Want to buy CK2: Are slow-downs still a thing?

[Coffee Fox]

Been reading the forums, and the talk of bad performance and in-game lag makes me apprehensive about buying CK2. I'm guessing this is due to heavy DLC bloat?

Will I be alright with only Way of Life, Legacy of Rome, Sons of Abraham, and Charlemagne? Or will I still get lag? I'd like to run this game smoothly, slow-downs really ruin a game for me.

Running an I5-4690K, 16GB of ram, and a GTX 970.

 

[RelVleDy]

I have almost the exact same setup you do:
i5-3570K, 16GB RAM, GTX 970.

I have almost no slowdown with all DLC enabled, a few portrait mods, music mods, and an overhaul mod enabled (usually CKII+). It does slow down a bit at 4x speed late in my save, and by a decent amount at 5x speed, but nothing that I would say is game-breaking. Besides, you probably won't want to run the game at 5x speed anyways. Depending on the overhaul mod you play, you may suffer game crashes late in the save (A Game of Thrones is notorious for this, it seems). Otherwise, I get almost zero crashes most of the times.

 

[Burned Coffee]

There's no noticeable slowdown for anyone getting into the game, I think this is an issue that comes up the more hours you put into the game, you just become faster at playing and the game doesn't.

I'd say there's no slowdowns but a few hundred years into any game there's a bit of a longer save time, it is a matter of seconds, but it becomes noticeable nonetheless.

Totes worth it.

 

[RelVleDy]

There's no noticeable slowdown for anyone getting into the game, I think this is an issue that comes up the more hours you put into the game, you just become faster at playing and the game doesn't.

I'd say there's no slowdowns but a few hundred years into any game there's a bit of a longer save time, it is a matter of seconds, but it becomes noticeable nonetheless.

Totes worth it.

I agree, I see this too, which makes sense due to more data to keep track of (your family's history, for example). It got a bit annoying to the point I decided to set auto-saving to once every five years and devote myself to saving manually more often. Now that I've gotten used to it, I'm thinking of disabling auto-saves entirely. It's just so annoying when you're clicking around and suddenly your game seems to freeze because, oh... time for an auto-save!

 

[Vito492]

I have almost the exact same setup you do:
i5-3570K, 16GB RAM, GTX 970.

i5-3570 (non-K, no OC), 8GB RAM, GTX 970 and after 200-300 years slow-downs become too annoying... Persistent survivor seems impossible, not to mention 7 centruries achievement

 

[Heinrich4]

I dont have any slowdowns, even not in longer games (i habe all DLCs except horse lords and conclave), but auto-saving takes longer in the late game (maybe about 5 sec when im like 600 years into the game).

 

[iron0037]

I have run benchmarks and haven't seen a significant difference in runtime with DLCs enabled or disabled. So I wouldn't worry about DLC purchases impacting performance.

 

[Nuklearius]

#

 

[RelVleDy]

i5-3570 (non-K, no OC), 8GB RAM, GTX 970 and after 200-300 hours slow-downs become too annoying... Persistent survivor seems impossible, not to mention 7 centruries achievement

I should stress I also have an SSD, not a spin drive. Maybe that's somehow speeding things up.

Also, does it really take 200-300 hours to finish a save for you, or are you exaggerating? I mean hell it took me 100 hours to beat Final Fantasy VII. Think about that, lol.

 

[shiro the bushi]

slow down mainly happens around save or really late game, the new dlc should solve this with its diseases and zombies

 

[Vito492]

I should stress I also have an SSD, not a spin drive. Maybe that's somehow speeding things up.

Also, does it really take 200-300 hours to finish a save for you, or are you exaggerating? I mean hell it took me 100 hours to beat Final Fantasy VII. Think about that, lol.

Oops, of course I meant 200-300 years, sorry for that
I have an SSD as well, but I think it only affects loading speed. I wonder if overclocking my cpu will speed the game up a little

 

[Tapio]

On an i3 after 300 years the game slows down a bit. Persistent survivor? Did that on an A6, now that was a bit slow at the end.

 

[CannotresistDLC]

On my i7 920 (OCed, but that's still old tech...) I get a little bit of a slowdown after a couple hundred years but to be honest, it doesn't matter. If anything important is going on I drop to 3x or even 2x to let me manage things more carefully. So if I'm running at higher speeds, I don't care - I'm not trying to direct armies or anything critical, I'm waiting - any input lag or jerkiness is not critical.

Edit: this is with all DLCs except, obviously, Conclave.

 

[Gnorrosch]

The game runs smoothly for the first 100 to 150 years or so, afterwards it starts to slow down. The main problem is the autosaves - the save files grows enormously during a campaign, and thus any autosave will take longer and longer, disrupting your game. That is specifically annoying if you play ironman, as that autosaves very often, each time basically freezing your computer (which can cause you to skip events), unless you have a specifically great hard drive setup.

The DLC do not cause much of a slowdown, at least I hardly saw any difference in performance between playing with or without DLC.

 

[CannotresistDLC]

Hm. I use a 10k rpm HDD - but it certainly isn't a match for a SSD. I don't think I've ever missed an event due to an auto-save. I almost always have enough time to hit pause if I notice something important going on when the game starts auto-saving - and when the game stops lagging due to the auto-save, it remains paused if I've done so.

Could you describe how the skipped events happen? Is this on 4x or 5x and referencing very time-sensitive things like marriage offers and such?

 

[Gnorrosch]

Could you describe how the skipped events happen? Is this on 4x or 5x and referencing very time-sensitive things like marriage offers and such?

It does not really matter at which speed I play, playing on slower speeds just delays the problem for about 50 years per speed step.

And yes, it was about marriage officers, request for joining a war, peace offers and things like that.

 

[Bernard95]

CK2 was always infamous for running differently on different hardware setups. You hear one guy with some old Windows XP laptop that does fine for a few hundred years and another with a top of the line gaming pc that suffers from severe lag and stuttering less than a hundred years in.

I even have a friend who has literally the same computer as me (4.0 GHZ Core i7 cpu, GTX 980, 8GB of RAM) and said he couldn't stand the lag. Meanwhile I was able to pull off a 1066 to 1454 game without barely a problem until the very end.

Regardless of the anecdotes, your mileage is definitely going to vary. Most people with a current-gen machine are going to at least get around 200yrs before things get bad. If you roll back to the pre-Rajas patch (or No India mod) or even further, then the game will only run faster for you. 200yrs is usually more than sufficient to blob hard and build yourself a nice empire though, so really it isn't too much of a problem unless you really want to achievement hunt for say Seven Centuries or Iron Crown.

 

[CannotresistDLC]

Hmm. Maybe a memory throughput problem + using a SSD = stuff lags at save but the actual game calculations continue and the SSD's save speed doesn't leave you time to hit pause...

Oh well. I wouldn't mind more optimization (that doesn't negatively affect play) but I'm happy with CK2 on my gaming PC, despite the hardware starting to show its age.

 

[Azarias59]

I'm using a MacBook pro w/ 8gb of RAM, and a dedicated graphics card (Ivy Bridge model). Slowdowns are indeed still a thing, but I play with mods (HIP, and my own).