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:

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:


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

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:

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:


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

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

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

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

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

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:


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

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:


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

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

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