State of the Game: CK3 has more content than ever, but noone can properly run it.

I want to give some honest feedback on CK3’s performance, especially because I genuinely love the game and think there is nothing else that properly replaces it.

What makes CK3 special to me is that you are progressing on several fronts at once. You are playing a character, a dynasty, a country and an alternative version of history simultaneously. You can change laws, names, titles, borders, relationships, genetics, religions and cultures, while the map and events make it feel like an actual living universe rather than just a spreadsheet.

But underneath it all, CK3 is essentially a massive Excel sheet. And that is completely fine. That is part of what makes the game good.

The problem is that the Excel sheet seems to have become increasingly inefficient, to the point where the game can no longer reliably support the kind of long-form multiplayer campaigns - or even single-player campaigns - it was previously capable of supporting.

Before Tours and Tournaments, we were able to play campaigns with more than 20 players and over 20 heavy mods, including things like RICE, CPE, EPE, MA, UB+ and various compatibility patches. I was hosting these campaigns on a comparatively shitty computer, and while it was never perfect, it was completely playable at speed 3 and generally remained above 60 FPS.

Today, I have a significantly more powerful high-end computer, and we cannot replicate the same experience. The game begins slowing down heavily after around 50 years, and desyncs become frequent enough that the campaign eventually becomes more about rehosting and troubleshooting than actually playing.

To be clear, I am not arguing that Paradox is responsible for making every collection of 20 heavy mods work perfectly. Mods are naturally going to make the game heavier and introduce their own problems.

The point is the comparison.

A weaker computer could previously host more than 20 players with a huge mod collection. A substantially stronger computer now struggles to host the same kind of campaign after only a few generations. That suggests the amount of performance headroom available to players has been massively reduced, regardless of whether mods make the remaining problems worse.

Tours and Tournaments feels like the point where something fundamentally changed.

Before T&T, activities were largely abstract. You started a feast, pilgrimage or hunt, some events happened, and it ended. After T&T, activities became physical objects in the world. Characters now have to travel through individual provinces, calculate routes, react to danger, wait for guests, move through activity phases and then travel home again.

On paper, that is fucking cool. It makes the world feel much more alive.

The problem is that it seems to have added an enormous amount of persistent simulation that now touches almost every other system in the game.

Travel interacts with character locations, wars, hostile territory, regencies, health, activities, events, terrain, armies and participant eligibility. Activities have to evaluate hosts, guests, routes, phases, intentions, scores and interruptions. A death, war or succession can suddenly invalidate several of these calculations at once.

It does not feel like T&T simply added more content. It feels like it introduced an entirely new layer of simulation that the engine was not properly prepared to handle at scale.

Then Roads to Power doubled down on the same foundation.

Landless adventurers are basically permanently using the travel system. They move camps, search for contracts, collect followers, interact with rulers across the map and remain active despite not holding traditional land.

Administrative governments then added even more broad character evaluations through governorships, influence, powerful families, estates and appointment candidates.

Again, these are great ideas. Roads to Power is one of the most interesting expansions CK3 has received.

But from a performance perspective, it feels like T&T created an expensive foundation and RtP then built an entire fucking house on top of it.

That is where I think the core issue lies.

The game appears to spend far too much time repeatedly asking characters questions that do not need to be asked.

- Can this person marry?

- Can they attend an activity?

- Can they start a scheme?

- Can they travel here?

- Can they take this decision?

- Are they a valid candidate for this position?

- And so on.

If nothing relevant has changed since yesterday, why does the game need to reconsider all of it?

A better system would presumably only recalculate something when the information it depends on changes. If a character’s spouse dies, reconsider marriage. If a war begins, reconsider the travel routes affected by that war. If a title changes hands, recalculate the relevant succession and appointment candidates.

Instead, CK3 often feels as though huge parts of the population are continuously polling the entire world for opportunities.

The same applies to character importance.

-> A player, emperor, heir, claimant, active traveller or scheme participant needs detailed simulation.

-> A completely irrelevant unlanded courtier on the opposite side of the world does not need to evaluate the same number of possibilities with the same frequency.

I am not asking for these characters to stop existing. Their marriages, children, deaths and history can still matter. But there must be a way to give distant and irrelevant characters a lower simulation priority until they actually become relevant.

That would be almost invisible to the player, but it could potentially save an enormous amount of processing.

The multiplaer architecture also seems increasingly unable to handle the complexity being added to the game.

Performance problems and desyncs are not exactly the same thing, but more complicated systems create more opportunities for game states to diverge.

Activities and travel have a huge number of states:

- Travelling.

- Waiting for guests.

- Changing routes.

- Joining an activity.

- Leaving an activity.

- Changing activity phases.

- Being interrupted by war.

- Being interrupted by death.

- Returning home.

- Starting or ending a regency.

- And so on.

When 20 players are interacting with these systems at the same time, it is not surprising that the game is placed under considerably more pressure than during an ordinary single-player campaign.

But large multiplayer is not some unintended use of the game. CK3 officially supports large lobbies, and the game is almost uniquely suited to creating long, shared alternative histories between groups of players.

A stronger host computer also does not seem capable of solving the problem when every player apparently needs to reproduce the same simulation and arrive at the exact same result.

This is why it is frustrating when patches claim performance improvements, but the actual experience does not seem meaningfully better.

I do believe optimisation work is being done. The problem is that the improvements appear to be immediately spent on adding more systems, more characters, more interactions and more map.

The result is not that the game becomes faster. The result is that the game avoids becoming even slower than it otherwise would have been.

That may look fine on a controlled vanilla benchmark, but it does not restore the performance headroom that existed before T&T.

It also does not necessarily address the severe spikes that matter during actual campaigns. A game can technically have a better average tick speed while still freezing during weekly/monthly calculations, major successions, large activities or several simultaneous character updates.

To be completely blunt, I do not think the current direction is sustainable.

You cannot keep adding permanent simulation layers onto the same foundation and then rely on incremental optimisation to prevent the entire thing from falling apart.

At some point, the underlying systems need to be reworked.

That does not necessarily mean replacing the entire engine. But it does mean looking seriously at:

- Caching results instead of repeating the same checks.

- Only recalculating systems when their dependencies actually change.

- Filtering candidates before performing expensive scoring.

- Reducing how often irrelevant characters evaluate decisions.

- Giving remote and insignificant characters a lower simulation priority.

- Improving how activities and travel are processed.

- Caching travel routes where circumstances have not changed.

- Reducing unnecessary activity and participant evaluations.

- Improving how multiplayer reconstructs and synchronises travel and activity states.

- Finding and removing full-population checks that are running far more frequently than necessary.

- Measuring not only average tick speed, but also the severe spikes that interrupt actual gameplay and promote slowdown.

- Making performance a design constraint before a feature launches, rather than something that is repaired afterwards.

I also think large multiplayer campaigns need to be treated as a real use case rather than an obscure edge case.

CK3 allows 10, 15 or more people to exist inside the same alternative history and spend several weeks or months building a shared story.

That is one of the greatest things the game can offer.

But right now, the game technically allows large multiplayer while increasingly being unable to support it over the length of an actual campaign.

That feels like a massive waste of CK3’s potential.

Again, I am not asking for Paradox to take responsibility for every modded setup. If a mod is badly written or introduces unstable behaviour, that belongs to the mod developer.

But the fact remains that we could previously play larger and heavier campaigns on weaker hardware than we can today.

The mods are relevant because they demonstrate just how much spare capacity the game used to have. They are not the complaint themselves.

Even without them, the same pattern is visible through worsening late-game speed, activity-related spikes, the growing number of persistent characters and systems, and multiplayer campaigns becoming progressively harder to maintain.

The simulation has become heavier, the systems have become more interconnected, and the multiplayer experience has become less stable.

Tours and Tournaments was the main turning point. Roads to Power then expanded the same expensive architecture further. The patches since have prevented total collapse, but they have not genuinely improved the performance of the game.

Please prioritise giving CK3 its performance headroom back.

I would honestly rather receive fewer new activities, events and mechanics for a while if the alternative was a major technical update focused on tick speed, late-game scaling, multiplayer stability and activity processing - I mean take my freaking money already.

CK3 already has enough content to be one of the greatest strategy games ever made.

It just needs to be able to fucking run it.