At one point I was up to ~5 minutes from launch to playing, too, most of which was spent on the “Loading databases” screen.
I put it down to an ancient processor and 16GB of slow RAM, but in my case it was due to 2GB of savegames. Moving them cut the time to a much more reasonable 30s.
Yeah that is why I asked him about that. I heard this can happen with Paradox games. I don’t save the way Paradox suggests I should save, so I never really run into that.
Not unless it’s parsing the whole friggin’ “My Documents” structure under my user profile for other games as well. This is me literally running it for the first time (repeatedly, on different drives) without any save game baggage and wondering why only the Paradox Clauswitz games are so slow compared to every other game.
If it was doing that, I am pretty sure we would all have problems. Since you have no saved games in the folder it’s looking at, the most logical conclusion is it must be something else.
The other thing these Paradox games do is login to the Paradox account. It’s usually one of the first things they have you do when you install new. Assuming you remember your password, have you tried logging out of one of those to see if bypassing that part helps? It’s not required, or at least it isn’t in the games I have.
Hmm… definitely no RAM shortage.
You may want to run the awesome diskmon to monitor what the process is reading on the disk at any time. You can filter by application to only monitor what the game is doing.
Also check to see how much CPU percentage is being used by the process using task manager, or the far better Process Explorer.
I’m just not going to play them. Thanks–already an old hand with the SysInternals Suite stuff.
(already tried with logged in vs not logged in w/o difference)
@rei , can you take a look at your CPU running speed?
I had an extremely weird issue once with a customer’s laptop where the CPU was throttled to extremely low speed because the board or chip’s heat sensor part was faulty. A 2.4GHz machine was throttled to run at 300Mhz! It was one of the strangest things, everything became super slow to load.
What does the CPU usage chart look like when Paradox is loading? In that weird case we encountered, the CPU was at 100% all the time when we did something.
Registered the Steam version of EUIV and it loaded in under 2 minutes.
Skimming through this thread I see you pick and choose which games are installed to SSD and which aren’t - there isn’t really any real reason to do that unless you are low on space; run everything from SSD. If you have it available, why waste your time? And I don’t think Paradox games are very large, in any case?
Glad it’s loading faster for you on Steam, though. Strange, in any case.
My 4TB hold only the games that need SSD. The rest of Steam etc reside on 12TB of mechanical storage. Anyways it’s strange for sure.
Some server connection timeout thingie?
It’s possible that even though you installed the games onto SSD, the decryption process for gamepass needs to write the files to disk first. So the game asks for a file, then the gamepass layer decrypts that file, and it writes it to storage so the game can find it and think it’s a regular file. If you don’t have a lot of SSD space available, it might be using your hard drive for these temporary files, which would explain the slowdown.
