Some of the Quality of Life improvements coming with the Azure free patch: Raise only Men-at-Arms, Game Rules Presets, and Character Search Presets! Read our Dev Diary #59 - Fantastic presets and where to save them
To see the images, please visit our forums or website. Hello friends, Isn't it satisfying when things just work smoothly? If you agree then this Dev Diary will be right down your alley. Im one of the jolly UX designers working on CK3 and today Im very excited to give you a sneak peek of some of the quality of life improvements we have in store for the Azure free patch. We wanted to focus on some of the requests you've brought up, so weve worked to find organic ways to implement these in the game. While we cant address all at once in a single patch, we still wanted to make some meaningful adjustments that will improve your time spent as medieval rulers, master strategists, and efficient trackers. Keep on reading to understand this last one. Today Ill be covering Raise Men-at-Arms, Game Rules Presets, and Character Search Presets. Raise only Men-at-Arms We had already mentioned that now you will be able to start your games with contingent Men-at-Arms regiments, but these troops have another nifty trick under their sleeves. Now you will be able to raise only Men-at-Arms, allowing you to subdue your enemies without having to bother your levies. Quite a power move, right? We know its dangerous to go adventuring alone, so raising Men-at-Arms will also raise your knights along with them. This ensures that you have a perfectly capable army to take on different challenges. This is how it works; you will find a button that allows you to raise only Men at Arms in your Military menu, clearly labeled Raise all Men-at-Arms. This button will also be present when selecting Rally Points. Hopefully, this will give you more freedom when planning the perfect military strategy. [Image of the Raise all Men-at-Arms action] Game Rules presets We all have different playstyles and sometimes its nice to spice things up by changing up the rules a bit. Sometimes we want to ask the Mongols to hold their horses and stay at home by turning off the Mongol Invasions, or maybe you want to see if you can withstand yearly visits from your friendly neighbors, the Norse invaders. To allow you to quickly change the rules, now you can save rules presets. To create your Game Rules presets, all you need to do is set the specific combination of rules that you want, and then click the save button at the top of the window. Doing this will open up a secondary window that lets you name, and save your presets. Loading the presets is very straightforward, all you need to do is to select the desired preset from the dropdown menu at the top of the window. [Image of the Game Rules Presets being saved] Character Search presets I said that the Azure patch will improve your tracking skills, and this is thanks to the introduction of Character Search Presets. Much like Game Rules Presets, the idea is to allow you to save different combinations of search filters into presets you can easily select. You can save and load presets by using the 2 new buttons youll find at the top of the search filters window. That means that if you find yourself constantly searching for a specific mix of traits or any other search criteria, then keeping tabs on them will be much easier. [Image of the new Character Search Preset buttons] While this feature is very useful to streamline the process of recurrent searches with the same criteria, it still comes with some limitations, we are not able to save the dynamic objects in the filter (Dynasty, House and Custom Faith). Thats all for today, I sincerely hope these quality of life improvements help you try other gameplay styles and that character search presets will make it easier for you to find that special someone somewhere in this fantastic medieval world. Thanks for reading! Stay tuned for future updates on the Azure patch. Until next time!