characters will join your court.
Fifth, the icon indicating whether characters will join your court will now show if giving them a bribe gift would be enough to change their response from “no” to “yes”.
Sixth, the “Great House” filter now also lets you filter out anyone of your dynasty rather than just the inverse.
Fun fact that most people don’t seem to know: You’ve always been able to search for claims; just put in the name of the title you want to find claimants for.
Note that the art is a work in progress; the final version will definitely not have buttons floating outside the window:



Further, for owners of Conclave we’ve improved the councilor selection screen a little bit. Each candidate will now have an icon representing their likely voting pattern, and hovering over it will show everything making each possible pattern less or more likely. Note that since the act of appointing someone will change a number of factors, the most likely position isn’t completely guaranteed to be the position they take, but since the factors changed are almost entirely positive it is exceedingly rare to end up with a worse position than indicated:



Another nice feature for Conclave owners is the ability to send laws to council consideration. This will show you how your council would vote without you having to have an actual vote. If you’re satisfied with the result, you can then start the actual vote from the same screen:



Also new on this screen is that it shows how the members of the council are voting, and hovering over the icon will show why they’re voting that way, making it simpler to figure out how you can influence their vote:



Beyond this, there’s one more Conclave QoL improvement: the childhood education screen will now show you which traits the child has got that positively or negatively influence the different education choices, so you no longer need to cross-reference the child’s traits with the description of each education choice:



One more small improvement has also been made to the Intrigue screen. Known and backed plots will now show their plot power on the plot entry itself rather than requiring you to hover over the plot:



Another new feature I know many fans, me included, have long wanted is the ability to randomize the name of newborn children. This has now been added, with four options: Randomize (uses the culture’s naming list), Name after Parent, Name after Grandparent, and Name after Random Ancestor. Note that the art for this is not yet done; the final version won’t look like this:



Now there’s only one last QoL change I’d like to illustrate: commander auto-assignment.
The Minor Titles tab now has a checkbox to auto-assign commanders. This will ensure you always have all your commander slots filled out with the best commanders available in your court. It will of course obey your restrictions on councillors to not lead armies.
To also make commander assignment a bit easier, the old “show commanders” checkbox has been changed to “show only commanders”. Since commanders are at the very bottom of the list anyway, hiding them didn’t make too much sense:



As I said, this is the last QoL change I wanted to illustrate, but it doesn’t cover every QoL change we’ve made. There’s numerous other small improvements made, and this I thought best to simply copy from the changelog rather than spend yet more pages illustrating. So here’s close to all QoL changes from the changelog:

- Reaper's Due: The Hospital icon in the province view will now open the hospital buildings screen if the province has a hospital. If it does not, it will toggle the Extended Province View - Clicking the Nomad Agitation alert will now select the relevant province, not just pan to it - The event where you ask your court physician to save your sickly child will now show the child's portrait - Clicking a council action again will now cancel job assignment - Recalling someone from their council action while having a job selected for assignment will now cancel job assignment - The border highlighting of selected CBs now takes precedence over selected provinces or titles - Fixed retinues in getting split apart into sub-units upon succession if the dynastic successor and the successor for the primary title aren't the same person - Fixed scrollbars not being visible in some cases where they should be - Updated the condition tooltips for the decisions "Mend the Great Schism" and "Restore the Roman Empire" to shorten the tooltip and make them easier to read - Now only possible to hit "Ready" in multiplayer when the save has finished loading - Fixed the character UI not fully updating if the character died while you were looking at them. Before this would result in the plot button still being available, as well as a number of other issues - Build Time and Build Cost modifiers now show as percentages (E.G., -10.0% instead of -0.1) - Fixed the Declare War interaction not telling you when realm peace is stopping you from declaring war; instead being grayed out with no explanation - Fixed the "pause" message setting having no effect for the close family and special interest characters - Fixed the "pause" message setting not working for low priority and log alerts. It will still do nothing for disabled alerts - Event options will now list both trait icons and affected character portraits - Added alert for councillors having no job assigned to them - The tooltip for religion in the province window now provides the same info as the religion tooltip in the character religion - The title shields on the law page now no longer change order when you click any of them, instead making the selected one bigger - Fixed councillor actions continuing to be greyed out if the reassignment cooldown expires while the council screen is open - Fixed the predicted morale gain for units almost always being very slightly wrong - Fixed clicking on someone's primary title sometimes not taking you to their capital - Clicking on a character's plot on the character screen will now take you to the target of the plot - Made so prisoner icon is now clickable and takes you to the imprisoner - The "Mod" and "Version" checkboxes in the multiplayer browser have been clarified to "Same Mods" and "Same Version" - Improved the tooltip for the "Revoke Vassal Title" plot

It is possible I’ve missed some, or that some things you’d consider a QoL change I simply considered a “bug fix”, but this should certainly cover most.

And with that, I leave you for today. Hopefully you enjoyed this DD as much as I enjoyed writing it.
If you have any questions, I’ll be happy to answer them in this thread, though note that I can rarely say all that much about potential future features, but I can give my thoughts on why I (or someone else) implemented something a specific way.

Read the original post


Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Crusader Kings II Development Diary Archive
Jan 16, 2017
Crusader Kings II - BjornB


Hello all, it’s time for another Society reveal: This week we’ll talk about the Hermetic society. Hermeticism is based primarily upon writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus ("Thrice Great"), who was said to know the three parts of the wisdom of the universe.The three parts are alchemy, astrology, and theurgy.



In game terms, the Hermetics are an open society joinable by members of the abrahamic religions, as well as Zoroastrians and Zun pagans (OK, and Hellenic, should you manage to play as one). Their primary attribute is Learning. Their Powers and Missions tend to involve earlier scientific experimentation combined with mysticism and a dash of Theurgy. They will often reward you with technology points or artifacts.

There is some overlap between the Hermetic society and Way of Life’s Scholarship focus. As a member you will be able to build an observatory, just as characters with the focus can, and once it is built you will be able to interact with it further to observe the skies. Not only that, Hermetic members are encouraged to build a laboratory for additional experimentation.



Other powers and abilities include attempting to divine the future using Scrying, making Horoscopes for your children, experimenting with drugs and medical techniques, and eventually writing your magnum opus - a book of lore and knowledge that you enshrine for the ages.



That’s all for now, but remember to watch the Medieval Monday stream at 1600 CET today, followed by Three Kings at 1700.

Read the original post


Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Crusader Kings II Development Diary Archive
Jan 16, 2017
Crusader Kings II - BjornB


Hello all, it’s time for another Society reveal: This week we’ll talk about the Hermetic society. Hermeticism is based primarily upon writings attributed to Hermes Trismegistus ("Thrice Great"), who was said to know the three parts of the wisdom of the universe.The three parts are alchemy, astrology, and theurgy.



In game terms, the Hermetics are an open society joinable by members of the abrahamic religions, as well as Zoroastrians and Zun pagans (OK, and Hellenic, should you manage to play as one). Their primary attribute is Learning. Their Powers and Missions tend to involve earlier scientific experimentation combined with mysticism and a dash of Theurgy. They will often reward you with technology points or artifacts.

There is some overlap between the Hermetic society and Way of Life’s Scholarship focus. As a member you will be able to build an observatory, just as characters with the focus can, and once it is built you will be able to interact with it further to observe the skies. Not only that, Hermetic members are encouraged to build a laboratory for additional experimentation.



Other powers and abilities include attempting to divine the future using Scrying, making Horoscopes for your children, experimenting with drugs and medical techniques, and eventually writing your magnum opus - a book of lore and knowledge that you enshrine for the ages.



That’s all for now, but remember to watch the Medieval Monday stream at 1600 CET today, followed by Three Kings at 1700.

Read the original post


Useful links
Official Website
Crusader Kings II Wiki
Crusader Kings II Development Diary Archive
...