Rant about hiring characters / Is there a way to find characters to hire from foreign countries without clicking so much?

[stadtpark-hartmut]

As my families produce mostly incapable children, the first act of every newly elected leader is to make a bunch of friends in foreign countries with good attributes (mostly martial tbh) and traits to lead my armies and for tax collection / desk jobs in the government etc.

The only way I know to find these characters is to "right-click" individually on every country and then "lefft-click" on the "View Characters" button (- if you haven't used it, it's next to the number of pops / above the "declare war" button). - Then sort for the attribute I want highest, then check their loyalty (they need to be lower than 70 or near enough that I can make them disloyal in a few months) so I can actually hire them. Then I check their age and health (- you don't want to hire characters that die soon / have half-lifes of less than 10 years).

Usually I look for characters in countries that share my religion (so I don't have to spend AE to force conversion), or my culture-group. - But often I want to hire more than one - (usually you have 3-5 "friend"-slots on your ruler), so I end up looking all over the place. (Because I want attributes of 10 and above; or 9 if they have some nice traits or more than one good attribute; and you can't actually hire them if they are Generals in their original country - which I found out the hard way...).


Clicking and clicking and clicking. (choose country on map, click right / left - check things to look for; repeat step for every counttry...)


I know: technically "clicking" is all we ever do in a game... - but still it would be great to have a option in the ledger to globally search for the best people...(and maybe even grey out the ones not in diplomatic range) - as it is, it's kind of random who I choose to befriend / hire.

In the early game I didn't have the money, but now I only have 120 years to go before the end date, and I made my one-province-minor I started out with (Praisos (Minoan Heritage!) into the Hellenic League into the 2nd most powerful nation in the game, and I struggle to replace the generals in my 7 standing armies and the guys on the deskjobs in the government as they age...

Not even speaking about getting good Governors with low corruption for my 8 additional regions... (- I hardly dare to mention nice-to-have-requirements like loyalty or actually a "Finesse" skill that is above 3 or 4, or traits that don't reduce the happiness or output of the regions etc...).

I know, I can get minor characters after a war, but the last half dozen times I've done this, I mostly only get old men with low health that way.

I would really need a way to get rid of my old families, but I don't dare killing them all, or letting them be scorned for too long. (I'm playing Ironman and I'm learning on the job = this is my first really continued / good run).

[Ericus1]

Nope. Character UI is all around a terribly unfriendly, cumbersome mess. It also doesn't help that you will only ever need at most exactly 3 high zeal and 3 high charisma characters, while you need dozens of finesse and martial. And I've also noticed a trend that your families tend to breed worse and worse stats over time, if they breed at all.

The whole character system is garbage.

[stadtpark-hartmut]

Originally posted by Ericus1:

Nope. Character UI is all around a terribly unfriendly, cumbersome mess. It also doesn't help that you will only ever need at most exactly 3 high zeal and 3 high charisma characters, while you need dozens of finesse and martial. And I've also noticed a trend that your families tend to breed worse and worse stats over time, if they breed at all.

The whole character system is garbage.

I guess from a roleplay view, it's about "fresh-blood" needed every generatiom or two, but it's a bit hard to do right with the mechanics as is. As you said: it's about the UI. All the other considerations about who is a good character to get, and how to get them almost come as an after-thought to the process, when it should be the main story. They certainly could use events to make it harder / more interesting to follow, if it all might have become too easy at some point in the future, but the hardness of the problem should not be in the UI and how many countries you are willing to click before you proceed with something else.