From what I have seen from already present gameplay the games a f*cking monster on speed 5, you dont need to worry the devs did a good job (unless you have some 2011 laptop/pc but then why are u buying games in the first place tbh)
CK2 ran smoothly in the beginning too, then came the many expansions, and with RoI performance got to an all time low.
I expect the game to run smoothly at the beginning. But I also expect that the performance gets worse with every expansion Pdox releases, and that is absolutely normal. The more stuff a game has to process, the greater the impact on performance. The thing that no one, neither of us, nor of Pdox, can estimate is, how big this impact will be.
And I think it would be ill advised to talk about a map expansion, or to encourage them to do one, as long as we don't know for sure, the performance of the game can take it. I don't say there should never be talk about a map expansion, at least not yet. I say, let us wait a bit and see how the performance developes after the first two or three real expansions.
I mean, CK3 isn't even released yet. Be patient, and wait how it developes. To say that performance wouldn't, or can't, be an issue is, at this point in time, just naive.
Maybe there won't be a performance issue with a map expansion. But tell me, remembering RoI, and the hit on performance it had back then, are you willing to risk this again? Without further knowledge of how performance developes with more content? Well, I wouldn't. I'd rather live with a smaller map (wich is pretty big already), and a good performance, than a bigger map and no performance to speak of.
Like I said, I am not against a map expansion. I am against a map expansion, as long as I can't estimate how big its impact on performance could be. And at this point in time I can't estimate a thing. A stream from the devs isn't a source for any estimation. Its just advertisement, nothing else, and everyone would be well advised to keep that in mind. We don't no what kind of PC they used, could be a standard toaster, or it could be a high performance server. We don't know. So take everything you see or hear from the devs with a grain of salt. Once we see how the game fares, we can talk about a map expansion, and if performance isn't an issue, I'll be the first one to say yes. But until then, it is, and will remain, a no.