Improve Game Performance: Stop Spawning Courtiers

[Anonymous01]

Please disable auto-spawning of courtiers.

This includes both the regular stream of maidens and also the men courtiers automatically created when an unlanded character is granted a title.

There are 5 reasons for this:

1. They severely clog the history files and contribute to extreme lag as time progresses.

2. Most of them do nothing at all. Ever. For their entire lives. Of the few who do anything at all, they mostly limit themselves to conceiving illegitimate children who do nothing. For their entire lives.

3. They penalize players by violating the Court Size/Court Fertility Cap. This is obnoxious, Paradox, because a, players don't ask for these characters but are penalized for having them anyway; b, players are penalized with tyranny maluses for eliminating them by execution or murder; and c, banishment also invokes tyranny, and it in addition to marrying them away solves the Fertility Cap problem but doesn't solve the game processing speed problem.

4. They break immersion. Having random characters with no history, no backstory, and no relationships in a game about characters and relationships (at least that's how I play it; I know some of you paradox coders think it's a game about war) is distracting.

And 5. They are unnecessary. The game provides players ample ways to create unlanded courtiers if they want them: pregnancy, Hire a Courtier/Debutante, Invite to Court, and several courtier-spawning events. If the AI doesn't use all these features, it should. And if you're concerned about players and ai rulers having empty councils at game start, spawn five male relatives for each ruler at the start of the game, give every ruler a teenaged sister for political marriage purposes, and call it a day.

That's it. No more stream-o'-courtiers.

More realism. More game speed. More playability.

DO IT PARADOX.

 

[Anonymous01]

Virtually none of the courtiers in either of your cases would be randomly spawned - randomly spawned characters without children, marriage, or dynasty would have been wiped on the transfer to your court.

Generally your randomly spawned courtiers stop at two

What is the paradox developer quote or game code reference confirming this?

The courtier caps you describe are not at all my experience in game. What is your support for these assertions?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_silence

The devs aren't going to comment on something like this. But they also don't sit there listing every game mechanic to provide authority for people spuriously looking for it.

Or put more simply, look at your game & follow what happens to randomly spawned courtiers.

So no support at all. Only made up numbers and LyingEyes. Thanks.

 

[LordPeter]

I think Talq is half right.

If we take gameplay experience as proof, I have played a game where I was a minor, rather isolated (religion-wise: Zoroastrian) nation.
Because my court was lacking unmarried females, the game generated a woman (16 to 18 years or so) who suddenly arrived at my court. She had my religion, but not my culture, because apparently the culture of my home province was taken, which I didn't share.
Problem is: She hated me because of wrong culture. So I went ahead and married her off to another court. Instead I invited another woman to my court, who shared my culture. I married her.
Now a few month later another woman arrives at my court, same religion, province culture. I was annoyed and sent her away, but some months later another one appeared. Apparently not because I was unmarried, but rther because there was no unmarried woman at my court! This little game went on for some more time...

If this is a general phenomenon, I would assume that the game generates a random unmarried woman for every court which doesn't have an unmarried woman at that point of time.
If it has an unmarried woman, the auto generation stops. Which I noticed when I stopped marrying/banishing them away. No more woman appeared, because there already was one at my court.

Of course this all is subjective experience from a few playthroughs, so I might well be wrong here.
But if this is right, then Talq has a point because the character generation stops after a few characters. However, it restarts if that character leaves the court (or in this example, stays but gets married). If you apply this to all courts in game, this means the game will auto-generate an umarried woman for every court whoch hasn't got one for a few months. Theorethically this could generate an infinite number of courtiers, if you would force all of these women into just one court automatically (or in this example, even if all women are forced to marry right away).

I do not know in how far this applies to men as well, or if I really read the signs right. But yeah, even though Talq may be right and there is a limit for spawned characters, this limit is really weak and far too easily removed again.
The problem persists...

 

[Talq]

Which incidentally is what the problem is with the OPs suggestion. Generally your randomly spawned courtiers stop at two (events can add extras (as incidentally do revolts & some pagans/muslims get more but again they don't spawn infinitely) so if you have a 100 person court, they either all have dynasties or you are doing something silly like marrying your courtiers every few weeks. Contrary to his belief, his proposal won't make a meaningful difference.

The large number of unlanded people running around at the moment is mainly the seduction focus (with some bonus from family focus). That needs to be fixed - this isn't even going to help materially.

Emphasis added. The spawning is one random unmarried male, and one random unmarried female (except for some cultures where there are more - muslims and pagans). If they form a family (marriage, child) the game spawns another, but again just one (it doesn't keep on spawning them every few weeks - furthermore they will not spawn under certain other conditions like the court being too large). If you simply ignore them, they will stay that way. One of the reasons they are there is because of the AI, because it doesn't use the create courtier decisions. Another is that you need to look outside your court for some reasons (eg marriage), especially at the start of the game.

All you need to do to stop the spawning in your court is leave them alone - they don't marry by themselves and the AI doesn't marry insignificant characters to each other. On inheritance, the game will kill off any unmarried courtiers without relations (so those, and the eunuchs, jews, etc you get from events all don't pass to the next court (unless on your council). Even women past childbearing age without children or marriage die off. And if you have a 400 person court, you will find that nearly everybody is related to somebody else - which has nothing to do with random spawning (oh yes, and you can only get event spawns past that point until its a more reasonable level - so any unmarried, unrelated people are event spawns or predated the influx of people).

 

[LordPeter]

Emphasis added. The spawning is one random unmarried male, and one random unmarried female (except for some cultures where there are more - muslims and pagans). If they form a family (marriage, child) the game spawns another, but again just one (it doesn't keep on spawning them every few weeks - furthermore they will not spawn under certain other conditions like the court being too large). If you simply ignore them, they will stay that way. One of the reasons they are there is because of the AI, because it doesn't use the create courtier decisions. Another is that you need to look outside your court for some reasons (eg marriage), especially at the start of the game.

All you need to do to stop the spawning in your court is leave them alone - they don't marry by themselves and the AI doesn't marry insignificant characters to each other. On inheritance, the game will kill off any unmarried courtiers without relations (so those, and the eunuchs, jews, etc you get from events all don't pass to the next court (unless on your council). Even women past childbearing age without children or marriage die off. And if you have a 400 person court, you will find that nearly everybody is related to somebody else - which has nothing to do with random spawning (oh yes, and you can only get event spawns past that point until its a more reasonable level - so any unmarried, unrelated people are event spawns or predated the influx of people).

Hmm ok.
That would explain the behaviour I experienced. Shouldn't have married them then...
But why does the AI not use these decisions? It can use decisions after all, right?
The problem would then again be seduction, because if some random count decides to "have fun" with those unrelated characters, they end up with relations.

So in the end it all comes down to blaming seduction again...
Great. I have already become used to that

 

[Anonymous01]

The problem would then again be seduction, because if some random count decides to "have fun" with those unrelated characters, they end up with relations.

So in the end it all comes down to blaming seduction again...
Great. I have already become used to that

No, seduction isn't the problem, the problem is the courtiers themselves.

To explain: I tested out this mechanic based on what LordPeter and Talq said. What I found is that LordPeter is correct that Talq is half-right.

As Talq said, it does seem to be the case that the game is programmed to fill each count+ court with a certain minimum of courtiers, but will stop once that minimum is reached. In my test game (Muslim King of Mali, 1337 bookmark), that number at the start of the game was 10: 5 lowborn men, 4 lowborn women, and 1 unlanded man with a dynasty of his own (but no family of course). 1 of those men was a councilor, 4 vassal rulers took the other council spots, and the king's heir was also at court, bringing the game-start court total to 15 (not counting the king). 15 months into the game, a baron with no heir died, so his title reverted to the king and his widow moved to the king's court bringing the court total to 16. One month later, the widow had a posthumous son, bringing the total to 17. About 3 years into the game (December 1339), another baron died and his wife moved to the court, making the total 18. I ran the game until February 1349 (12 years), and the court stayed at 18.

So there is a spawned-courtier cap as Talq said. I had never noticed this before because I've always married away spawned-courtiers in my game, as Talq guessed. The reason I do this (and this gets back to LordPeter's point) is that I don't want my character's dynasty members, councilors, and other hand-picked courtiers taking lovers and making children in the court (makes more useless characters, screws up succession and claims, invokes the fertility cap, etc). However, while this lover/illegitimate children risk is magnified by seduction/Way of Life, I do not think seduction is the primary culprit because I observed this same phenomenon (though producing fewer children) before WoL, which is why I've always married-away spawned-courtiers since I started playing CK2 in 2013 (I think). As I said in post #6 above, all lowborn/no-dynasty characters are auto-spawned by the game or descend from auto-spawned characters. The same is true for many (though not all) no-family/1-member-dynasty unlanded courtiers. This contributes to the problems of breaking immersion, uselessness, and fertility cap I pointed out in post #1.

Regarding Talq's suggestion that these extra characters only negligibly impact game performance, that cannot be said with any confidence. Notepad++ counted 8,149 lowborn/no-dynasty characters in my December 1339 test game save file. I did not count how many had died (though being only 12 years in, it's safe to assume that the great majority of them were alive). Using the lowborn-to-single member dynasty spawned-courtier ratio in my character's court at game start, we can safely assume another 10% (814) of characters or so were game-spawned single-member dynasty characters, bringing the spawned characters to 8,963. This is versus the 40,932 total number of characters (dead or alive) in the save file by 1339 (12 years in). This means that 21% of characters in the game were spawned-courtiers with no connection to any ruler -- they were only in-game for the purposes of maintaining 5 spare councilors, 1-4 spare wives, and 1 spare noble/potential ruler for every count, duke, king, and emperor in-game at all times.

Using Groogy's ratio of 700 event triggers per character/per day quoted in post #13, that means that of the ca. 28 million triggers being processed everyday/every tick in a 40k-characters save file, about 6.27 million event triggers are being processed for characters who add next to nothing to any save game and do even less (this is assuming most of them are alive which is a safe assumption for the reason given earlier and if Talq's they-die-on-succession assertion is true, and also assuming they don't make any kids, which is not a safe assumption pre-WoL and is a less safe assumption post-WoL).

When I make some time to play again, I will test Talq's assertion that the 7-to-10 spare courtiers are killed off on succession. I've never observed this, but even if it is true, we've established here that they are immediately replaced character-for-character, meaning the 8,963 useless character figure is a static baseline at all times the game is running.

In total, this suggests that the question raised by LordPeter in post #24 and by me in post #1, 'why doesn't the ai use the hire-a-courtier/present-a-debutante intrigue decisions,' is a main question here. An alternative (and for me preferred) solution is the one I outlined in point 5 of post #1: give every count+ ruler 5 males cousins (with no parents) and 1 sister at each bookmark. After that, no more courtier spawning -- every character would need to come into the game via pregnancy, the intrigue menu, or the few eunuch/squire events. This would make the game more interconnected, intimate, and immersive while removing more than 6 million event triggers per tick.

 

[Anonymous01]

3 things:

1. Thank you, paradox staffers, for partially implementing this for Nomads, whether due to my suggestion or your own volition. I think it significantly improves the character game, especially when starting a new game.

2. Horse Lords seems to me to be your best work yet, both in terms of game stability and depth of features. Congratulations to your team.

And 3. Please consider expanding the 4 brothers/1 sister/2 parents setup or something similar to other government types.

Thank you for a great game and your high-quality workmanship.

 

[LightningFarm]

One of the problems is how much of a central mechanic the courtier system is, and I honestly doubt we'll see major overhauls to it before we get CK3.
That being said, I don't get the arguments that we'll lack people to give counties, seeing as the family dynasty get's rather huge.

My Way of Solving would consist of two different changes to the current system.
1. Add a cadet system for landed family members. - This is not really for optimisation, but to help create a deeper game, and make it even more personal.
2. Sending family members to other courts. - Instead of using randomly spawned courtiers, we should have the ability to send sons and daughters to another court. This is I think could solve a lot of lag by having just dynastical members in the court, and would to some extent add another level of diplomacy.
The above is something that I've been thinking off alot, especially with comments that the game was inspired by 'A Game of Thrones'. In there we see how much intriuge comes from the fact that children are being sent to other courts.

 

[Anonymous01]

2. Sending family members to other courts. - Instead of using randomly spawned courtiers, we should have the ability to send sons and daughters to another court. This is I think could solve a lot of lag by having just dynastical members in the court, and would to some extent add another level of diplomacy.
The above is something that I've been thinking off alot, especially with comments that the game was inspired by 'A Game of Thrones'. In there we see how much intriuge comes from the fact that children are being sent to other courts.

It's a great idea and very common in this era.