Good morning, all. I’m Magne “Meneth” Skjæran, the programmer on CK2. In the past I’ve written dev diaries about modding, optimization, and quality of life improvements, as well as a few diaries this summer about the team, the bug fixing process, and what we’re doing for modders.
We’re now returning to regular dev diaries, so today I’ve been given the opportunity to reveal a new feature: rally points.
And to maintain my tradition from the summer, at the end of this dev diary will be five changelog entries from the 2.8 patch.
Rally points are a rather classic strategy game feature which can do a lot to make troop management more manageable. While in the early-game, there usually isn’t much of a need for such a feature in CK2, as you grow larger collecting your troops at the start of a war increasingly becomes more tedious. This is especially the case in multiplayer, where you don’t have the luxury of pausing.
In 2.8, we’re finally rectifying this by adding the ability to define rally points, both for land units and ships.
Now, when you raise your troops and have rally points defined, the raised troops will immediately start walking towards the nearest rally point by travel time. Once they get there, they will merge with any troops in the province.
While rallying, they will not appear in the outliner, but instead the rally point entry will show how many troops are incoming.
If you disable the “rally points” section of the outliner, the individual armies will show as before.
You can define any number of rally points, and can put them anywhere in your realm, so you can set them up to suit any layout.
Units will only rally to provinces they can walk to (sail, in the case of boats); they will not use transports to get there. So you might for example want one rally point on the British Isles, and a handful in mainland Europe.
Now, as promised, here are 5 changelog entries from 2.8:
Fixed old Byzantine women's hair being unable to change color
Taught the Pope that lifting his own excommunication when he becomes the Pope makes him a better role model for other Catholics
The AI no longer thinks that just because a province is someone's capital, it's a good target; it is now more discerning and only cares if it is the capital of an enemy
When you have a unit selected and are hovering over a province it can't move to, the game will now try to explain why you can't move there
Fixed it being possible to gift cursed diamonds and crowns
I hope you will all enjoy the rally point feature. That’s all for today.