6 articlesIt’s only a few weeks left until we can finally get our hands on the newest expansion for Crusader Kings 3 called “All Under Heaven”.
The new expansion is a massive one, having a storage requirement of approximately 20Gb on its Steam page.
It introduces a dramatically bigger map, a bunch of new countries, and a ton of new and exciting features. At the same time, it also introduces several concerns with regard to the game’s overall performance and optimization.
Fortunately, there’s really nothing to worry about, as Paradox Interactive claims that everything has been properly optimized.
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In their recent dev diary, technical lead Joel Hansson explains that they’ve “made significant performance improvements, with the game now running significantly closer to the current release’s speed than our previously set tick-rate target.”
Paradox has been focusing most of its resources on the development of the expansion. In fact, they shifted their focus toward it that they nearly neglected the much-anticipated Coronations Event Pack.
Now, the upcoming expansion will serve as their opportunity to show their fans that Crusader Kings 3 still remains as one of the best grand strategy games on the market.
How Stable and Optimize is All Under Heaven’s Performance
According to Hansson, the game is about 30-40% bigger with the addition of All Under Heaven. With such a massive scope, it’s only normal for players to worry about how the game will perform as a whole.
“With All Under Heaven included, the game is about 30% to 40% bigger, in the sense of the amount of playable land, and playable living characters. We focused on reducing simulation tick duration to keep the experience as close to CK3 as it is now.” said Hansson in the dev diary.
These numbers were from both low-end as well as high-end machines. He revealed that they were able to reach tick speeds that are comparable to the current live version.
By comparable, he meant that the game starts slower early on but ramps up in speed in the mid to late game.
“Results will vary by the world you create and the world the simulation creates around you! There is no single number or graph that covers all games, hardware, and play styles, but we have aimed to deliver a playable, stable, fast experience with All Under Heaven.”
Hansson then went on to talk about the improvements they’ve made from a technical standpoint. You can read it in full in their dev diary.
Jimmy Selling, technical director for Paradox’s Studio Black, stated that they’ve revisited their minimum hardware requirements during their performance review.
He mentioned that “after months of optimization work, we’ve recovered nearly all of the slowdown seen during early development.”
During their review, they noticed that their original minimum CPU requirement of Intel i3-2120 is already outdated.
To ensure a smooth experience for everyone, they decided to update the minimum requirement to Intel i5-750 or AMD FX-4300 alongside 8Gb of RAM.
All Under Heaven releases on October 29. 2025.
