Good afternoon. I’m Magne “Meneth” Skjæran, programmer on CK2, and I’ve once more been let out of my cage to write a dev diary for you guys. In the past I’ve written diaries about modding, optimization, quality of life, and some filler diaries over the summer, and today I’m returning to one of those topics: quality of life.
Back in 2.7, we added a number of quality of life improvements, which I had the honor of writing the dev diaries about. These changes proved hugely popular, so we thought we’d try to repeat it for 2.8. Our first step towards this was the Rally Points feature that will be included in Jade Dragon, but we decided to also add a bunch of free functionality.
So without further ado, let’s get started.
If you’ve ever had multiple artifacts of the same type, you have almost certainly felt the tedium involved in replacing an equipped artifact. First you had to unequip it, and only then could you equip something else into the slot.
We’ve simplified this by making “Equip” available even if a slot is filled; it’ll simply unequip whatever is in the slot first to make room. For mods that have slots that can take more items than one, it’ll unequip the first item it finds that uses that slot.
Another common frustration with artifacts is that the amazing weapon you just spent a fortune on can simply randomly disappear during succession. We’ve now eliminated destruction on succession for all equipped artifacts. Only artifacts that aren’t equipped now have a chance of being destroyed. Note that this does not apply when artifacts are inherited by a character’s liege as a last resort; then even equipped artifacts can perish.
One last frustration with regards to artifact is that upon succession, your heir just ignores what you had equipped, and instead what they already had equipped takes precedence. We’ve now changed this so that your heir will attempt to equip anything you had equipped, unequipping their own equipment if necessary to make room.
Now let’s move onto a different topic: the character screen.
I’m afraid it still looks the same, but we’ve made it slightly nicer to work with.
First of all, when you select a landed character, their realm will get glowing borders on the map, making it much easier to tell where that quarrelsome duke is actually located.
Further, we’ve long had a variety of status icons. Back in 2.7, we made the “prison” icon take you to whoever is keeping the character captive. We’ve now applied the same idea to a few other status icons:
- Job action: This will now pan to where the councillor is performing the action
- Guardian: This will now take you to the guardian’s character screen
- Leading troops: This will now pan to the army in question, and select it if it is one of yours
- The character portrait itself: If you click the character you’ve selected once more, you’ll now pan to their location
One brand-new addition to the character screen is the “Restrict Marriage” checkbox. Some of you may have already seen this on last week’s stream.
For your children and grandchildren, you can now choose to disable the marriage AI so that they don’t get into marriages you don’t want. However, note that they may still marry by event, so you better not wait too long to arrange a proper marriage.
To help you do that, you can now also arrange marriages on their behalf as long as “Restrict Marriage” can be enabled.
Since this is an incredibly powerful tool, it does come with some restrictions. First of all, it can only be used on your children and grandchildren.
Second, they have to be your vassals or below, or courtiers in your court or that of a vassal or below.
Third, they cannot have been landed for more than 10 years. After being landed for such a long time they no longer accept their parent or grandparent interfering with their marriage.
Overall, this removes one of the big reasons why players often refrain from landing their children, and provides the control you need to ensure the continued greatness of your dynasty.
We’ve also added the line of succession to every title screen, showing you who stands to inherit, instead of having to search for the characters based on the title’s tooltip.
Note that this art is not final; it’s simply an example of my amazing programmer art.
Finally, we have one last change: The Proselytize council action has been made easier to use. It now highlights provinces of the wrong religion in blue, and puts what religion it is in the tooltip if you hover over it. Foreign rulers that you can convert are now also highlighted in red.
This system can also be used by modders to define any color scheme they want based on the target province and the ruler ordering the job action.
That’s all for today. If you have other ideas for quality of life improvements we would be happy to hear them, but we cannot promise that we will have the time to implement any of them in 2.8.
Useful links Official Website Crusader Kings II Wiki Crusader Kings II Development Diary Archive