Autosaving Issue in Ironman Mode

[Encephalon]

Adding my voice to this thread. I like the Ironman mode and all that is associated with it, including the inability to save-scam. For the first houndred years or so I hardly notice the autosaves. However, by the mid-17th Century the game starts to become increasingly slow, with autosaves taking 3-7 sec each. This is not really a problem in times of peace and stability, but as France with a colonial empire spawning frequent native uprisings, nearly monthly rebellions and a 5-year cycle of war with a Portugal-Spain alliance (including myriads of 1000-men exterminations), the amount of saves becomes problematic.

As alluded to by other players this has caused me to think strategically about whether to engage in conflicts or increase my revolt risk based primarally on the amount of autosave trouble it will cause me. Just as lordboy54, MCam and others I would urge the team to come up with a way to keep all the functions of Ironman while increasing the mid- and late game performance.

Otherwise all hail to the developers, EU IV is a great game!

 

[lordboy54]

Really wish I knew what you issueless people are doing to make the saves not noticeable. My desktop costed around 2,5k euros when it was built and the OS and EU IV is on a SSD, I even tried to move the steam cloud to the ssd but that didn't do anything at all. The first 100 years go by without issues but at some point the game will start 'stalling' for 2-3 seconds on each save. Basically goes like, see event, hit pause, wait 2-3 seconds and then the game unlocks. Internet is 100/10 but I really doubt it waits for the sync to finish because that would take like 15-30 seconds depending on the age of the game, it just stores it in the steam userdata so I'm pretty sure you could easily fool ironman mode by just copying that file and replacing it prior to exiting the game or something.

Here's a question tho, all you people who seem to have no issues past 200 years at least, is your steam installed on the SSD? Or just the games from steam, because I tried making a symbolic link for the userdata folder and installed EU IV onto the SSD from the steam folder and that did nothing at all.

Sadly Paradox's answer to this is, Buy a dedicated 2k euro machine with nothing except EU IV on it (With no guarantees of working well) AND then we won't call you a savescummer and allow you to get achievements.

It's just your internet connection. Nothing else, nothing more.

 

[arcain]

That is an arrogant statement! I have got a pretty decent Internet-Connection for german standards and the same massive problems described in the postings above. I guess this topic will grow more important when people start playing in Ironman and reach lategame..

 

[pierreyoda]

Saving IS getting slow, 1750 here with a huge French blob and it takes up to 3 or 4 seconds, compared to less than a half second in the first century. I love Ironman (the pressure when you declare war !), but in my next games I won't use it because of this (except for specific achievements).

IMO those monthly saves should not be here since there are already so many saves due to sieges, combats or events.

 

[duhsveti]

That is an arrogant statement! I have got a pretty decent Internet-Connection for german standards and the same massive problems described in the postings above. I guess this topic will grow more important when people start playing in Ironman and reach lategame..

Well i'm in year 1740 and saves take about 0.50 seconds, so i can't really complain. I do have an SSD so that accounts for the speed i think.

 

[Mann42]

The entire point is at saves at each decision so you can't quit out and return to an earlier save when something goes wrong. If you don't want that, why not just play in non-ironman mode and save whenever you like?

Because you tied achievements to Ironman mode, forcing people that want to experience all the features of the game to deal with a buggy and lagtastical experience.

 

[unmerged(537306)]

This needs adressing.

I am running a very high-end PC, with a very fast internet connection in Sweden and when I get to the later stages in the game and something causes mass rebellions, I prefer to just speed up the game, put on autonomous rebellion suppression and let the time flow while building/coring/converting stuff. But every auto-save, which means every battle, every decision, every month, I get a 2 second pause for that 40MB save upload to the steam cloud.

If anything, they either need to rethink the whole save-thing of when it should be necessary to save and when it shouldn't be. There are several instances when an auto-save is not warranted:

Crushing victories, where their whole army is eliminated. Maybe even won battles at all(who reloads a won battle?).
Won sieges.
Monthly saves should already be pointless with the amount of auto-saves going on.

They should instead look at things like what would cause a player to reload a save? Mostly, I would say, it's when they lose a battle they thought they'd win, they enter a war and find that an unexpected amount of enemies have joined.

Or they need to rework the entire save-mechanic for iron man, instead function like a database where every save is instead an update to a database, instead of reuploading the database on every change, which would make a hell of a lot more sense, but may not be possible due to the nature of how steam cloud works.

 

[duhsveti]

Now this i did not know. The game uploads the save to steam cloud every time a save is made?

 

[BoleslavLev]

It took me like 2-3 seconds for every save which is too much for some, but was ok with me. But then it came. I reached 17th century. Now, every save takes 7-10 seconds, I am dead serious! Any advice what can I do except to pay 10k bucks (well, in euros like 400+-) for the new PC. I have great Russia finally catching up in tech just waiting to crush everybody, but I played 7 hours today and more than half of it was saving. Oh man... is this suppose to happen every time the save is made?

 

[RyanX]

I adore the idea of the Ironman mode, but it has become unbearable. I don't have a totally super fantastic upload speed and since the game needs to upload 40 megabites of saved files to the cloud every time I end a battle (I have a lot of rebels and native uprisings) or a member of my alliance makes a move or every time a month passes... I simply give up on Ironman. When most of my game turns to looking at a "Autosaving..." message, I get angry and I quit Ironmode.

Why can't Ironmode just save randomly? Or simply have Paradox nitpick some of the events that are totally worth reloading the game, if they are so afraid of their fans cheating? This is not about cheating, I do not want to cheat, I want to play and I want to get achievements (fuck me, right?). I had to give up on my England game just because it was no longer playable in Ironman, once I got in a few wars with Hainaut or Flanders. I'm sorry, but can't you have the game files save into some random steam folder and then when the game is ended have them uploaded? This is unbearable!

 

[coldsteel]

The entire point is at saves at each decision so you can't quit out and return to an earlier save when something goes wrong. If you don't want that, why not just play in non-ironman mode and save whenever you like?

Also, in addition to Mann42's point because I've started the game already in Ironman and would like to continue my game without it lagging.

 

[arcain]

A new PC won't change anything. As people said above, it's the size of the save-game thats causing the problems, not your system. I laid my game to rest today. I am in the year 1750, every new year gets more problematic, sometimes takes up to 10 minutes to reach december in full speed.

 

[BoleslavLev]

A new PC won't change anything. As people said above, it's the size of the save-game thats causing the problems, not your system. I laid my game to rest today. I am in the year 1780, every new year gets more problematic, sometimes takes up to 10 minutes to reach december in full speed.

That sucks. I hope Paradox will come up with some solution. I used to cheat in EU3, but now I love Ironman, it gives me that challenge and also rewards me for big successes, because I know I did that on my 1st try. But I hate that saving. Even the monthly saving is becoming annoying, but that saving of everything else is driving me crazy. Ukraine wants military acces, I agree, 10 seconds saving. After a minute, they cancel it and then want it again, I agree, 10 seconds saving. Then they want it for the 3rd time, I agree, 10 damn seconds saving. 4th time they want it, I said NO, I want to play the game God damn it, I don´t want to save all the time! "Decline" 10 seconds saving? I fell on the floor in agony. And thank God I am playing as republic, unless there would be royal marriages too.

 

[Geralt]

Well people you know there is something called Cheat Engine.... So bisically if you want to cheat you can do it without any problem Ironman game or not! But I'm absolutely agree that this permanent autosaving is just horrible! It's making me crasy! And I have a good computer i72600k @4ghz GTX 560 TI 8gb Ram Crucial sdd 120 gb. Win7 64bit. So please can somebody explaine me, is that autosaving here to prevent cheating? Because if it is, it's a fail! I think disabling the console should be enough to get achievmenrs.

 

[BoleslavLev]

Every time you exit the game, it should save, nothing more. If somebody is willing to crush to the desktop or even to hard-restart his/her PC instead of playing more of the game to get some achievement, I pity that person. I also think it is not worth the risk of ruining your PC and wasting your time, but ok. It won´t prevent every cheating, but I think it would be enough.

 

[mknoke]

Sorry to be annoying but no one replied to this, probably because it cannot be done?

Is there a way to turn ironman game into a regular one? I started an ironman campaign but got tired of the constant saves, can I just convert the game into a regular game, of course with no possibility of going back to iron?

+1

Judging the developer reaction, they are not going to change the behavior anytime soon. No problem, I can "simulate" ironman and dont care about achievements - but I would like to be able to continue playing my current game.

Anyone know how to turn an ironman game into a normal one?

If that is not possible, and developers are not working on a fix, it is very disappointing.

 

[Mr. Habba]

Every time you exit the game, it should save, nothing more. If somebody is willing to crush to the desktop or even to hard-restart his/her PC instead of playing more of the game to get some achievement, I pity that person. I also think it is not worth the risk of ruining your PC and wasting your time, but ok. It won´t prevent every cheating, but I think it would be enough.

I totally agree with this statement. Just prevent players from exiting the game without saving, like many other games out there do. As others pointed out, there are games that save automatically even if you force-exit. But even if you just save when you manually exit the game (whoever force-exits the game shouldn't play Ironman, IMHO) that would be a hughe improvement. Right now wars are a pain in the ass because of the amount of autosaves: battle starts, 3 sec autosave, after a few days the battle is over, 3 sec autosave, then a new month starts, 3 sec autosaves. EUIV is a fantastic game, but Ironman definitely needs some rework.

 

[BoleslavLev]

I totally agree with this statement. Just prevent players from exiting the game without saving, like many other games out there do. As others pointed out, there are games that save automatically even if you force-exit. But even if you just save when you manually exit the game (whoever force-exits the game shouldn't play Ironman, IMHO) that would be a hughe improvement. Right now wars are a pain in the ass because of the amount of autosaves: battle starts, 3 sec autosave, after a few days the battle is over, 3 sec autosave, then a new month starts, 3 sec autosaves. EUIV is a fantastic game, but Ironman definitely needs some rework.

Yep, I remeber Diablo 2 was like that. The lightning could struck, stopping the delivery of electricity and crash my game and I still had all my progress (well, concerning level, not hte position as you always started in the town, so if you were beating some boss, it wasn´t nice experience, but the point remains - it is possible to save it every time the game ends). It would be awesome. Not only pesky saving would be gone, but you could also feel save, because your game would be saved under any circumstances.

 

[lgonggr]

Up to date machine but not installed it on SSD. Game ran ironman flawlessy but now in mid-1600's and world wars I am getting the stuttering as well. This should be improved as it is causing me to make fatal mistakes due to accidental unpausing or preventing me from pausing.
Also, fog of war should really be increased to two squares as you are completely unable to react to incoming AI blobs.

 

[unmerged(239624)]

i have a monster rig and good internet connection so the constant autosaving doesn't really bother me. my friend was complaining that it makes his game take ages, though.