I'm in a small pickle right now.
So last night, I was playing my file and it very suddenly got laggy and froze out of nowhere. I'm not expecting stellar performance on my non-gaming laptop, with a dynasty that is 24 weeks in, but this was far beyond normal, occasional freezing/lag. It was "I can't move the camera at all and it takes five minutes to bring the Options menu up" freezing/lag. So I opened up the cheats panel (another minute or so of waiting for that to come up), did a global
resetsim to see if that would clear things up, noticed that that didn't do anything to help performance, so I eventually was able to save and exit as usual. I always clear caches, DCBackup, and Featured Items before I open up the game again, so I did that.
Tried opening my file again tonight. For one, the
resetsim cheat didn't even fully work, because my active sim was still standing by the fishing hole where she was before, instead of being placed back home. It took a good few minutes for the camera to move if I directed it to, if it did at all. I couldn't even open the Options menu to save my game. Not that it mattered, since I couldn't even un-pause the game to do anything. Often, the cursor was stuck in place. And worst of all, the build/buy buttons were greyed out. It was bad, and so non-functional, that I had to force-quit through Task Manager and try again, only for the file to still be extremely laggy. Then I opened up my last good save to see if that was still playable. Which it is. Things run about as smoothly as they can on a laptop with integrated graphics and a humongous dynasty file to cope with.
For reference, I tried other things to make performance better. Lowered a few of my graphics settings, closed every other program (I have a nasty habit of leaving everything open), but that didn't help this lag in the slightest. Is there anything left to do? I'm too far along to give up.