Suggestions for improved performance

I want this so much.

Sounds great.

The courtier part would be amazing. +1

I believe the part about deleting courtiers with no links to other people is an existing feature for some time now though, and it certainly helps already.

That said, indiscriminately deleting the histories of old rulers kinda ruins part of the point of the game though, as every now and then a dynasty from nowhere could land in the throne of somewhere via a lot of twists of fate, and the only way for the player to find out their stories is if the histories are intact.

Making it optional would be nice of course, but I'm more curious how exactly would they pull of that functionality though - would characters that aren't directly/indirectly tied to your dynasty's progress just disappear from the records, thus causing regnal numbers of other realms to be messed up among other things? Every character in the game has the potential to be an important character, and determining which characters are 'inconsequential' is probably difficult to define - the dynasty of some random baron in the middle of somewhere could end up the future emperors of your mortal-enemy realm several centuries later, how do we determine that they were inconsequential and thus should be expunged from saved game records?

I don't think histories really slow down the game. It is the huge amount of courtiers that does it.

What about deleting county history?

trying to finish a game from 867 was nearly impossible

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Really? What spec is your machine?

On my 4gb ram and rad hd4650 it was pretty bad. Even after i used every trick i knew of (disable trees, city, low res, no steam overlay) i was barely getting through 10-20 years in an hour in the 1300s.
The game really slows down the longer you play and I've yet to see someone who didn't experience this after playing a couple hundred years.

m1c said:

On my 4gb ram and rad hd4650 it was pretty bad. Even after i used every trick i knew of (disable trees, city, low res, no steam overlay) i was barely getting through 10-20 years in an hour in the 1300s.
The game really slows down the longer you play and I've yet to see someone who didn't experience this after playing a couple hundred years.

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You turned down the graphics to get through a CPU bottleneck. That's not gonna work unless the coders were some kind of technowizards.

You need a better processor and/or more/faster RAM if you want to improve the situation yourself.

Courtiers are already killed off quite frequently. Count deposed? Bam -> a ton of people is dead. Dead lowborns are "forgotten" right away.


In terms of performance I think what would be best to happen is to move away from simulating everything in the same detail. If I am playing in Ireland the engine doesn't have to really simulate _ALL_ stuff in India. Sure it is nice to be able to change rulers on load, yeah, but this comes at a price.

I think that it would make sense to not simulate parts of realms that are far away. Sure, conquests and revolts should still be possible. But not simulating counts and barons could work. Have there be dukes and most counties populated by "unknown character". Maybe add the option to send the spymaster there to find out more which leads to those places being (again) fully simulated for a few years. Also disable events and decisions and the court for far away rulers. Once your realm expands towards these places those details can be gradually added in again. Would drastically cut down the number of characters as well as the number of things that have to happen every day.

Years ago I was a big fan of EA's football (fifa) manager series. Around 2002 the player was omniscient: For every club in the world the players could be looked at and their skill and talent viewed. In later versions those details where hidden and had to be found out by sending a scout. And you know what? This actually made the game more realistic. Why not do something similar for CK2?

cerapa said:

You turned down the graphics to get through a CPU bottleneck. That's not gonna work unless the coders were some kind of technowizards.

You need a better processor and/or more/faster RAM if you want to improve the situation yourself.

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The CPU is a 3ghz dualcore so not the worst (was the best I could find at home). I don't have any cash so I cant really buy anything new so I was looking for possible solutions.

I'm just wondering what kind of setup is required to get similar game speed throughout a 500 year game?

edit: Eu4 has terra incognita which is a nice solution

m1c said:

The CPU is a 3ghz dualcore so not the worst (was the best I could find at home). I don't have any cash so I cant really buy anything new so I was looking for possible solutions.

I'm just wondering what kind of setup is required to get similar game speed throughout a 500 year game?

edit: Eu4 has terra incognita which is a nice solution

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I think (could be mistaken) that behind terra incognita (which is something that I would like to have in CK2) still everything is fully simulated.

History files should delete people ~50-100 years after they've died, if they didn't hold a title at some point

JonStryker said:

I think (could be mistaken) that behind terra incognita (which is something that I would like to have in CK2) still everything is fully simulated.

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This is correct, it primarily saves on graphics load since you aren't seeing armies, etc. moving around in those areas, stuff under construction, and so forth. It may also slightly speed up stuff like diplo ai decision making by eliminating nations from consideration. The bulk of the load in later stages of a CK 2 game is the massive number of characters. Construction probably comes close to doubling (or more) the number of holdings by the end of the game, all of which will have their minimal court. Then consider the typical size difference between your court at game start and in the late game and multiply that by the number of duchy and higher level titles and that is a massive number of added living characters so even pruning the meaningless dead doesn't help all that much.

Even with a 3GHz i7 Sandy Bridge, 16GB of RAM, and CK2 installed on an SSD, it still chugs after the 1100s.

m1c said:

On my 4gb ram and rad hd4650 it was pretty bad. Even after i used every trick i knew of (disable trees, city, low res, no steam overlay) i was barely getting through 10-20 years in an hour in the 1300s.
The game really slows down the longer you play and I've yet to see someone who didn't experience this after playing a couple hundred years.

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No denying that it slows down, but I haven't experienced it to the point that the game becomes unplayable.

Hopit said:

History files should delete people ~50-100 years after they've died, if they didn't hold a title at some point

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It already does. But not if they are related to landed people (because this would destroy the family trees for nobles)

Thure said:

It already does. But not if they are related to landed people (because this would destroy the family trees for nobles)

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Even the relatives should go if they didn't hold titles.
I'd rather have messed up family trees, that really only affect immersion, than a slower game-

People running on old machines, just buy a cheap ~$80-$120 GPU or CPU, with all the money you're able to spend on buying DLC's and games, buying a cheap improvement for your computer shouldn't be that hard. However, some optimization for improved performance is always welcomed.