Hotfix 1.245.3 and Some Updates

Hi all,

Just a small patch for today that fixes up a few bugs and does some minor rebalancing while I work on the next major update (which seems to continually grow - I am not immune to scope creep). I'm hoping to get it out by the start of May. It will include the new UI, ability to play as other characters, and modding tools.

Originally I wanted to have all the modding tools available and ready to go before the next patch, but instead I'm going to bundle them in with it. The biggest problem is that currently the UI, landscape, province borders, rivers and settlements require the Unreal Editor to work with, but that means shipping a massive editor - probably about 100GB - due to engine modifications, and also requires a lot of legal wrangling and work to be able to create a new editor for each release.

Instead, my plan is to make more things dynamically loaded at the start of the game (such as the landscape, rivers and province borders) and create a small, non-Unreal program that will let you visually edit these. The new UI system is also going to save a ton of headaches, since it will be fully (and very easily) moddable.

I'm going to do a dev diary on the new UI soon - lots to cover there.

For this update:

Features

• Experience bar shows active XP sources and role-based XP awards. Rebalanced what counts toward experience.

• Allow declaring siblings, grandchildren, nieces/nephews as heir

• Added starting bishops (+ fix clergy auto-assign)

Fixes

• Game no longer crashes due to other programs using too much memory

• Settlement effect textures no longer keep growing and using up VRAM

• LLM event context no longer freed mid-request

• Religion share shown in Clergy tab

• HUD faction assigned before binding settlement warning events on load

• Court positions no longer auto-fill/vacate against player intent

• Warning events rebind when HUD constructs before player faction

Balance

• Trinitism given anti-hierarchy debuffs to match its description

Thank you,

Joe