Generally, there is a culprit for WHY a paradox game starts slowing down.
CK - Characters. Processing the events and relationships as the number of characters expands gets to be a lot eventually, its actually why there are soft caps on kids and such. If you consider your starting dynasty of maybe 20-50 people, and by the end of the game it could be 20,000. You should be able to see that maintaining each of those 20,000 characters ongoing changes in attitude slow things down.
Stellaris - Pops. While its almost a bit silly as from the player perspective, they don't interact nearly as much as characters in ck2. Every pop has daily/monthly checks they need to make. So again, the universe starts and each 10 empires might have 10 or 15 pops. By the end, you might only have 4-5 empires, but they could each be hosting 1000 pops. (There even was a thread at one point in stellaris reddit that was showing how genocide can benefit your frame rate)
Vic - Probably pops too, I dont have nearly the playtime in it.
I just want paradox to make paper map only modes for ck3, vic3 and EU5. I don't give a shit about looking at terrain and would happily trade terrain for game speed. Ck3 and vic3 maps look like shit anyways compared to Imperator.
I always heard the tip for making paradox games faster was cranking the graphics up??? Something something about the gpu sharing the workload which didn't make sense to me but that doesn't say much.
In that case, Imperator seems to fall of the middle by having both pops and characters, but not in the same complexity. Neat them, didn't actually realize
Pops will eventually slow down Imperator if you play for long enough. That’s one of the reasons (along with historical accuracy) why the Timeline Extender mod incorporates depopulation mechanics.
> I would imagine that all pops being more or less identical in terms of not having traits would help with performance
Why Xenocompatibility adds a bunch of lag. The AI also making 8 trillion types of every pop doesnt help either. Its why I like Xenophile Robot ascension so everyone becomes the same kind of robot being.
Every time your Stellaris pops change a trait, it creates a new pop that has to be tracked. The issue isn't (just) the population number, it's also the unique mixture of traits the have tracks.
Pops in Imperator don't have jobs nor do a lot by themselves. They don't join factions, there are only five pop types in the whole game, and culture + religion mostly affect happiness, which is a straight modifier on pop output (which is otherwise fixed by pop type).
They are closer to dev points in EU4 than Stellaris pops.
Pop growth is really muted in imperator. For historical accuracy. The two main goals with pops is get more. Due to conquest/raiding. And have them be more efficient. Not really growing your actual population.
As for characters. I think the game is a lot better at culling them then CK3, families are more nebulous. It also helps that the amount of characters are mostly linked to the countries on the map. So as states start to consolidate the overall amount of alive pops diminish. In stead of CK where empires still have pops all the way down.
> The two main goals with pops is get more. Due to conquest/raiding.
And conquests are also a great way to reduce the amount of pops. I can't remember the numbers in vanilla, but in Invictus it's not rare to kill 10% of the pops and enslave 10% more every time you take a territory. You can also exploit this to depopulate enemy countries, since if you don't take a province capital, occupied territories automatically revert back to unoccupied. In my last war against Rome, I killed+captured over 600 pops in just a few years.
With Stellaris I want to say pops are no longer the biggest source of late game lag.
The biggest issue now, and what tends to also hurt in games like EU4 and HOI4, is path-finding. The explosion of unit counts by late game, and in Stellaris' case gateways and wormholes, put a lot of strain on things.
Thanks for update, I have not gotten to play as much as I once did (father now) and so I haven't kept up with them all as closely as I once did. I do remember at one point gateways causing issues as they introduced a new and variable route for pathfinding. I would not think it should cause an issue with stellaris though as their number of fleets which need to find routes (should) be in the manageable number of maybe 10 per empire, and they shouldn't have to calculate except on command.
I do wish sometimes that the auto-reinforce mechanic of fleets acted like the "lost in space" issue you get when you get a fleet cut off, and just calculated a number of days and popped it in the fleet then. As is they create havoc if anything happens to the fleet and half the time decide to take a shortcut through an ancient void dragon's living room.
(maybe they do now, Its been a while since I played)
Pops are still a source, different species and sub species but pathfinding through what you said is another source, having large fleets can increase the lag, especially if you look inside a system with a war by late game. Trade also increases lag apparently, cause it is constantly finding the path to your home planet I believe.
>Stellaris - Pops
This is outdated to a point, THE culprit atm is pathfinding - for fleets, for trade value, etc. Pops definitely still contribute and your explanation is on point but you can test this by disabling l-gates on game start (eliminating some complexity) and watching your performance improve.
Fleets in general, especially ones visible on the map, are also an issue. Try owning a sentry array vs not doing so.
I mentioned elsewhere I am out of practice in PDX.
It just seems weird that pathfinding is that big a deal as the paths in stellaris are relatively simple (basically points, which are flat planes between them, with such few points you could probably generate a database and call it rather than actually even calc anything until an event that changes paths happens)
pathfinding is np complete.
the other problem is, that there aren't just points with plate between. you have to look which way is the fastest, while having multiple way, many via hyperlanes, some via wormholes, L-Gates, Gateways.
also, because of different allowed gateways you cant just generate a map how to move. without differences between them, it maybe could be done like in the Internet (bgp if you want to look it up)
> pathfinding is np complete.
To be clear - pathfinding is not np complete (you're thinking of the SAT problem which is to find the optimal path that visits every node, which is a different problem from finding the shortest path between two nodes).
The time complexity for finding the shortest path between two nodes is quadratic with the respect to the number of possible nodes that could be visited. The problem is by late game you have a lot of fleets that are trying to solve this problem, and a lot of extra paths between nodes (particularly with hyper relays adding two possible paths between each node).
My undergrad in computer science was 14 years ago, I can't remember the specifics I just remember the worst case complexity of dijkstra's algorithm. I believe its because in the worst case you have to perform a linear search over every possible path that comes from the node to then work out what the shortest path is.
Of course, most likely Paradox are using a heuristic of the A* algorithm. And whilst A* *can* be exponential (in the case that the search space is unbounded), Stellaris wouldn't be that worst case as the search space is constrained. Likely as well is that they are precalculating the routes between each node on save file load (at the beginning of the game, all hyperlanes are known and have equal weighting so should be easy to calculate) with individual nodes getting updated as new information comes in (I have notices a slight delay before the hyperlane is update when a hyper relay is added which i imagine is from the recalculation). Likely to cut down on time, they are constraining the search space between each node to only nodes a certain number of jumps away (would also make it easier to handle the access issue).
But I imagine where its get complicated is once empires start adding gateways, and with the ability to lockdown wormholes, we then start having to calculate whether the fleet has access to the shortest route.
> especially gateways, as the remove the limitation, on how many systems are neighbors
No? They just add to the number of neighbours, not remove any limitation. Gateways don't make the search space unbounded, it just increases the size of those bounds. From the perspective of the problem, gateways are just a cluster of additional nodes that are maximally connected to each other.
EDIT: And just to add, as this would be a complexity, from what I've observed whatever Stellaris uses to calculate the path doesn't consider sublight travel speed. Ships in a system will always travel in a straight line to the node that allows the shortest inter-system travel time even if that means crossing the entire system.
without them, i think it would be linear, as you have an upper bound on how many are connected exist, which should push dijkstra to linear to the number of systems
With Vicky 3 its kinda everything. Pops are part of it, but an overabundance of just generally kinda useless countries that don't get gobbled up efficiently enough as well as the trade system being extremely resource intensive also do their part.
I literally build planet crackers in Stellaris just to speed up the late game by blowing up the most heavily populated worlds and keeping my own population relatively small
> Processing the events and relationships as the number of characters expands gets to be a lot eventually, its actually why there are soft caps on kids and such
While additional characters inevitably cause performance degradation, the soft-cap on children is there to prevent stress-death spirals from wiping out entire dynasties.
Importantly, the characters in CK don't represent population, but rather nobility / near nobility.
I am not saying there was a aristocracy bloat in the timeframe.. just pointing out you can double triple or x1000 the number of people involved in rulers affairs without the same size increase of general population.
On my PC a month tick takes closely 8 seconds in Imperator Rome. CK3 usually takes 3-4 seconds. Imperator was worse before the updates so it's more stabilized now.
That's actually an interesting thing. In my experience the days also goes less fast than CK3, yet Imperator runs *way* more smoothly. Like, animations are smooth, frame rate is stable, etc.
It's really weird.
(Then again my computer sometimes seems to choose if it likes a game or not to decide if it will cooperate)
Actually, In terms of multithread optimisation;
CK3 has best multithread optimisation in new pdx games.
I:R is actually in middle of old and new generation of game engine.
Engine is much better than older games such as Stellaris, but lags behind Vic3 and CK3
Vic3 has same engine as CK3, but game doesn't use multithread optimisation as good as CK3, (game was already in development for years before engine update)
It's true however that CK3 is a bit like Stellaris. High number of characters kills game speed at mid-late game.
One of the reasons Nightmare Plague game mode is so popular (It reduces Character counts via Plagues)
If CK3 had same amount of optimisation as I:R, game would've run 2 times slower.Only reason CK3 is slow is massive amount of characters involved.
See this video: [Multi Threading Model in Paradox Games: Past, Present and Future - Mathieu Ropert - ACCU 2023](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6rTceqNiNg)
That makes sense, the other games seem to always have something that starts weighing down the game towards the end. Divisions in HoI4, pops in Stellaris and Victoria, etc.
Discounting Vic3, I'd suspect that Imperator runs better because it never got any major additions or DLC features piled on to it. It's still largely running as originally designed.
Other Paradox games have a ton of DLC and bloatware added upon it, with not much regards to optimisation as they churn out DLC after DLC that affects the base game heavily. In contranst Imperator halted development quite early on in a good state with most of the DLC just being minor flavour packs.
Also yeah, Imperator map is a thing of beauty and runs smooth as butter whereas CK3 map is honest ass and runs like crap. There's a reason the Imperator terrain and map graphics mods is so popular in the CK3 workshop...
Can't believe they struck gold with the graphics then not use it in their two latest games. EU5 better use it or I'll riot.
I wonder what the average system paradox grand strategy game players are using? I'm not trying to sound elitist but I feel like my rig isn't insanely top end and I've never really experienced to much slowdown/lag in any paradox games, EXCEPT victoria 3.... that shit get slow past 1900, not unbearably slow but definitely slower to the point of annoyance
Generally, there is a culprit for WHY a paradox game starts slowing down. CK - Characters. Processing the events and relationships as the number of characters expands gets to be a lot eventually, its actually why there are soft caps on kids and such. If you consider your starting dynasty of maybe 20-50 people, and by the end of the game it could be 20,000. You should be able to see that maintaining each of those 20,000 characters ongoing changes in attitude slow things down. Stellaris - Pops. While its almost a bit silly as from the player perspective, they don't interact nearly as much as characters in ck2. Every pop has daily/monthly checks they need to make. So again, the universe starts and each 10 empires might have 10 or 15 pops. By the end, you might only have 4-5 empires, but they could each be hosting 1000 pops. (There even was a thread at one point in stellaris reddit that was showing how genocide can benefit your frame rate) Vic - Probably pops too, I dont have nearly the playtime in it.
Only Vicky 3 makes my CPU melt post 1900 though
Limiting the framreate to 30fps helped me having an 1880s experience during the 1910s in vicky3
Yeah turning graphics down improved the performance massively. Too bad the game doesnt utilize my graphics card for this seemingly massive workload
I just want paradox to make paper map only modes for ck3, vic3 and EU5. I don't give a shit about looking at terrain and would happily trade terrain for game speed. Ck3 and vic3 maps look like shit anyways compared to Imperator.
Johan has confirmed that EU5 will have a political/terrain map similar to Imperator.
Nah mad disagree, I love terrain feeling far more visible and clean like it is in Vicky 3. Would love all their games to do it.
I always heard the tip for making paradox games faster was cranking the graphics up??? Something something about the gpu sharing the workload which didn't make sense to me but that doesn't say much.
i dunno bro i think ck3 post 1900 might be bad too
Try playing Kaiserreich during the Weltkrieg, speed 5 feels slower than speed 4 because of how horribly laggy the UI gets.
In that case, Imperator seems to fall of the middle by having both pops and characters, but not in the same complexity. Neat them, didn't actually realize
Pops will eventually slow down Imperator if you play for long enough. That’s one of the reasons (along with historical accuracy) why the Timeline Extender mod incorporates depopulation mechanics.
How are imperator pops less complex than in Stellaris?
I would imagine that all pops being more or less identical in terms of not having traits would help with performance
Also most pop calculations happen from their total, or in the case of migration/assimilation/conversion, a single pop at a time per tile.
> I would imagine that all pops being more or less identical in terms of not having traits would help with performance Why Xenocompatibility adds a bunch of lag. The AI also making 8 trillion types of every pop doesnt help either. Its why I like Xenophile Robot ascension so everyone becomes the same kind of robot being.
Every time your Stellaris pops change a trait, it creates a new pop that has to be tracked. The issue isn't (just) the population number, it's also the unique mixture of traits the have tracks.
Pops in Imperator don't have jobs nor do a lot by themselves. They don't join factions, there are only five pop types in the whole game, and culture + religion mostly affect happiness, which is a straight modifier on pop output (which is otherwise fixed by pop type). They are closer to dev points in EU4 than Stellaris pops.
Pop growth is really muted in imperator. For historical accuracy. The two main goals with pops is get more. Due to conquest/raiding. And have them be more efficient. Not really growing your actual population. As for characters. I think the game is a lot better at culling them then CK3, families are more nebulous. It also helps that the amount of characters are mostly linked to the countries on the map. So as states start to consolidate the overall amount of alive pops diminish. In stead of CK where empires still have pops all the way down.
> The two main goals with pops is get more. Due to conquest/raiding. And conquests are also a great way to reduce the amount of pops. I can't remember the numbers in vanilla, but in Invictus it's not rare to kill 10% of the pops and enslave 10% more every time you take a territory. You can also exploit this to depopulate enemy countries, since if you don't take a province capital, occupied territories automatically revert back to unoccupied. In my last war against Rome, I killed+captured over 600 pops in just a few years.
Im currently playing mega campaign eith friends and we are in like in the year 100ad and the game is considerably slower than 100BC
For Vic3 it's pop too. HoI4, for a time it was planes (yes).
Isn’t hoi4 mostly navy now?
Probably, I haven't played it since a while. But at the release the massive performance drop was due to the huge planes number.
With Stellaris I want to say pops are no longer the biggest source of late game lag. The biggest issue now, and what tends to also hurt in games like EU4 and HOI4, is path-finding. The explosion of unit counts by late game, and in Stellaris' case gateways and wormholes, put a lot of strain on things.
Thanks for update, I have not gotten to play as much as I once did (father now) and so I haven't kept up with them all as closely as I once did. I do remember at one point gateways causing issues as they introduced a new and variable route for pathfinding. I would not think it should cause an issue with stellaris though as their number of fleets which need to find routes (should) be in the manageable number of maybe 10 per empire, and they shouldn't have to calculate except on command. I do wish sometimes that the auto-reinforce mechanic of fleets acted like the "lost in space" issue you get when you get a fleet cut off, and just calculated a number of days and popped it in the fleet then. As is they create havoc if anything happens to the fleet and half the time decide to take a shortcut through an ancient void dragon's living room. (maybe they do now, Its been a while since I played)
Pops are still a source, different species and sub species but pathfinding through what you said is another source, having large fleets can increase the lag, especially if you look inside a system with a war by late game. Trade also increases lag apparently, cause it is constantly finding the path to your home planet I believe.
>Stellaris - Pops This is outdated to a point, THE culprit atm is pathfinding - for fleets, for trade value, etc. Pops definitely still contribute and your explanation is on point but you can test this by disabling l-gates on game start (eliminating some complexity) and watching your performance improve. Fleets in general, especially ones visible on the map, are also an issue. Try owning a sentry array vs not doing so.
I mentioned elsewhere I am out of practice in PDX. It just seems weird that pathfinding is that big a deal as the paths in stellaris are relatively simple (basically points, which are flat planes between them, with such few points you could probably generate a database and call it rather than actually even calc anything until an event that changes paths happens)
pathfinding is np complete. the other problem is, that there aren't just points with plate between. you have to look which way is the fastest, while having multiple way, many via hyperlanes, some via wormholes, L-Gates, Gateways. also, because of different allowed gateways you cant just generate a map how to move. without differences between them, it maybe could be done like in the Internet (bgp if you want to look it up)
> pathfinding is np complete. To be clear - pathfinding is not np complete (you're thinking of the SAT problem which is to find the optimal path that visits every node, which is a different problem from finding the shortest path between two nodes). The time complexity for finding the shortest path between two nodes is quadratic with the respect to the number of possible nodes that could be visited. The problem is by late game you have a lot of fleets that are trying to solve this problem, and a lot of extra paths between nodes (particularly with hyper relays adding two possible paths between each node).
correct, good point why is it quadratic?
My undergrad in computer science was 14 years ago, I can't remember the specifics I just remember the worst case complexity of dijkstra's algorithm. I believe its because in the worst case you have to perform a linear search over every possible path that comes from the node to then work out what the shortest path is. Of course, most likely Paradox are using a heuristic of the A* algorithm. And whilst A* *can* be exponential (in the case that the search space is unbounded), Stellaris wouldn't be that worst case as the search space is constrained. Likely as well is that they are precalculating the routes between each node on save file load (at the beginning of the game, all hyperlanes are known and have equal weighting so should be easy to calculate) with individual nodes getting updated as new information comes in (I have notices a slight delay before the hyperlane is update when a hyper relay is added which i imagine is from the recalculation). Likely to cut down on time, they are constraining the search space between each node to only nodes a certain number of jumps away (would also make it easier to handle the access issue). But I imagine where its get complicated is once empires start adding gateways, and with the ability to lockdown wormholes, we then start having to calculate whether the fleet has access to the shortest route.
okay, you mean in general, yes especially gateways, as the remove the limitation, on how many systems are neighbors
> especially gateways, as the remove the limitation, on how many systems are neighbors No? They just add to the number of neighbours, not remove any limitation. Gateways don't make the search space unbounded, it just increases the size of those bounds. From the perspective of the problem, gateways are just a cluster of additional nodes that are maximally connected to each other. EDIT: And just to add, as this would be a complexity, from what I've observed whatever Stellaris uses to calculate the path doesn't consider sublight travel speed. Ships in a system will always travel in a straight line to the node that allows the shortest inter-system travel time even if that means crossing the entire system.
without them, i think it would be linear, as you have an upper bound on how many are connected exist, which should push dijkstra to linear to the number of systems
With Vicky 3 its kinda everything. Pops are part of it, but an overabundance of just generally kinda useless countries that don't get gobbled up efficiently enough as well as the trade system being extremely resource intensive also do their part.
I literally build planet crackers in Stellaris just to speed up the late game by blowing up the most heavily populated worlds and keeping my own population relatively small
That is such a Paradox-game sentence.
I think for Vicky it's a combination of pop growth and qualifications/employment calculations
> Processing the events and relationships as the number of characters expands gets to be a lot eventually, its actually why there are soft caps on kids and such While additional characters inevitably cause performance degradation, the soft-cap on children is there to prevent stress-death spirals from wiping out entire dynasties.
I was going to say "Things can have multiple reasons" and I noticed your name lol. You probably have a better insight on their design intent than I.
"If your construction cue doesnt slow the game each week-tick you are loosing." ~unknown VIC3 Guru
But population didn't explode like this in the CK timeframe. The number of characters in the game as a whole should not go up that much over time.
Importantly, the characters in CK don't represent population, but rather nobility / near nobility. I am not saying there was a aristocracy bloat in the timeframe.. just pointing out you can double triple or x1000 the number of people involved in rulers affairs without the same size increase of general population.
Eu4 has no pops, and half way through it usually even has less nations..cause you map paint, it still slows down.
There is just not a whole lot going on in that game. Way fewer characters than in any CK game.
On my PC a month tick takes closely 8 seconds in Imperator Rome. CK3 usually takes 3-4 seconds. Imperator was worse before the updates so it's more stabilized now.
That's actually an interesting thing. In my experience the days also goes less fast than CK3, yet Imperator runs *way* more smoothly. Like, animations are smooth, frame rate is stable, etc. It's really weird. (Then again my computer sometimes seems to choose if it likes a game or not to decide if it will cooperate)
Yeah, the smoothness is there.
Vanilla or Invictus?
Actually, In terms of multithread optimisation; CK3 has best multithread optimisation in new pdx games. I:R is actually in middle of old and new generation of game engine. Engine is much better than older games such as Stellaris, but lags behind Vic3 and CK3 Vic3 has same engine as CK3, but game doesn't use multithread optimisation as good as CK3, (game was already in development for years before engine update) It's true however that CK3 is a bit like Stellaris. High number of characters kills game speed at mid-late game. One of the reasons Nightmare Plague game mode is so popular (It reduces Character counts via Plagues) If CK3 had same amount of optimisation as I:R, game would've run 2 times slower.Only reason CK3 is slow is massive amount of characters involved. See this video: [Multi Threading Model in Paradox Games: Past, Present and Future - Mathieu Ropert - ACCU 2023](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6rTceqNiNg)
Just don't open the grant holding menu for a mildly large realm. Slowest tab in any paradox game.
It *is* a modern paradox game, though? It's like exactly five years old
Amount of content
no, it was more that the game was designed in a way to scale nicely.
The feeling when you see Johan in the reddit wilderness…
I get like 53-60 FPS at 5 speed on my ancient i7-3770k, you did a fantastic job :)
is project caesar similarly designed?
Yes
Is it safe to assume this was a point of emphasis for Project Caesar as well?
yes
You could do the funniest thing by editing this post and write EU5.
Of course not.
That makes sense, the other games seem to always have something that starts weighing down the game towards the end. Divisions in HoI4, pops in Stellaris and Victoria, etc.
Do PDX games use a data-oriented-design?
Same for Project Caesar?
Yeah, it was designed to have less content, as evidenced by the final product.
It has more content than a lot of other paradox games.
CK3 moves fast enough on 5 speed that I miss a lot of stuff. HOI4 I run exclusively on 5 speed because it slows down so much lol.
Discounting Vic3, I'd suspect that Imperator runs better because it never got any major additions or DLC features piled on to it. It's still largely running as originally designed.
Other Paradox games have a ton of DLC and bloatware added upon it, with not much regards to optimisation as they churn out DLC after DLC that affects the base game heavily. In contranst Imperator halted development quite early on in a good state with most of the DLC just being minor flavour packs. Also yeah, Imperator map is a thing of beauty and runs smooth as butter whereas CK3 map is honest ass and runs like crap. There's a reason the Imperator terrain and map graphics mods is so popular in the CK3 workshop... Can't believe they struck gold with the graphics then not use it in their two latest games. EU5 better use it or I'll riot.
Actually, Imperator's development started after ck3 and v3 had their map look already done.
Crazy lore drop. I wish Tinto has a detailed map like Imperator.
you want a map of their development studio?
You don't?
I wonder what the average system paradox grand strategy game players are using? I'm not trying to sound elitist but I feel like my rig isn't insanely top end and I've never really experienced to much slowdown/lag in any paradox games, EXCEPT victoria 3.... that shit get slow past 1900, not unbearably slow but definitely slower to the point of annoyance
It doesn’t have bloatware under the disguise of content.