CK II - Game fails to save, probably a memory issue

[ThisIsMyForumAccount]

One line summary of your issue
Game fails to save, probably a memory issue

Game Version
3.2.1 [AZCE]

What expansions do you have installed?
All of the above

Do you have mods enabled?
No

Please explain your issue is in as much detail as possible.
Specs: 16GB RAM, i7 6700k, AMD Vega 64 video card, Mac OS 10.4.1. All DLC installed, though Conclave is disabled. No mods.

I've been playing a shattered world game as Scania. It's now into the 1100s and I've conquered most of the world at this point. I've taken just about all of Europe, most of Africa, the Middle East, and I'm eating into India with the bulk of northern Asia left to go. The game chugs pretty badly from time to time, sometimes to the point of becoming unplayable.

However, I've twice seen the game fail to save on the autosave dates. A dialog pops up and says so, asking if I'm out of disk space (no) or if I'm using illegal characters (no). If it does this once, it will do this continuously at every save attempt until I quit and reopen the game. I checked memory usage when I saw this happen again recently. 2.86GB. My guess would be that it's hitting the 3GB memory limit as it tries to save and it fails.

Considering how poorly this game is running in the late game and that it eats nearly 2GB after loading the save and climbs near 3GB pretty quickly, I'd say that this game either needs to go 64-bit ASAP (especially since it will become unplayable on Mac OS 10.15 Catalina thanks to Apple's inane choice to kill 32-bit support, which is going to cause some serious support headaches) or tighten up memory management, maybe plug a few memory leaks. I've attached the save, though I doubt there's anything very unique about it.

Steps to reproduce the issue.
Nothing in particular, but playing this save, declaring a few wars, clicking around, dueling, etc seems to eventually trigger it.

Upload Attachment

 

[ThisIsMyForumAccount]

This is now happening after perhaps a half hour of playtime. I've carved a swath through most of India, but I can't play for very long at a stretch or it's impossible to save the game. This strikes me as a pretty game-breaking bug and I'd be very surprised if I'm the only one seeing it. I updated to 10.14.6, but no dice.

 

[AndrewT]

I've conquered most of the world at this point.

This, in addition to the 32bit thing, will be the proximate cause of this issue for you. The game was simply not designed to cope with that!

No doubt this game will go to 64bit as HOI4 and Stellaris have, but when that will be I cannot say.

 

[ThisIsMyForumAccount]

It was designed to cope with this from the beginning. The problem is that the DLC and updates have made the game considerably more complex than it was in version 1.0. There are a LOT more counties, titles, events, mechanics, etc. It's made the game so heavy that it's hitting limitations that weren't considered from the start.

Hopefully they do this soon. World conquest is one of the major goals of this game, and when it's broken like this, then Paradox is essentially selling a crippled game. I'm getting tired of having to quit and losing all progress since the last save, which sometimes includes events and such that are random and don't happen again when I reload it.

 

[ThisIsMyForumAccount]

The game is also becoming a lot more crash-happy, probably because it's trying to allocate memory that cannot be allocated due to hitting the limit. In addition, I'm pretty sure it's leaking memory like a sieve over almost nothing. Here's a fun example a few years and conquests down the line from the posted save:

I start the game. It's eating about 1.77GB of memory once everything loads.
I leave the game paused.
I click on my character. It takes several seconds to load the character screen. Memory usage jumps to 2.6GB from this alone.
I go through my list of MANY rivals since I've been treating my dungeon like a meat locker and am scarfing down anyone with good traits.
I see that a number of them are in my prison. Good, I can get rid of many of them and narrow the list.
I go through all the ones in prison and sacrifice any filthy heathens that aren't reformed Germanic to the bloodthirsty Gods.
After sacrificing a batch (and clicking on a number of other portraits to check their religion), memory usage is now up to 2.88GB.
Start the clock and let the game proceed. It gets to the "ten days after you start" mark and tries to save. It fails. ON THE FIRST SAVE.

This. Game. Is. BROKEN.

 

[Zethisis]

I have the same issue and it's been going on for months now. I tried playing, even updated my computer to play this game. So for what I see, its a game issue and not a computer system issue?

So it's designed for 32 bit but needs a 64 bit? I'm just surprised that was the issue.

 

[ThisIsMyForumAccount]

In this case, it seems that the 32-bit CK2 application can only use 3GB of RAM. Once it hits that and can't grab any more then you start having problems. Updating it to 64-bit will break that limitation and it can grab all the memory it needs.

This and the fact that the upcoming Mac OS 10.15 Catalina release (which is very likely within weeks) being unable to run 32-bit applications are very, VERY good reasons that Paradox should get this thing up to speed ASAP.