Ruler Designer

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Fito Coulter

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Aug 3, 2024, 3:40:41 PM8/3/24

to fastcangastco

The Ruler Designer is a free feature added with Patch 1.2. It allows the player to replace a ruler in either start date (867 or 1066) with a customized starting character, allowing attributes, traits , dynasty, and physical appearance to be tweaked, altered and tailored to one's design, within certain limits. To access it, the player must select a historical (or otherwise pre-existing) ruler on the world map to replace when starting a game and choose the Create your own Ruler option, which replaces the character by a custom one and opens up the Ruler Designer to create that custom character.

The left panel allows you to set the basic characteristics that define the ruler. None of the options described here cost customization points (see the Attributes section below) as they are mandatory for every character.

The right panel allows you to choose some of the character attributes of your ruler. These options can significantly provide benefits; as such, each is assigned a cost in customization points. This cost can be either positive (costing points) or negative (refunding points). Your customization points total is displayed in the upper part of the panel. While there is no hard limit, exceeding 400 points will disallow achievements, even if Ironman is enabled.

Beneficial ages to a ruler cost more customization points. The range between 24 and 28 is considered a ruler's prime and thus costs the most, while 0-16 and 70 (or older) are the ages that cost the least. Starting age determines starting health, with younger rulers being more robust and growing more frail with age. That being said, older rulers do receive free lifestyle perk points and traits; this is a fixed amount based on age shown on the table below, without Education or intelligence traits affecting this.

By contrast, weight doesn't cost anything despite having a significant impact on your ruler's health (being malnourised (below -50) or obese (over 50) will cause a penalty of -1 health). Because noble characters have a tendency to easily gain weight over time (especially so if they have certain traits or lifestyles), a simple strategy is to start somewhat underweight but not too much to incur the aforementioned penalty. This corresponds to placing the slider in the second quartile, between 0 and -50.

For every 9 perk points a ruler receives, he or she also gets a bonus lifestyle trait, so a free lifestyle perk at age 42 and a second at 69. These are chosen at random from any of the three Lifestyle perk trees that match your Education, without you having to invest in the usual per-requisite perks.

You can choose the traits for your character, classified into education, personality and other traits. Most of the usual restrictions for traits don't apply here. For example, you can start with any number of personality traits (instead of three for adults) or get the lifestyle traits for the various perk trees without having to complete said tree. The Traits page include the customization point cost of each trait that can be purchased; if a trait has no cost it's not available in the Ruler Designer. If a trait has congenital and non-congenital versions, only the former can be purchased.

Note that a trait's cost isn't affected by it being considered a virtue or sin under the ruler's faith, so in case you are unsure which traits to select, virtues allow you to eke out more benefit than their cost would imply.

You can choose a value for each of the ruler's six skills, between 0 and 100. The customization point cost to increase a stat by +1 depends on the threshold of the skill ("terrible", "poor", etc) after the increase, but before traits are applies. For example, to increase diplomacy from 3 to 4 (a skill of 4 is "terrible") costs 2 points, but from 4 to 5 (a skill of 5 is "poor") costs 4.

Because the way costs increase when changing threshold, the most cost-effective skills are 1 point below a threshold change; these are listed in the Skills page. It's recommended that the base skill of your ruler be one of these values; you can then use traits to further increase it.

You can use these settings to have the game randomly generate family members for your adult ruler. You can choose to start married (no customization point cost) with a randomly generated spouse of matching faith and culture. You can also choose to start with sons and daughters, also of matching faith and culture. They inherit your DNA and congenital traits, but everything else is randomly determined. Each child of either gender costs 10 customization points, unaffected by your faith's view on gender. Male or female, a ruler is limited to a number of children equal to one for each year since they turned 16. For example, a 50-year-old character can start with at most 34 children.

The Ruler Designer features a robust character creator that permits tweaking the physical appearance of the character, including ethnicity, skin tone, height, and facial features. It can be roughly divided into two parts.

The first screen allows for a quick generation of the ruler's appearance. You can select one of the game's predefined ethniticies and randomly generate an appearance. This can be useful as a starting point before your further refine the character.

This screen also allows access to the ruler's DNA, a string of text corresponding to the current values of your ruler's genes. You can copy the DNA to your computer's clipboard and share it with others or retain it for later use. You can then paste text from said clipboard and, if it corresponds to a valid genetic code, the game will process it and generate a character with the corresponding appearance. Note that the DNA string only applies to a characters physical appearance. Skills, attributes, lifestyle and education must be applied separately.

The second screen allows you to manipulate the value of most of your character's genes through a graphical user interface, similar to conventional character creators in various other games, so that you can fine-tune your ruler's appearance. None of these affect game mechanics in any way (e.g., raising height to the maximum doesn't confer the effects of the Giant trait, only the trait will provide those).

A few genes can't be manipulated this way: body shape, body hair (for men), bust shape (for women), style of aging and eyebrow wrinkles. These genes still exist and all characters have them; they are merely hidden in the Ruler Designer interface. You can however tamper with them by copying the character's DNA to a text editor, changing the corresponding values directly and then pasting the DNA back in the game.

Hi maxen,
Text frame rulers are only available in Affinity Publisher (along with a host of other features mentioned in the Help page by mistake). I will report this to the documentation team to be corrected (also affects Affinity Photo). Thanks for raising this up.

I do wish the text rulers would be available in Affinity Designer too and not only in Affinity Publisher. It is quite handy and I used it a lot in Adobe Illustrator before.
Would be awesome if you guys could implement that in another update.

Well, let's show some prefs hack here how one could enable FrameText rulers for the other Affinity apps like APh & ADe then too. - I'll demonstrate that under MacOS here since that's what I have & run Affinity apps on. Further since I'm too lazy, I will show it only for APh here, but it should be equally for ADe too.

PRE-NOTE: On a MacOS system Affinity Preferences settings are stored in OS related binary "plist" files (aka binary representations of XML-files), so in order to read/write and perform changes to such binary "plist"-files, the right tools have to be used. Usually one would use Apple's Xcode in order to manipulate and change a binary "plist"-file, but there are also some easier to use third party editor tools available, which can showup and edit binary "plist"-files in an easier to use fashion (without the need of Xcode).

PRE-NOTE2: UnderWindows systems doing the same should be much easier, since there (on Win) you usually just deal with text based XML settings files, so no binary versions of those, which eases the overall changing process.

If it is a binary .dat preference file for Win and has a magic number of "00FF4B41" for the first 4 bytes in it (hex values), then it is an Affinity file format based file. - Even though I have some routines for reading parts of such affinity files, I won't share them here as it's more something that normally developers can handle and not mere mortals aka plain users. - Further note that the above shown is more a proof of working concept here and thus, that the other apps (aka APh & ADe here) also do support and can (or could) handle frame text rulers (they even have and support the prefs option flag). - So the only thing missing for them is, a corresponding associated/connected menu entry for toggling on/off the frame text rulers. - But who knows, maybe that menu option will be also added in future updated APh & ADe versions.

I never really thought about searching the Affinity related ones for "ShowFrameTextRuler," but sure enough, that works & by changing "" to "true/" AD gets the frame text ruler. Same thing works for AP.

Just to be on the safe side, I first copied the com.seriflabs.affinitydesigner.plist in place (same folder) & after testing switched the names so it would revert to not showing it. I can switch names again to reenable showing it but I'm not sure I want to do that.