[Eu4] Late game lags due to background AI calculations

[Andrew713]

Disclaimer: I have found several similar topics, none of seem seem to solve anything. The list of things people suggest to try (and my result) is included.

My specs (yes I am playing on 8 years old Mac Pro ):

2,7 GHz Intel Core i5
8 ГБ 1867 MHz DDR3
Intel Iris Graphics 6100 1536 МБ

macOs Mojave 10.14.6

The cpu load is around 100% even in Menu, however game runs great pre 1650s


The game became almost unplayable (at speed 2) around 1650s: below 10 fps, stuttering every 2-3 days (at speed 2). At pause everything works fine.

Suggested options found by me included:

1. Lowering graphical settings - already literally everything switched to lowest possible option - obviously didn't help
2. Installing performance user mods - tried Fast Universalis, Toaster Universalis - zero impact
3. Disable autosaving - zero impact (since I believe it's aimed to eliminate lag on month/year tick)
4. Dismissing the majority of top bar notifications (aka blue flag to core territories, able to construct buildings etc.) The idea behind it is that it could reduce the amount of calculations performed to notify you once conditions are met for such actions - zero impact (although the amount of people stating that THIS helped was relatively high in every topic)
5. Zooming out to stop seeing billions of trade ships/armies - zero impact the game continues to run in 7 fps at speed 2 even fully zoomed out
6. Disabling the AI in console (as far as I understood it disables ai-factions' decision making process that involves a lot of calculations) - great improvement
   
   I didn't want to fully sacrifice gameplay for performance boost and tried manually disabling AI for all the nations with less than 5 provinces (leaving around 15 major nations' ai ON) - the lag came back in full extent. That leads me to conclusion that some of the major states AI is causing the trouble.

So the questions:

• are there any other measures I overlooked that can help?
• Is there a precise way to learn what EXACTLY loads the computing capacity - what countries and which processes within them (army movement, navy movement, calculation for construction, etc.). Something like debug logs (ideally like "25% of CPU capacity trying to process pathing for 900k Ottomans army split in 2k stacks running in circles")
• Is there a more gentle way to control amount of AI calculations, not fully shutting down everything - some compromise maybe
  
  For example: let them move armies, declare wars (and so on), BUT STOP reassigning navy missions 487 times a day, calculating everyday which province to build +0.01 church in

I will be grateful for any advice/recommendations (besides getting a new PC which is not an option for me rn)!

 

[AndrewT]

Sorry, but despite supporting this game since release I don't know the answer to any of your questions.

As a general principle though, games do not give you direct access to functions such as a way to control amount of AI calculations. Your best hope in that regard is a mod to affect such things.


Going to your hardware, your 2,7 GHz Intel Core i5 is only just above the minimum requirement on MacOS, the Intel® Core 2.

UserBenchmark: Intel Core i5-7200U vs Core2 Duo E8400

And your Intel video system is unsupported hardware for this game; in fact as an integrated video system it uses the CPU for graphics too, adding extra load to it.

I suspect those two factors together are causing your problem on this machine, and I don't know of a way to do anything about that I'm afraid!

 

[grotaclas]

Are there maybe some big wars between colonial powers? Then you could try if it helps if you disable their AIs and if the game hangs for you if you open the peace deal screen as one of the warleaders. Big wars in general cause a major slowdown in the game and at least in part that's unavoidable. If you are willing to use console commands, you could either end these wars or make a quick peace deal with the help of the winwars command(you have to use it again, so that the country doesn't continue to get 100% warscore in all their future wars). And the current version also has a bug which makes peace deal calculations for the AI overly complicated in colonial wars. I have seen saves where this causes a hang for more than 10 seconds on a similar CPU as yours. I recently reported it as a bug, but it was probably too late to be fixed in 1.35

 

[Andrew713]

@AndrewT

Thanks for your response anyways! Guess I shouldn't completely neglect GPU-related advices since in my case it's drawn from the same resource pool.

 

[Andrew713]

Are there maybe some big wars between colonial powers? Then you could try if it helps if you disable their AIs and if the game hangs for you if you open the peace deal screen as one of the warleaders. Big wars in general cause a major slowdown in the game and at least in part that's unavoidable. If you are willing to use console commands, you could either end these wars or make a quick peace deal with the help of the winwars command(you have to use it again, so that the country doesn't continue to get 100% warscore in all their future wars). And the current version also has a bug which makes peace deal calculations for the AI overly complicated in colonial wars. I have seen saves where this causes a hang for more than 10 seconds on a similar CPU as yours. I recently reported it as a bug, but it was probably too late to be fixed in 1.35

That might actually be the issue.

I am now going trough an effort to manually inspect the state of things in every country (with 'tag []' console command) and there is a religious league war going full throttle in HRE. I will check wether force-ending it will help, thanks!

You also mentioned: "...current version also has a bug which makes peace deal calculations for the AI overly complicated in colonial wars." Could you share the source of this info? This type of insights is exactly what I was hoping for.

 

[grotaclas]

That might actually be the issue.

I am now going trough an effort to manually inspect the state of things in every country (with 'tag []' console command) and there is a religious league war going full throttle in HRE. I will check wether force-ending it will help, thanks!

You also mentioned: "...current version also has a bug which makes peace deal calculations for the AI overly complicated in colonial wars." Could you share the source of this info? This type of insights is exactly what I was hoping for.

this comment of mine in another thread has some more information. But your issue is more likely caused by the league war, because the lag/freeze is more than once a month. The league war has been a major source of slowdown for many versions and I think it would be very difficult for the developers to improve this without making the AI significantly weaker in big wars. The flip side is that your game will probably become much faster again once the league war ends.

 

[Andrew713]

I managed to boost performance and actually finish the game by:

• manually ending several big/colonial wars
• manually replacing Quantity ideas for Quality for every AI
• annexing <5 province minors outside of europe into larger neighbour

It screwed the balance but reduced ~40-60% of stuttering and lag. Also updating to 1.35.1 seemed to improve performance somehow.

Case closed Thanks everyone!

 

[DeJoT]

I managed to boost performance and actually finish the game by:

• manually ending several big/colonial wars
• manually replacing Quantity ideas for Quality for every AI
• annexing <5 province minors outside of europe into larger neighbour

It screwed the balance but reduced ~40-60% of stuttering and lag. Also updating to 1.35.1 seemed to improve performance somehow.

Case closed Thanks everyone!

What helped me a lot was disabling autonomous sieging, which I use quite often. I didn't realize how huge impact it actually had!