Hey again everybody! Happy Wednesday. Today we’re going to be sharing some miscellaneous quality of life features coming within 1.4, particularly with the user interface and usability. There’s a lot of small but fun bits and pieces to cover, so let’s just go one by one.
The road builder tool has received some love. By default, the tool will find the best path for Proximity between two Locations and build all possible Roads, as it did before. But now you can now use set it to skip sections where Rivers or Maritime connections are already yielding better Proximity than a Road.
Also, the map now displays a preview of the road you are going to build, with different art assets depending on the level of road you are building.
As you can tell from the preview arrows on the map, this action will not build roads between Flix and Belchite, since the Ebro river is already giving better Proximity than a Gravel Road would. Checking the “Ignore Rivers” checkbox will force it to build the road nonetheless. And yes: the tool is smart enough to know Railways are better than Rivers :)
Aaand of course the new builder also takes into account bodies of water in order to connect locations, making it much easier to build roads to locations not connected by land.
Along with the improved Road builder, the new “Uncontrolled Wealth” mapmode neatly shows how much Wealth is escaping your Control in your Locations, so you know exactly where you need to build your Road and Governors.
Yeah, a lot of untaxed Wealth in Zaragoza and Valencia.
Now on Laws. As you are well aware, the original Law panel was using a limited amount of space by being the last subtab in the Government Country Panel. After some feedback gathered in this very forums + internal QA feedback we realized the best approach was to give this feature its own vertical panel and with the inclusion of the brand new Content Panel it allowed us to declutter Government and add this Laws Panel
No trees were harmed during the making of these UI assets.
Space alone wasn’t the only limiting factor in presenting the Laws feature though. Previously Categories were collapsed by default and the original layout lacked a big picture of all Policies selected and non selected ones per Law. We included shortcut filters per category in the panel itself, an overhaul of the cards themselves, containing relevant info on all policies + a highlight on the current one, and also useful filters in the regular Filters sidemenu for all targeted modifiers Laws can have.
Finally you might have realized we added a set of up to 5 buttons at the top of this panel. Here we centralized what we considered the 5 actions that narratively feel closer to what an actual Law is and it was only fair to include that in this brand new panel. Those being: Court and Liturgical languages, Succession Law, Employment System and Parliament type. Last but not least, for those who would still fancy the previous layout we have kept it as a toggle view actionable at the left edge of the panel’s search bar.
Now some visual quality of life for our beloved Throne Room. This section in the Government Upper section had some pending declutter in order to give a bit more protagonist to the actual Ruler and Throne room whilst improving the accessibility of some actions. In the original layout Formable Countries lived here as well making it less obvious for players to check but now, after having migrated them in the brand new Content Panel we had the chance to liberate that slot to add a sidemenu with all Country Modifiers (which still live in the Ledger in case you wonder).
On top of this we have decluttered some buttons there, we centralized Automation, Events and Ruling History at the top left of the Government Header (next to the back button) and we have relayouted both Skills and Character Traits of the Ruler in order to make sure Ruler’s name get proper space to grow.
We also made sure all of this keeps a neat layout for when we are in a regency and we have to extended or simply if our Ruler happens to be a General/Admiral so it has a shortcut there to manage his/her royal Army
Now with an extra amount of sidemenus for you to browse through!
The production tab Locations panel got a facelift, it’s now the urbanization panel and will be used to assign urban rights, as well as Promoting Industry! A mechanic we will touch more on in future Tinto Talks
The budget panel has gotten some minor, yet noticeable improvements. Starting with the top, we have reworked the panel’s subheader a bit by aligning the main 5 economy related stats. And you may be noticing one of them is brand new: the Tax Base Ratio, which allows for the player to track the tax base contribution per location based on the applied Control in order to understand on which Locations Players could extract more ducats based on Wealth Potential and Control.
We also simplified the visuals of the chart and added both income and expense in the graph for a better understanding of the economy's evolution. We added a toggle view next to the close button to toggle off the graph and we also made some adjustments in how some income sources present its automation, estate satisfaction and its targeted satisfaction.
Another new panel is being introduced: The Turmoils Panel. Which is meant to centralize all mechanics related to the “happy accidents” we may be facing through a campaign on behalf of our country’s population.
In order to address this centralization we basically gathered the original tabs from different places. Diseases originally lived in the Geopolitics panel and it felt disconnected from the Population management, and Rebels and Movements subtabs lived in a very cluttered People panel which deserved to have less density so the Pops, Characters and Dynasty browsing feels better organized.
Another biggie: you can now see and modify the Building queues of your Locations. Gone are the days when you needed to cancel all queued buildings to get that one Fort going.
Up to 6 different queues can show: Armies, Navies, Estate Buildings, Foreign Buildings, and regular Buildings (which includes Roads, Rank upgrades, Market creation, etc.).
We have done a few improvements here and there to the building construction flow.
You can now easily use the mass-build tool directly from the list of Building types:
The Location/Building row of the macrobuilder has been slightly rearranged to include the Building Limit and RGO of the Location, as well as a quick button to quickly see/change/lock the Production Method of specific buildings:
Not seeing Locations on the building list/map due to an active filter has been a frequent source of confusion. Locations that are being filtered-out from the list are now painted in a darker brown on the map:
Bonus track: We have also added small icons on the map for those Locations with a bespoke Productivity bonus for the selected building.
Various lists across the game now have a row of quick buttons for particularly useful filters. A few examples are Pop types, the list of Goods in Markets, and, perhaps most useful of all, lists of Characters:
Only Crown characters in my Cabinet, please.
Another UI that deserved some love was the Mod Manager. Main goal here was not only to offer a cleaner version but also to address many UX pain points inherent in the release iteration. Some of these improvements but not all include: better mod and DLC content categorization with proper subtabs and browsing, better Playset Creation/Save/Delete interface flow, more shortcuts for mod managing including file management, auto reorder based on dependencies, checksum changes alert etc. This is one of those UIs to expect that keep evolving following community feedback and on a need basis.
Mainly 2 new ones: War Score and Crown Power, the latter being per-location data we didn’t previously expose at all. On top of this all tooltips in top bar have gotten a pass so they get their related map modes shortcuts in its top right header.
Also 3 existing map modes got some improvements, Rebels now target countries rather than showing all rebel factions at once, using a heatmap and its tooltip containing per-faction tables with locations and numbers you previously had to dig through nested tooltips.
Works of art now shows all eight quality tiers with their own colours running red through yellow and green to teal for a Magnum Opus, with a count label on locations holding more than one. Finally, Raw Materials now shows provinces and rivers which it always should have.
This is all for today. Let it be known that we haven't touched everything we have in store for the UX of 1.4. In fact, we are yet to reveal the BIG UI stuff directly related to trade. Especially something in 1.4 we've been putting a lot of UX work into, Trade Orders! among other massive changes to the trading gameplay and UX. Next week we'll be talking a bit about what performance looks like in 1.4 (based on our testing), showing some a handful other much requested changes, and unveiling a fun new 1.4 feature that should bring a smile those who enjoy sharing their campaigns... Until then, we bid you farewell!