General arbitrary ruler/province targeting & dynamic targeted-action decisions

[zijistark]

[ Corresponds to the new ASSIGN_ACTION_DAYS = 0 in EMF defines.lua ]

Ability to actually target specific characters or provinces as an essential parameter to custom "character action decisions" by using your chancellor's meta-positioning on the map using an expanded-trigger version of the "Improve Relations" job_action (which may be renamed to the more generic but compatible "Send Envoy" or the like) which allows any province to be selected but those in your demesne.

After targeting a ruler/province on the map with instant placement (and re-placement), a number of custom action decisions would appear as valid decisions in the intrigue menu with localisation specific to the targeted ruler or province which integrates their name into the decision title and info tooltip directly. When the councillor is recalled or used for a different job_action, those decisions all disappear.

All such decisions would be grouped together and contain a custom icon shape to indicate their special status (likely a non-uniform but symmetric hexagon in both X and Y dimensions).

Their background color could reflect the type of decision:

• Blue for diplomatic actions (e.g., summon a vassal to your court for interaction, travel to treat with / invite another lord to treat with you, travel there to try to win the support of another AF2 member for the next AF2 election, a ton of shit for AF2 leaders, go on an adventure, etc.)
• Red for military/enforcement-related actions (e.g., hire, commit, and deploy a small contingent of standing troops for 10-years to suppress religious violence and enforce your policy, costing your demesne some levies-- ala how the great Saladin ensured that Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem were actively protected from religious violence/threats by local Muslims after the conclusion of the Third Crusade in 1187)
• Green for stewardship actions (e.g., start a 20-year economic investment project to build and maintain high-quality roads, levees, canals, expand well water sources, clear forests for agricultural expansion, etc. throughout a province)
• Purple for intrigue actions (e.g., send an envoy with a mission to convince a rebelling vassal to turncoat and rejoin his liege, send your spymaster on a mission to attempt to kidnap a dynasty member or child of a ruler)
• Silver for spiritual/religious actions (e.g., choose where/how to construct/paint a holy icon/monument that will last, have your court chaplain interview local, outspoken commoners, priests, and monks to identify those with heretic leanings, allowing you to selectively cut down on any dangerously-high heresy "interest points" in a province, as alerted by other events or a visible, graded province modifier, OR send your chaplain to actively encourage "alternative interpretations" of religion and thus heresy in a province, actively increasing heresy interest points).

One neat possibility (can be skipped if scanning, as the conclusion is that while really neat/cool from a modding perspective, it might not actually lead to a more straightforward, user-friendly experience):

For some ideas I've got for realm stewardship actions, using an overloaded job action for your Steward might also be appropriate, which would likely allow you to target even within your own demesne. Likewise, there are cases for martial ruler/province selection decisions, so an overloaded case for your Marshal could also be supplied. Argument also applies to spymaster and court chaplain.

Thus, in a world with lots of such decisions that are possible to execute covering most of the spectrum, we could, in the UI style of the Elder Kings, mod the interface and add a fourth job_action for every councillor that is simply a councillor-specific title akin to the generic "Send Envoy" or, semantically speaking, "Go Here and Complete Job," for which the allowed province placement triggers are all extremely flexible.

However, it really may be better to just use the Chancellor only w/ this other otherwise pretty useless and harmless job_action, because then it would never be hard to know what target-specific action decisions were available/applicable for your selection (no matter what type they were).

[thefinestsieve]

To the list of diplomatic actions:

• Negotiate for prisoner exchange/release (displacing the current prisoner swap decision)