Paradox strategy games: slower than pig shit to load?

Yeah my guess would be that they keep reloading small files, or that they have more small files than average. If the file encryption system can’t easily locate and jump to small files and decompress them, it may have to decompress some huge container file over and over again just to get to a small file the game was looking for, then dump that huge file out of memory, and then decompress the huge file again just to get to yet another small file.