Game stops responding after a certain point

[kormer]

I'm playing with no mods and whatever the current patch is. All DLC are enabled.

It's now 1288 and for the past year or so the game has really lagged hard about once a month. The monthly lag has been getting progressively worse from 2-5 seconds, to minutes, to now it just doesn't progress at all. I'm not sure if it's related, but the lag coincided with the first black death outbreak that is sweeping the world.

Any hope of recovering this save and continuing it?

 

[AndrewT]

Is there an empire that covers a large portion of the map? If so this is a known issue with this game, it cannot cope above a certain point. There's really nothing you can do if that is the situation, except say delete troops or revolters from the save game file.

 

[kormer]

I'm in control of Britannia, Normandy, and Norway. Aztecs control Spain and France. HRE is still in existence with largely the same borders as the start of the game. Anyone else in the game is at least an order of magnitude smaller in terms of provinces.

Any of those meet the requirements for being too big? If I let the game go long enough, like 20+ minutes, it does get past the chokepoint. Any tips on what I could do in the brief moments of control to help out?

 

[AndrewT]

Well, the real issue is the sheer number of units on the map. When I've seen it before a large empire has had a massive rebellion or civil war break out. But in principle the same could happen with some smaller empires all doing the same thing I guess - did those three together all spawn lots of units for any reason?

The only thing that helps is reducing the number of units on the map.