Tired of late-game lag, I coded my own mod. It's 1949 and 1 day takes 2.4 seconds.
UP: Hey everyone, I'm seeing a lot of requests for the beta. Just to be clear, this post isn't AI slop my English just isn't great, so I used AI to translate it. I promise I'm doing my best to get the beta out. I'm not claiming to have the best AI or performance mod out there anyway. I just wanted to share the data with you all.
Hey guys. I got tired of the late-game lag on my mid-range setup (i5 11th Gen laptop), so I started making a performance mod. Instead of giving the AI artificial buffs like Expert AI does, I tried to optimize how the vanilla AI manages its military.
The main change is a hard cap: countries can only train divisions based on their current factory count and available manpower (e.g., 10 factories = max 5 divisions, 40 factories = 25). This stops minor nations from spamming units and choking the CPU. It also forces major nations to build high-quality, fully equipped templates instead of flooding the map with weak units.
I left an observe mode test running overnight. When I woke up, the game was in August 1949 and running surprisingly well on Speed 5 (FOW on):
1943: 1 day = ~1.8 seconds
1945: 1 day = ~2.0 seconds
1949: 1 day = ~2.4 seconds
Some observations on how the AI handled these restrictions by 1949:
Germany focused on economy until late 1938, then took Poland in 20 days with 16w templates. France built heavier divisions and held out until early 1941. Germany also invaded Switzerland right before Barbarossa.
For Barbarossa, Germany built around 4.5K planes (Fighter/CAS). The Soviets used a deep defense with infantry and AT stacks. It turned into a stalemate until 1945, but the Soviets eventually capitulated while I was asleep.
Axis forces invaded Turkey and pushed into Egypt.
The UK is stuck on its island with a massive iron deficit due to convoy raiding. However, the AI managed its production well: they have zero equipment deficits, a 10K plane stockpile, and 210 fully supplied divisions using Modern Tanks.
The US puppeted Japan.
AI dynamically adjusted production to fix deficits and built specific counter-units (like Germany making 16w AT divisions against naval invasions).
I'm not planning to upload this to the Workshop yet; I just wanted to share the test run.
(Screenshots are from 1945, when the Soviets were pushed back to the Urals.)