How are the devs this incompetent?

[Chuddly]

I'm probably centuries away from the crisis and the game is stuttering and lagging just from regular play on a large galaxy with probably half the max empires possible and running an RTX 2070 super and a Ryzen 7 3700x... why do I pay for this garbage. If there was ever an argument for ******, a company who can't even make a properly working product would be it.

[videomike_Ultimate_Plushie]

On a philosophic answer: Because companies are made of people and hiring practices to the level of ensuring everyone has excellent skills in ever area is something so hard we have dedicated professionals called executives dedicated to it. How good those people are at listening to the needs of the development team is something EVERY company deals with in both possible directions. I have good reason, given the guys who made the economic plan system didnt provide a caviet for "What happens if X empire can't fill what it thinks it should be producing by year Zed," that the original team might have lacked skills in making AI. Keep in mind Paradox hired people explicitly good at doing that to fix the AI up, and is currently looking into increased multi-threading.

As for the game. The original game had a tile system which worked well enough, but the new much improved system increased the number of pops from around 15....to rounding toward 90, with each pop considering 4 new variables just off the top of my head(job type, species information, demotion timer, happiness weight.) So yeah, the needs of the game exploded. To the designers credit the game still handles well enough to not break down despite the numbers i gave being so drastic it crash if they didn't optimize at all. It's basically been a powered keg that keeps getting worse to the point there's now a full team to dealing with it.

[ghosthunter1441]

hmm i want to light it

[VoiD]

Originally posted by Mr.CanEHdian:

I'm probably centuries away from the crisis and the game is stuttering and lagging just from regular play on a large galaxy with probably half the max empires possible and running an RTX 2070 super and a Ryzen 7 3700x... why do I pay for this garbage. If there was ever an argument for ******, a company who can't even make a properly working product would be it.

I agree, it's horrible, and it's not something players should tolerate.

That being said it's dozens of times better than it used to be a couple of years ago, like, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ this hell you're describing is paradise compared to how much the game used to lag.

Nowadays it just makes for a bad experience (very bad if you play in big galaxies), in the past the game was just unplayable.

[videomike_Ultimate_Plushie]

Void's right, the difference from before is massive. I'm still baffled some of the decisions the original team mad.e Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose

[ScreamCon]

I just came in to say 'dido' about the devs being incompetent
I know each individual dev is intelligent
but the peoples of devs are not

Invincible bugged fleets still invincible !

[mike]

All these big simulation/strategy games get laggy and slow as they get bigger. Especially those that are 5+ years old. Cities Skylines was released in 2015, got new DLC and patches this year, and people with an i9, 3080, 64GB RAM say it gets bogged down at some point.

[Chuddly]

Originally posted by videomike_Ultimate_Plushie:

On a philosophic answer: Because companies are made of people and hiring practices to the level of ensuring everyone has excellent skills in ever area is something so hard we have dedicated professionals called executives dedicated to it. How good those people are at listening to the needs of the development team is something EVERY company deals with in both possible directions. I have good reason, given the guys who made the economic plan system didnt provide a caviet for "What happens if X empire can't fill what it thinks it should be producing by year Zed," that the original team might have lacked skills in making AI. Keep in mind Paradox hired people explicitly good at doing that to fix the AI up, and is currently looking into increased multi-threading.

As for the game. The original game had a tile system which worked well enough, but the new much improved system increased the number of pops from around 15....to rounding toward 90, with each pop considering 4 new variables just off the top of my head(job type, species information, demotion timer, happiness weight.) So yeah, the needs of the game exploded. To the designers credit the game still handles well enough to not break down despite the numbers i gave being so drastic it crash if they didn't optimize at all. It's basically been a powered keg that keeps getting worse to the point there's now a full team to dealing with it.

Good answer lol. You're right, it's largely out of the hands of the devs when executives control funding.
I guess I can't complain then if they seek to fix it.

I suppose that makes sense too, it could be worse... You'd think after decades of designing grand strategy games they might know what works and what does not.

[Chuddly]

Originally posted by mike:

All these big simulation/strategy games get laggy and slow as they get bigger. Especially those that are 5+ years old. Cities Skylines was released in 2015, got new DLC and patches this year, and people with an i9, 3080, 64GB RAM say it gets bogged down at some point.

I know, I totally agree but like CK2 could be played for dozens of hours before it got bogged down, even the AGOT mod with far more happening could go a longtime without major lag issues but Stellaris, it sometimes seems to strike up pretty quickly.

[EleventhStar]

they aren't incompetent they just make greedy choices.

features sell games. features ruin performance.

the choice is pretty much a feature rich and/or large scale game that runs bad at end game no matter what,
or a simple and/or small scale game that always runs smooth.

players will bring it upon themselves too ofc, i'm sure we would all go "is this it?" in the latter case.

the greedy part is where a company the size of paradox just doesn't invest properly in the initial development of the game. honestly these big companies can take a bit bigger risks if you ask me. how often have you heard a company say "these games so expensive, we had to make do with what we had, we cut corners. so now were wasting time re-doing our shoddy work because it wasn't future proof at all.". pretty much everytime a company does a "version 2" it's pretty much that story again.

[Azunai]

the original designers of the game made some questionable design decisions that come back to bite the davs in the backside over and over.

there's not much that can be done to change the fundamental aspects of the game (like the whole concept of simulating economy through the pop system), so they focus on optimizing the game as much as they can.

blaming the current generation of devs and designers is probably not going to help. they achieved quite a lot in the last year or so. AI is finally somewhat decent at playing the game and performance is good on a decent machine if you can live with a bit of a compromise (playing medium maps with a dozen countries or so).

[Eldi]

Fine here but on a modern CPU I guess.

I guess the argument is should old games stay old.
They obviously want to keep cramming things in but more things need more power.

Only way to keep people like OP happy would be a ban on extending games/features (generally speaking)

Is that worst than how it is now?
A brand new game for each iteration? Wouldn't be very feasible

[Father Prometheus]

Like how people complain about games when they themselves likely know nothing about how a game is actually ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ made. OP you're dumb. You try having 1000-3000 pops per empire in the mid-to late stages of the game all asking if: they can vote, how happy they are, what jobs they're in, what's their pop-strata, and a few more I can't really remember off the top of my head. All of these things are calculated by your computer.

The lag used to be wayyyyyyyyyyy worse back in the day when even empires who didn't have the right to vote still asked if they could vote. All of these checks are done at the end of every month. So if you're wondering why it slows then speeds up a little every month that's why. You're PC is calculating a bjillion ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ calculations EVERY MONTH.

The only way to reduce your lag is by having a smaller galaxy with less AI to cause these calculations.

[Chuddly]

Originally posted by Eldi:

Fine here but on a modern CPU I guess.

I guess the argument is should old games stay old.
They obviously want to keep cramming things in but more things need more power.

Only way to keep people like OP happy would be a ban on extending games/features (generally speaking)

Is that worst than how it is now?
A brand new game for each iteration? Wouldn't be very feasible

Why not just use proper multithreading from the get go, wouldn't that largely solve it?

I mean I 'can' ignore the lag and do, but it definitely ruins the fun a fair bit.

[Elitewrecker PT]

Because you can't efficiently multi-thread some stuff. No point in multi-threading stuff that requires input from previous stuff.

[randomuser1123456789]

Originally posted by Mr.CanEHdian:

Originally posted by Eldi:

Fine here but on a modern CPU I guess.

I guess the argument is should old games stay old.
They obviously want to keep cramming things in but more things need more power.

Only way to keep people like OP happy would be a ban on extending games/features (generally speaking)

Is that worst than how it is now?
A brand new game for each iteration? Wouldn't be very feasible

Why not just use proper multithreading from the get go, wouldn't that largely solve it?

I mean I 'can' ignore the lag and do, but it definitely ruins the fun a fair bit.

What EliteWrecker said is right. Stellaris was made in 2016, when the pop system was based on tiles and pops lacked many modifiers and attributes compared to today. Back then I'm sure multithreading was not needed for relatively good performance. And using multithreading when designing a game is quite difficult. Some calculations rely on other calculations. Which means that they cant calculate both at the same time. Plus they can't really change the game to utilize a lot of multithreading as that would basically require that they rewrite the game's code.