How to solve the problem of performance with China

[Tusade]

With Khans of the Steppe out, I'm going to be real here, chief:

Performance-wise, CKIII isn't ready for China and the rest of Asia.

This is exactly what I am thinking.

And before adding China to the game, why not add the anti-popes and western stuff like that? I wanna be a western latin holy emperor with Pope vassalized.

 

[Hellua]

This is exactly what I am thinking.

And before adding China to the game, why not add the anti-popes and western stuff like that? I wanna be a western latin holy emperor with Pope vassalized.

Tbh, i think paradox thinks because China will sell more. Just count the amount of "please add China" all these years and now compare them to "please add hre". We have long moved away from the original of an European dynasty Rpg. Its sad, but in the end paradox is a commercial company that values sales more than everything. Maybe someday another company dives back on the idea of a Medival Dynasty game.

 

[iShurik]

Today I ran a "just watch" playthrough. It took roughly 4 hours on max speed from start (earliest start date) to finish (1453). I was actually impressed by the performance and gained a lot of optimism for the China DLC.

Running on a i7 13700k, which is obviously a nice CPU, but you shouldn't expect this game to run well on a potato.

Even if it took 8 hours for a full run, it would be acceptable.

 

[ray243]

Tbh, i think paradox thinks because China will sell more. Just count the amount of "please add China" all these years and now compare them to "please add hre". We have long moved away from the original of an European dynasty Rpg. Its sad, but in the end paradox is a commercial company that values sales more than everything. Maybe someday another company dives back on the idea of a Medival Dynasty game.

It's been stated many times that they never meant the game to be a European dynasty RPG. It's all due to some fans imaging it must be the case when devs have repeatedly said no.

 

[klopkr]

I'm gonna be real here. Khans of the step has noticeably slowed things down and added weird stuttering for me.

I didn't expect this, I expected Khans of the Steppe to actually make things run faster since it adds basically empty provinces.

I'm not sure what is causing this.

I suspect the issue is not pops or provinces though since that's not what's been changing recently. I suspect there's some bugs at the core here. It's important to resolve performance issues like this before expanding the map or else we'll get another Rajas of India situation where the performance became absolutly terrible but it wasn't even actually because the map expansion, just a litany of bugs.

But everyone still believes it's the map that caused it and so Rajas of India went down in infamy, despite later patches fixing it and adding even more provinces.

I remember when devs much later pointed out that in CK2 one of the major causes of slow down was greek characters considering whether or not to castrate or blind everyone in the world constantly.

 

[heliostellar]

the game spawns in more characters than it strictly has to and doesnt clean them up quick enough. when you unland a character, their entire court is flung to the other side of the map and when you land a new person in their place, a bevy of lowborns is created to act as courtiers instead of reusing those wandering characters that already exist. events are constantly generating characters that dont get pruned when you dont recruit them, and even when useless characters are killed, they clog up the save as corpses for far longer than they need to. many events that generate characters also lack a cooldown, so not only are they generating useless characters that impact performance, theyre also common enough that you get sick of seeing them constantly (hedge knight travel event comes to mind)

there is a lot you could fix in this game that would help with performance without arbitrarily dividing the map. we could have all of china and have it running smooth as butter, theyd just have to clean a bunch of shit up first

There's actually a mod that helps with this called Population Control:

Steam Workshop::Population Control (Reduce late-game lag)

steamcommunity.com

 

[Benismann]

I didn't expect this, I expected Khans of the Steppe to actually make things run faster since it adds basically empty provinces.

Because it's not provinces that lag the game, it is AI.

 

[tilly]

There's actually a mod that helps with this called Population Control:

Steam Workshop::Population Control (Reduce late-game lag)

steamcommunity.com

mm, the issue with this as a solution is it doesnt address the cause of the mess in the first place. it kills characters off well enough (sometimes a little too aggressively, even - ai dynasties dont exactly need help dying out) but it cant do anything to delete the dead characters faster, and it cant stop the game from spawning in useless bozos in the first place

i still use this mod because its nice to have day ticks that dont take a minute each, but its fighting a losing battle. corpses bloat the save and more guys just keep popping in, and meanwhile characters of not zero interest get pruned off to make room for them. its a bandaid solution. not much else we can do userside tbf, thats why i use it, but itd be nice if we didnt HAVE to use a nuclear option like this

 

[Betheven]

It's been stated many times that they never meant the game to be a European dynasty RPG. It's all due to some fans imaging it must be the case when devs have repeatedly said no.

This is map game without any fancy graphics or complex ai, we should totally expect it to run well on potato

 

[AchedTeacher]

You just dont add china and then you dont have to solve anything major. Easy.

Is this a joke? There's still massive performance issues past the first century, especially once massive realms start appearing.

 

[quicklyrainbow]

It's been stated many times that they never meant the game to be a European dynasty RPG. It's all due to some fans imaging it must be the case when devs have repeatedly said no.

Look I understand that, I just think it was the wrong decision.

 

[Hellua]

It's been stated many times that they never meant the game to be a European dynasty RPG. It's all due to some fans imaging it must be the case when devs have repeatedly said no.

Well, I was not going to make a big point out of this but you're implying I am wrong due to wrong assumptions, but that is clearly not true.
Let me give you the FULL steam description of CK III:
"Love, fight, scheme, and claim greatness. Determine your noble house’s legacy in the sprawling grand strategy of Crusader Kings III. Death is only the beginning as you guide your dynasty’s bloodline in the rich and larger-than-life simulation of the Middle Ages" (The underlining is done by me of course.) Tell me where i made the wrong assumption, and i am "imaging things". I would love this game that has described here tbh, the current CK III is not this described game at all. "Death is only the beginning"... Not really.

Anyway, I'm not going hijack this thread with my annoyance of the road(map) we are currently on. I just want to play the game that i thought i bought at the start, and get the love back that i have (or had) for the CK games. I will keep hoping for a game where I'm playing the long immersive game with marriages and other complex strategic planning (that takes cunning...). Slowly improving my noble house with unique flavour in the medieval world.

 

[CrazyRat]

Well, I was not going to make a big point out of this but you're implying I am wrong due to wrong assumptions, but that is clearly not true.
Let me give you the FULL steam description of CK III:
"Love, fight, scheme, and claim greatness. Determine your noble house’s legacy in the sprawling grand strategy of Crusader Kings III. Death is only the beginning as you guide your dynasty’s bloodline in the rich and larger-than-life simulation of the Middle Ages" (The underlining is done by me of course.) Tell me where i made the wrong assumption, and i am "imaging things". I would love this game that has described here tbh, the current CK III is not this described game at all. "Death is only the beginning"... Not really.

... and pray tell, how does it translate into prioritizing European content over China expansion?, or are you trying to argue that China had no dynasties?

 

[heliostellar]

This is map game without any fancy graphics or complex ai, we should totally expect it to run well on potato

It has a extremely active database that is constantly working, unlike in most in most games. Most FPS for instance don't need to constantly track--let alone recalculate--the ever changing line of sucession for upteen different titles.

The load is usually on the CPU instead of the GPU for that reason. It's not an issue of just dumping more processing into the GPU vs CPU or adjusting frame rates, which is a lot of what standard game optimization involves. The database itself has to be well-optimized, and ideally, never too large. I agree with others that the issue is that the database grows out of control with too many extraneous records (characters) that you may never need or interact with.

 

[guiskj]

I thoroughly fear that adding China will come at the cost of deeper interactions between characters in the future. There is just no way around it in my mind on how they'll expand the map, therefore character count, by 40% and yet still have computational capacity to add more character interactions (decision points for the AI) in the future.

Unless they plan on making the extended part of the map just work differently, like removing Baron-level characters and making Counts operate like Barons do now (basically do nothing). Doing this for the current map would cause riots, but I imagine the playerbase would be more accepting of this move for the new lands.

 

[CannaeCogitate]

I thoroughly fear that adding China will come at the cost of deeper interactions between characters in the future. There is just no way around it in my mind on how they'll expand the map, therefore character count, by 40% and yet still have computational capacity to add more character interactions (decision points for the AI) in the future.

Unless they plan on making the extended part of the map just work differently, like removing Baron-level characters and making Counts operate like Barons do now (basically do nothing). Doing this for the current map would cause riots, but I imagine the playerbase would be more accepting of this move for the new lands.

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)

 

[Pendables]

I thoroughly fear that adding China will come at the cost of deeper interactions between characters in the future. There is just no way around it in my mind on how they'll expand the map, therefore character count, by 40% and yet still have computational capacity to add more character interactions (decision points for the AI) in the future.

Unless they plan on making the extended part of the map just work differently, like removing Baron-level characters and making Counts operate like Barons do now (basically do nothing). Doing this for the current map would cause riots, but I imagine the playerbase would be more accepting of this move for the new lands.

Administrative government basically turned counts into barons, so I wouldn't be surprised if that's the direction they continue in.

 

[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.

 

[Benismann]

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 thermal nuclear device.

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

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

 

[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.