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

Key features:

• Start a game at any point between 1066 and 1337 and play until 1453
  
• Pick a Christian lord and make sure his dynasty survives as you play a succession of his descendants through the ages
  
• Gain Prestige for every successive character you play, furthering the glory of your Dynasty
  
• Expand your feudal domain - and keep it from falling apart
  
• Unravel the plots of your courtiers and vassals, each with their own opinions and agendas
  
• Take up the Cross and fight the Moor, the Heathen and the Heretic.
  
• Defend against the onslaught of the Mongol Horde
  
• Struggle with the Pope for control of the bishops
  
• Relive the Middle Ages with up to 32 other players in a competitive multiplayer mode
  

• OS: Ubuntu 16.04 x64
• Processor: IntelR PentiumR IV 2.4 GHz or AMD 3500+Memory: 4 GB Hard disk space: 2 Gb Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 6750 / NVIDIA GeForce 320 / NVIDIA GeForce> 9600 or higher. 1024MB graphics memory required.
• Memory: 4 GB Hard disk space: 2 Gb Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 6750 / NVIDIA GeForce 320 / NVIDIA GeForce> 9600 or higher. 1024MB graphics memory required.