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A Culling of the Weak: Performance Improvements

The culling has begun.

[Okay, that does sound a little dramatic.]

Think of it less as a mass extinction and more as a... selective focus. This mod works a bit of CPU witchcraft to concentrate the game’s attention (and its processing power) on the rulers and realms that actually matter to you. Characters and courts beyond your diplomatic reach get quietly streamlined: fewer wars, fewer decisions, smaller courts, less noise.

It’s population control, yes, but the elegant, performance-boosting kind.

A Culling of the Weak assigns a new trait, Obscured by Distance, to rulers who are beyond your diplomatic range, which in turn, applies that trait to all of their vassals and courtiers. This trait comes with optional modifiers (all recommended) including health modifiers, which lowers childhood and elderly health, while reducing fertility. Rulers with the trait also have a larger domain size (reducing the need to fill hundreds, no, thousands of baronies and counties with ultimately irrelevant barons and counts), reduced war chances (lowering the strain of large armies path finding), all which can be adjusted by game rules to your match your preferences.

What makes this different from other population control mods? The Obscured by Distance trait also prevents rulers from hosting (but not participating in) most activities and engaging in most decisions, unless they are Kings or higher. This is adjustable by a game rule. If kept, this prevents CPU hogs like grand tournaments in areas of the map that are not relevant to you. This disabling of distant AI rulers from these types of activities, on its own, increased my game performance by around 10%.

From my own testing, with all options enabled and default diplomatic range enabled, I saw a performance boost by about 30% with an ideal setup. Your mileage will vary, especially if you blob out and end up being in diplomatic contact with more than half the map. It should still help, but other population control mods that cull characters, regardless of diplomatic range, are still useful (and recommended).

Need a more detailed break down? Check this post out.

Controlling character population is critical on long games, particularly with the AuH map expansion. Paradox did a fantastic job at performance improvements with 1.18, but I still saw room for greater improvements. But controlling population is only part of the solve. Even when we cut down on courtiers, we still have thousands of rulers making thousands of decisions, traveling, participating in activities, running schemes, starting wars, etc. So we need to cut down on that overhead as well without sacrificing immersion and fun.

So instead of focusing on all rulers, we just focus on those that we cannot interact with. We streamline the way they run their realm, without neutering them or making them static. They'll still wage large wars, just fewer small ones. They'll still have revolts, but fewer meaningless peasant revolts. They'll still marry, have (fewer) children, die (less 80+ characters) and pass their legacies on. And when they come into diplomatic range, they "awaken" fully.

This leaves more resources to allocate towards your region of the world and all of your immediate neighbors, where there are no restrictions for activities, wars, or rule adjustments. So you still get your challenge and a dynamic world too.

No vanilla files harmed. Other population control mods can be used without issue. There is some basic support for AGoT built in around ensuring that dragons and riders don't get culled, but beyond that, we may need a deeper support patch from those who play with that mod.

• A Court of Beasts and Crowns
  
  
• A Promise of Blood

1. Just how much of a performance gain will I get?

Hard for me to say. I am fortunate enough to run CK3 on a beast of a machine, and even I gained about 30% of a performance boost on multiple test runs with a full map and most counties and baronies fully developed. Multiplayer is hard to test objectively, but in our internal tests, multiplayer felt more stable, less likely to lower our speed to catch up. It's not a silver bullet though, and you'll inevitably run into hardware and software limitations. It also won't necessarily undo resource intensive mods that you have running on top of this one, though it may mitigate it a bit.

2. Can I adjust some of the settings?

Yes. I anticipated that most players would want the ability to fine tune their experiences. There are eight rules in total that can help create a setup that is most ideal for you.

3. Who can get culled and how often?

Every five years, an event fires that checks if a character qualifies to be culled. Generally speaking, these are irrelevant characters without titles or landed family members. Only characters who have the trait Obscured by Distance may be culled. Anyone within diplomatic range, regardless of their stats or traits, are not touched.

In future versions, I may extend the culling to irrelevant characters inside diplomatic range, but that would be redundant with other population control mods out there.

4. I'd like to make my own version of this mod or incorporate it into mine, may I?

Yup. Go for it! The modding community is made stronger when we create together. Different visions, ideas, and takes on mods is good for everyone.

5. Is this save compatible?

Yep. There is a character interaction with yourself that allows you to immediately calculate which rulers are within diplomatic range and those outside, thus applying the Obscured by Distance trait to them. The rest of their realm (including vassals, courtiers, councilors, etc.) may take up to five years to gain the appropriate trait.

6. What if I want to have only certain AI rulers outside of diplomatic range to not be Obscured?

Not a problem. There is a character interaction (not limited by range) called Arrange an Introduction that will permanently remove the Obscured by Distance trait of this ruler, "awakening" their capabilities fully (meaning they can host activities again and make most decisions). Change your mind? No worries. Bid them Farewell and they get the Obscured Trait again.

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