The highly anticipated Crusader Kings 3 expansion, “All Under Heaven,” is set to dramatically enlarge the game’s already vast map. This new addition introduces China, Japan, and Southeast Asia, offering players a wealth of new opportunities to forge dynasties, manage shogunates, and control the lucrative Silk Road. While an expanded world brings exciting gameplay, it also raises concerns among veteran players about potential performance slowdowns due to increased backend calculations. However, Paradox, the developer, assures fans that despite previous minor missteps with DLC, they have optimization firmly under control.
“All Under Heaven” has consumed so much of the development team’s attention that Paradox recently acknowledged neglecting the “Coronations” flavor pack. That previous release was plagued with issues and received a very low rating from players. Now, “All Under Heaven” presents Paradox with a crucial chance to reaffirm Crusader Kings 3’s standing as a top-tier grand strategy game, potentially pushing it to new levels of acclaim, provided its immense scale doesn’t compromise performance.
Developers have shared detailed insights into the expansion’s development, including a lengthy video explaining the technical challenges and solutions.
Joel Hansson, the technical lead, explained that with “All Under Heaven,” the game becomes approximately “30% to 40% bigger” in terms of both playable territory and the number of active characters. To maintain the existing Crusader Kings 3 experience, the team has diligently worked on decreasing the ‘simulation tick duration,’ which dictates how swiftly the game processes all ongoing events and actions.
Hansson elaborated that integrating East Asia and Southeast Asia into the game was “a significantly greater challenge than any previous expansion.” Beyond the usual 20% performance hit from new, unoptimized features, they also contended with a 32% rise in baronies and rulers. He further clarified that rulers serve as the foundational units in their simulation, directly influencing the CPU’s workload. Consequently, simply adding the Asian territories intrinsically made the game slower by an amount equivalent to this size increase.
The promising news is that extensive testing, conducted on both low-spec and high-spec machines, indicates the team has successfully achieved a new build with performance “comparable to the current live version.” Indeed, the accompanying chart illustrates that while the early game might experience a minor slowdown (reflected by a higher tick rate value), the updated Crusader Kings 3, with the new expansion, actually boasts faster performance during the mid-to-late game.
Paradox is also diligently working to optimize other aspects of the game. Hansson mentioned their efforts to tackle the issue of overpopulation, akin to how some community-made mods improve performance by thinning out characters. He elaborated, “While we haven’t implemented the exact same approach, we’ve focused on the core problem.” The development team has successfully reduced or removed numerous sources that generate insignificant, random, or unseen characters who often clutter guest pools, court retinues, and other background elements, thereby consuming valuable processing power.
Hansson advises that “results will inherently differ based on the world you forge and the ongoing simulation,” so players should anticipate some variability in their personal playthroughs. For those keen to delve deeper into the technical achievements, the developer has published a comprehensive blog post detailing the extensive work involved.
Finally, Paradox Studio Black confirmed a minor update to the game’s minimum CPU requirements, now recommending an Intel i5-750 or AMD FX-4300 paired with 8GB of RAM. Their thorough hardware testing revealed that older CPUs, such as the 2011-era Intel i3-2120, consistently struggled to perform reliably under intense loads, particularly with only 6GB of RAM. This revised baseline is intended to guarantee the stable and predictable performance essential for Crusader Kings 3 in its current state, five years post-release.
Crusader Kings 3: All Under Heaven launches Tuesday, October 28. Prepare to expand your dominion and reshape history!