How to solve the problem of performance with China

[JonZone]

If they're adding new land (and they are) common sense says they'll still have barons through emperors (and the new bigger title, of course) Cutting out the lowest rung is just a very hack-and-slash attempt at fixing things, my money's on behind the screens work to improve performance more than hacking bits and bobs off of things.

I wholeheartedly think that when they floated the idea of "What about the rest of the continent of Asia?" more than one employee brought up performance, and that they wouldn't have decided to add China and Co. if they didn't also settle on a satisfactory way to manage performance.

DLC aren't just whims, they're discussed to death internally at least a year before we see them. (From what I've gathered)

Correct!

We won't cut any of our core game mechanics just to juice out some performance. We will not just shove half of Asia into the game without carving out performance in other areas. There is a lot of things we can do behind the screen.

The game is obviously very complex and demanding, otherwise we wouldn't be here - but rest assured that we understand that the playerbase wouldn't accept us just turning the end-user's computer into a thermonuclear device.

We're also discussing the DLC to death iternally, so you have absolutely gathered right.

 

[JonZone]

Little do you know that my laptop is already a thermonuclear device when playing the game :Р

It gets hot doesn't it? I had to get one of those big cooling tables for my laptop to play games like CK3 and Civ 6. After a certain while, addind doodads and add-ons it kind of defeats the point of using a laptop over a desktop tower.

But look at it from the brightside, if you ever get caught in an avalanche, you will be able to start the game as Byzantine Emperor Basileus and melt a tunnel in the snow.

 

[JonZone]

Stellaris just went through a massive redesign primarily aimed at tackling late game performance. 4.0 came, and the performance got worse! The team there worked hard to work the myriad issues with 4.0, but we are now on 4.10 and you know what you won't find in the Stellar is forum? People celebrating how much faster 4.10 is than 3.*

Yes, they're a super-talented team, but maybe that was a bit too overambitious. They are a super ambitious team though!

I would have preferred a major patch before All Under Heaven that clearly tackles performance in a big way, and only after proven results, have a DLC that adds more lands.

That's a very reasonable take! There are however some fixes we can do that we've already kind of explored for console performance though. I think people might be positively surprised. I don't know how much I can disclose, but imagine easier things, like deciding what is created when, or what is updated how. We're not "exploring unexplored territory", we're reducing the amount of work the already existing systems need to do.

Performance wise, do dead characters cause less of a performance hit than living ones?

Yes Characters are kind of like different stages of a "build-a-bear". Your neighbourhood fellow king subscribes to two-thousand more "news-letters" than a courtier. That courtier has eight more PO-boxes than a dead dude.

As for your second question, I'm actually a programmer that worked on Khans of the Steppe, I'm not too well versed in the exact design of All Under Heaven, but it's going to function as most of the rest of the world. We can get performance in other ways. If AI-characters are so expensive, it's better to work with the concept of an AI-character and maybe make sure that if they get a new trait - only the relevant data needs to be cached.

 

[JonZone]

A bit off topic but related. I think the game should feature more minor noble “family units” as opposed to having a lot of commoners hanging around. Commoners come and go and only leave any sort of legacy behind if they are given a title above baron level. Having minor noble families would make more sense, especially for higher level courts as they would have their own ambitions (marrying into your family, council position, court position, getting an accolade, etc.) to grow alongside yours and other titled characters.

I agree that this sounds like a dope concept!