Half the game is unplayable

[PossibleTango]

Once you hit 1870 good luck going any further with how much it slows down even with a top end CPU.

 

[MfgLuckbot]

Once you hit 1870 good luck going any further with how much it slows down even with a top end CPU.

Weird, my middle class laptop handles even the 1900s well

 

[ShaTiK]

I think multiculturalism tanks the performance - people move around all the time and create little sub-pops in lots of states. Since each pop unit have their own calculations..
Since, as we all know, PDX have absolutely no inter-project cooperation, the game would go the same way Stellaris did - in that it took devs approximately 3 years to somewhat fix the pop-related calculations.
Not to mention, by the way game is balanced, I personally think no single person on dev team played pass 1880, while actually, you know, playing game decently - having good econ, waging successful wars etc. Like, you know, having 3 full pages of building queue - for player it is a sign of success, but I think devs didn't even planned on players having +100 construction, much less +1.000
I'm sorry if I sound harsh, but as far as I see - this is reality of modern pdx and VIc3. Game could be good - in a few years of free patches even.

 

[Marirosa]

I finished a game owning more than half the total population. The trick? don't zoom in and don't open the trade routes map.

 

[Mr.Arrow]

The game also consumes a rather huge amount of ram. Near the late game it can go as high as 10GB-16GB ram usage.

 

[Hemothep]

Refraining from going for Multiculturalism does ease the lag somewhat. In my current game, I'm in the 1890ies and the game is still at an slow, yet acceptable pace.
Other things that reduce lag are annexing a lot of small tags, as well as turning off some graphical calculations. For the latter I recommend the following two mods, that really helped my mid tier Laptop:

Steam Workshop::Remove all trade routes' line and arrows(移除贸易路线上的箭头和线)

steamcommunity.com

Steam Workshop::No Clouds

steamcommunity.com

 

[Hardin4188]

As others have said, stay zoomed out as much as possible and check your ram usage. This game uses a lot of ram and if you only have 16gb it might be time for an upgrade.

 

[Marirosa]

Refraining from going for Multiculturalism does ease the lag somewhat. In my current game, I'm in the 1890ies and the game is still at an slow, yet acceptable pace.
Other things that reduce lag are annexing a lot of small tags, as well as turning off some graphical calculations. For the latter I recommend the following two mods, that really helped my mid tier Laptop:

Steam Workshop::Remove all trade routes' line and arrows(移除贸易路线上的箭头和线)

steamcommunity.com

Steam Workshop::No Clouds

steamcommunity.com

The no clouds i knew already but the no trade routes its very interesting too.

 

[Lauxman]

I’ve got a top of the line PC and mine also drags to a crawl after 1880 or so. The fact that the devs haven’t acknowledged this is absurd.

 

[BPZ1941]

1.0.6 was pretty good for me, but 1.1.x is just awful. I'm not sure what happened, but early- and mid-game went from 70% CPU use to >95%. Granted, it's an i5-10300H, so not a super computer, but still above the recommended. Did a benchmark test and it's probably not a CPU problem because it apparently performs better than the average i5 submitted.

This slowdown isn't late-game related unlike previous versions, because the drop when getting 1.1.x is very noticeable in January 1836 alone.

 

[Star Seeker]

The fact that the devs haven’t acknowledged this is absurd.

This is incorrect. As others have mentioned before, 1.0.6 did improve perfomance, so the devs did "acknowledged" it by improving it. What happened with 1.1 is anyone's guess.

 

[TripleAgent]

For what it's worth, Kaiser_Johan acknowledged it on reddit when asked about it, they apparently had to choose a functional AI over functional lategame. His response when I asked about late-game testing and how this major functionality issue (not being able to play lategame) was missed:

"We do it regularly however close to release we added some necessary AI updates which heavily exacerbated the problem lategame. By then it was too late to fix but it was the lesser of two evils."

I don't particularly like that choice, that shouldn't be something you need to debate for a full priced release, but I guess it is what it is.

 

[smellymummy]

As others have said, stay zoomed out as much as possible and check your ram usage. This game uses a lot of ram and if you only have 16gb it might be time for an upgrade.

if it's pushing past 16gb I'd say that's more an issue with the game having a memory leak than needing to soup up your gaming computer. 16 is pretty high and the advantages of having say 32gigs is so you can lag free email, web surfing, office work, etc IMO

 

[Question]

It would help if we got more information. Whats causing the game to use 9gb+ memory in late game, compared to about 2gb at start? Late game is unplayable right now, it can take 5+ minutes to load a save and the chugging due to slow tick rate is insane.

 

[Question]

Hmm, i suspect that the pop merging thing added in 1.06 was broken in 1.1. Im not seeing any pop merging taking place at all. As an example :

Lots of tiny laborer pops in this food industries building.

I even cranked up the pop merging values :

POP_MERGE_MAX_WORKFORCE = 10000 #10                        # Pops with workforce smaller than this may get merged with other pops of the same type in their building / unemployment pool; if zero, no small pop merging will occur, which may have an adverse effect on late-game performance
   
    POP_MERGE_MIN_NUM_POPS_SAME_PROFESSION = 2 #4            # Employed Pops will not get merged with others in their same building if there aren't at least this many Pops of the same type in the building

So in theory, any pops less than 10k will merge as long as there are at least 2 pops in the same profession, but im not seeing this happen...

MIN_ASSIMILATION doesnt appear to work either, i have it set to 10k and I have multiculturalism, and i am not seeing all these tiny cultures getting insta-assimilated...

 

[TSD]

Weird, my middle class laptop handles even the 1900s well

It's completely dependent on how the player plays. I had a Japan playthrough to 36 and it was pretty much fine the whole game. A US playthrough, conquering all over, a 500M+ population and a 10BN+ GDP? My PC is begging for mercy in the 1900s.

 

[endersaim]

I can’t run the game at all. I start the game and in 1836 it uses all 16 gb of memory (sometimes crashes), 100% of my gpu, and 95% of my CPU (I have a gen 12 i7 I think)

 

[TSD]

I think multiculturalism tanks the performance - people move around all the time and create little sub-pops in lots of states. Since each pop unit have their own calculations..
Since, as we all know, PDX have absolutely no inter-project cooperation, the game would go the same way Stellaris did - in that it took devs approximately 3 years to somewhat fix the pop-related calculations.
Not to mention, by the way game is balanced, I personally think no single person on dev team played pass 1880, while actually, you know, playing game decently - having good econ, waging successful wars etc. Like, you know, having 3 full pages of building queue - for player it is a sign of success, but I think devs didn't even planned on players having +100 construction, much less +1.000
I'm sorry if I sound harsh, but as far as I see - this is reality of modern pdx and VIc3. Game could be good - in a few years of free patches even.

I completely agree there are aspects of the game I clearly think were not actually play tested, playing the game organically.

Trade being a GLARING example.
It's been repeatedly stated this isn't a "map painting game", however, the only way to keep your economy moving is to paint the map. I cannot trade for resources in ANY meaningful amount. I purposely did a playthrough as the US with the intent of never allowing myself to get infamous (let alone a 999 level infamy pariah which is usually par for the course for me). I spent a couple really short stints infamous on accident (I never broke an infamy of 30).

My economy started stagnating around 1910 at a GDP of 6BN, because I had no resources left to build to cover deficits for further industry expansion. I also rushed Malaria and basically got most of Africa unopposed.

So I hit the trade tab. The only thing I needed that was in okay supply was iron. I was able to get 2 trade routes supplying me with 1000 iron a piece, but that was still a drop in the bucket. Literally anything else I needed there were a handful of trade routes that would supply me with 10-15 of a resource. Completely pointless to even bother.

So I basically spent the rest of the game trying to snipe coastal resource nodes while keeping me infamy low in spirit of the goal of the playthrough, but my GDP barely grew for the rest of the game.

What I've learned is while hearing from PDX "It's not a map painting game", the gameplay leaves map painting as your only choice to grow your economy. Focusing on a "cash crop" for example and building your economy through trade throughout the game, just isn't something that is possible, but should be in a game that "isn't about painting the map". I mean, you can't even supplement your economy with trade in the mid to late game let alone rely on trade.

The thing is, it isn't that the resources aren't there. Like I was sniping iron nodes in wars because I was short Iron, none of them were developed at all. The AI simply doesn't exploit its own resources....By late game, even small minors should be exploiting their resources....

EDIT: I don't know how someone could "respectfully disagree" with my post. It's a literal fact. There is practically no resource availability through trade particularly mid-late game, other than things most GP's will already have in significant abundance on their own like grain.....Iron? Coal? Oil? Opium? lmao. Good luck.

 

[Ir0nSlug]

I completely agree there are aspects of the game I clearly think were not actually play tested, playing the game organically.

Trade being a GLARING example.
It's been repeatedly stated this isn't a "map painting game", however, the only way to keep your economy moving is to paint the map. I cannot trade for resources in ANY meaningful amount. I purposely did a playthrough as the US with the intent of never allowing myself to get infamous (let alone a 999 level infamy pariah which is usually par for the course for me). I spent a couple really short stints infamous on accident (I never broke an infamy of 30).

My economy started stagnating around 1910 at a GDP of 6BN, because I had no resources left to build to cover deficits for further industry expansion. I also rushed Malaria and basically got most of Africa unopposed.

So I hit the trade tab. The only thing I needed that was in okay supply was iron. I was able to get 2 trade routes supplying me with 1000 iron a piece, but that was still a drop in the bucket. Literally anything else I needed there were a handful of trade routes that would supply me with 10-15 of a resource. Completely pointless to even bother.

So I basically spent the rest of the game trying to snipe coastal resource nodes while keeping me infamy low in spirit of the goal of the playthrough, but my GDP barely grew for the rest of the game.

What I've learned is while hearing from PDX "It's not a map painting game", the gameplay leaves map painting as your only choice to grow your economy. Focusing on a "cash crop" for example and building your economy through trade throughout the game, just isn't something that is possible, but should be in a game that "isn't about painting the map". I mean, you can't even supplement your economy with trade in the mid to late game let alone rely on trade.

The thing is, it isn't that the resources aren't there. Like I was sniping iron nodes in wars because I was short Iron, none of them were developed at all. The AI simply doesn't exploit its own resources....By late game, even small minors should be exploiting their resources....

EDIT: I don't know how someone could "respectfully disagree" with my post. It's a literal fact. There is practically no resource availability through trade particularly mid-late game, other than things most GP's will already have in significant abundance on their own like grain.....Iron? Coal? Oil? Opium? lmao. Good luck.

AI doesn't even build gold mines when it's just free money. Captured pretty much all gold states in north america, not a single one had gold mines build even though they were discovered. Hell, I just captured a Russian alaska with 0/12 gold mines, but 16 ports...

 

[Ir0nSlug]

they apparently had to choose a functional AI over functional lategame.

Yeah, the advanced behavior the AI shows is bound to have a heavy performance impact.