Unpopular opinion: some provinces should be removed

[necro84]

When you include the largest and most important city in the world at the time (Rome)

Rome in 1450 had a population of about 30k. Naples, Florence, Genoa, Milan, and Venice were bigger in Italy alone. Cities like Verona, Brescia, Palermo, and Brescia were similar in size. If you consider the whole world there would be hundreds of bigger cities in Europe, Asia and even a few in Africa like Cairo, Fes, Oyo or Tenochtitlan in North America. It was important because of the Pope but nothing more.

Rome at that point was something like Brussels today if you consider it the main city and something like the capital of EU

 

[JKiller96]

North America I would say is the place where provinces should be removed. It is massively bloated, and I say this because, unlike Europe, Asia, and Africa, not that many people play in North America. The colonizable areas between East Africa and Great Lakes should also mostly be removed, maybe with a few provinces remaining between Kilwa and Congo. South America could use impassable provinces, but it has a good density.

Ireland doesn't need less provinces when there's something like two dozen that can be removed in the aforementioned areas.

 

[st360]

Strongly disagree! Paradox haven't added enough provinces. I'd definitely like to see some more in Africa at the very least. Plus South America desperately needs an impassable mountain range for the Andes.

Cool. And when those new provinces in Africa make your game freeze for 20 seconds every new in game day you will be happy?

 

[st360]

I disagree with removing provinces for the sake of fewer provinces.

I wholeheartedly agree with removing provinces from already overcrowded places such as Southeast Asia, North America and (unpopular opinion) the HRE, France and the British Islands if it means we can get more provinces in greatly neglected places such as South America and Subsaharan Africa.

The point was that the addition of new provinces in Emperor is making the game extremely laggy.

 

[Bandua_of_Gallaecia]

The point was that the addition of new provinces in Emperor is making the game extremely laggy.

I don't buy the argument that the new provinces increase lag all that much.
Besides, my game has always been incredibly slow anyway (potato pc), so a +5sec increase in an already 50 second month is tolerable for the extra flavour.

It's mostly the number of tags and the number of armies (which is an AI issue)

 

[Fusilliban]

If Leviathan broke it, like @Johan said it did... why not just revert to the pre-Leviathan map?

The biggest problem with removing provinces/tags is that those decisions are hard, and political. Deciding which 100 provinces to delete, change, etc would be a huge political undertaking. Tons of people have opinions about parts of the map near and dear to their hearts, due to their playstyle, their personal heritage, or affinity for history, and so any new decision would have to be justified and would produce tons of grumbling and "okay but why did you do remove provinces from MY favorite part of the map when you could have removed stuff from THIS stupid backwater instead," and this would suck because everyone's favorite is someone else's backwater.

But the pre-Leviathan map is a known quantity, doesn't need any new decisions, and wouldn't piss off anyone new. So it would be cheap in developer time, and cheap in forum gripes, and would help performance a lot.

Reverting is good, actually.

The game could also make better use of more cores, but that probably still wouldn't be as good as slimming down some big-O stuff.

 

[MatthewP]

If Leviathan broke it, like @Johan said it did... why not just revert to the pre-Leviathan map?

The biggest problem with removing provinces/tags is that those decisions are hard, and political. Deciding which 100 provinces to delete, change, etc would be a huge political undertaking. Tons of people have opinions about parts of the map near and dear to their hearts, due to their playstyle, their personal heritage, or affinity for history, and so any new decision would have to be justified and would produce tons of grumbling and "okay but why did you do remove provinces from MY favorite part of the map when you could have removed stuff from THIS stupid backwater instead," and this would suck because everyone's favorite is someone else's backwater.

But the pre-Leviathan map is a known quantity, doesn't need any new decisions, and wouldn't piss off anyone new. So it would be cheap in developer time, and cheap in forum gripes, and would help performance a lot.

Reverting is good, actually.

The game could also make better use of more cores, but that probably still wouldn't be as good as slimming down some big-O stuff.

It would probably be the simplest solution but probably not as simple as it sounds. Are there events/decisions/great works/etc. tied to the new provinces?

Also, while I support it as an experiment, I still don’t think we have anything like proof that there would be large perf improvements just from this change.

 

[Fusilliban]

Oh, for sure it wouldn't cost no time, I just figure it'd probably take 1/20th of the developer/manager time, and maybe 1/10th of the forum-mod time. And the dev time might be a net win, compared to all the future dev-time savings from not needing to push more performance improvements.

 

[st360]

I don't buy the argument that the new provinces increase lag all that much.
Besides, my game has always been incredibly slow anyway (potato pc), so a +5sec increase in an already 50 second month is tolerable for the extra flavour.

It's mostly the number of tags and the number of armies (which is an AI issue)

I literally gave the link to a EU 4 developer who said "its not the tags its the number of provinces".

 

[BlazeKnight_]

I literally gave the link to a EU 4 developer who said "its not the tags its the number of provinces".

except that argument is complete bull because modders know that new provinces don't do crap, its tags

and there is no functional difference between vanilla adding new provinces and you going in and adding your own new province

What do MP mods that want to improve gamespeed do? They delete tags, not provs.

 

[AvengedK1ng]

I literally gave the link to a EU 4 developer who said "its not the tags its the number of provinces".

I bet theres some lose code like every Greek character constantly thinking about blinding in ck2

 

[Chazb5046]

Paradox has admitted that they went overboard with new provinces on the map and it crossed the line into heavily affecting performance. This performance cant be fixed any way except by removing provinces. The effect is not linear; even removing just a few provinces would make most of the difference.

I don't think Ireland having 13 provinces instead of 10 is worth EU 4 as a game getting permanent unfixable lag. I think if Ireland tomorrow got cut down to 10 provinces it would still be just as fun a region and the world wouldn't end.

I don't think Japan needs every household with over 4 people represented on the map.

Not every village in the game should be represented just because its in some players home country and they think its cool to see it in EU 4.

I love this post

 

[Twoflower]

I literally gave the link to a EU 4 developer who said "its not the tags its the number of provinces".

A fantastic developer with a very famous history of hot takes and misjudgements, that is
Game speed should be improved, ideally, by optimizing the code. This was done rather successfully with Stellaris, it shouldn't be impossible to do with EU4.

 

[Commonblob]

except that argument is complete bull because modders know that new provinces don't do crap, its tags

That is simply not true. Have you ever tried playing Beyond Typhus? It's not as slow as something like M&T, but it is significantly slower than vanilla.

 

[AvengedK1ng]

That is simply not true. Have you ever tried playing Beyond Typhus? It's not as slow as something like M&T, but it is significantly slower than vanilla.

Because of their additional mechanics jury rigged on

 

[MatthewP]

Does someone want to just make a mod with 200 tiny provinces in the middle of North America and see if there’s much difference? Then we could have something real to talk about.

 

[AvengedK1ng]

Does someone want to just make a mod with 200 tiny provinces in the middle of North America and see if there’s much difference? Then we could have something real to talk about.

NA native tag calcs is probs biggest change

 

[MatthewP]

NA native tag calcs is probs biggest change

Possibly, but no one knows and there are conflicting theories with little evidence. If that’s your theory, the best way to test it would be to remove all the NA tags in a mod. Until then you’re just guessing. At least the provinces theory has a half-hearted vague dev statement backing it up.

 

[ThePHD]

The only real solution to all this is EU5.

I paid a lot of money for this game and I would like it to at least have decent performance before they throw it in the trash. Don't think this is an unreasonable request. They had a sweet spot for awhile where the performance was good. Not sure what changed but the difference in performance now vs what we had before emperor is massive. It's why I quit playing. You get to the later parts of the game and it's just so slow that you don't even want to continue.

 

[Kapi96]

Cool. And when those new provinces in Africa make your game freeze for 20 seconds every new in game day you will be happy?

Won't happen. I have a decent PC.