Best Large Game Set Up to Avoid Slowdown?

[Ainz_Ooal_Gown?]

I really enjoy playing on a huge map with 30 ai empires, for the first 100 or so years I can run the game fine but slowdown is so apparent I just can't play anymore with it being so slow. I ran some benchmarks and it really starts picking up around year 50. I know about the performance issues, I think I read a lot of it is game engine related? I have a seriously beefy pc (5090, 9950x3d) and I still get slow down. I tried using the tick rate command in the console but the fps drop is not work it to me.

Anyways, I was wondering if anyone also enjoys playing on huge crowded maps and knows a good set up or mod config to avoid slowdown. I know about decreasing habitable worlds, map size, and AIs. Is there anything else I can do? The mods I know about Casako's Framework utilities/better performance utilities, AI game performance optimization, and Stellaris Fixes. Not sure if I should run them all, or a combination, also load order. I know pops cause slowdown but I also read somewhere that it might be something else too, really I would like insight into whats causing the slowdown, or if it really is just pops. I wonder if there a particular system or thing that's very unoptimized that can be disabled?

love the game, but the performance issues really push me away from it sometimes. i really hope it improves, then again its been like 10 years. I should also note I did play with other mods but for my testing I disabled them all and slowdown was still there

 

[Nakkivene]

For me the answer is just roll back to 1.9

If I were to guess what slows down the game, I'd say fleets. Every mercenary enclave seems to spawn 20 tiny fleets for example.

 

[GuardianGI]

Disable hyperrelays, hyperrelay repairing, gateways and "flash forge hyperrelay" astral decision by replacing "potential" brackets with this:

potential = {
always = no
}

Inside these files:
05_gateways.txt
14_hyper_relay.txt
astral_planes_actions.txt

Also disable wormholes and lgates ingame. Also force spawn alot of purifier civs, so that the galaxy doesn't become a hugbox filled with 1 colony empires and mercenary enclaves.

 

[WoodenP]

Aside from 1.9 mentioned above, you can also roll back to 3.14 and add the Trade Lane optimization/removal mod. 3.14 had really good sim speed with this mod. It's what motivated the Phoenix team to remove trade lanes as well as a part of 4.0.

Spoiler

(Though PDX accomplished no performance gains even though the mod did... but let's not think about that too much shall we.)

 

[Ainz_Ooal_Gown?]

For me the answer is just roll back to 1.9

If I were to guess what slows down the game, I'd say fleets. Every mercenary enclave seems to spawn 20 tiny fleets for example.

was the performance fine up until 2.0? I didn't know that, frustrating if it just gets worse and worse

 

[Ainz_Ooal_Gown?]

Disable hyperrelays, hyperrelay repairing, gateways and "flash forge hyperrelay" astral decision by replacing "potential" brackets with this:

potential = {
always = no
}

Inside these files:
05_gateways.txt
14_hyper_relay.txt
astral_planes_actions.txt

Also disable wormholes and lgates ingame. Also force spawn alot of purifier civs, so that the galaxy doesn't become a hugbox filled with 1 colony empires and mercenary enclaves.

thanks for the info, I'll try these out. just annoying that I have to turn off gameplay features but if its worth it then yeah. I really hope that they address the performance with their next patch, they said they changed from the hotfixes to larger ones to better develop fixes so fingers crossed. but, history tells another story

 

[Carl_Bar]

was the performance fine up until 2.0? I didn't know that, frustrating if it just gets worse and worse

There's an enormous number of features that were added between 1.9 and now. Any new thing will allways have a performance cost, thats unavoidable.

Aside from 1.9 mentioned above, you can also roll back to 3.14 and add the Trade Lane optimization/removal mod. 3.14 had really good sim speed with this mod. It's what motivated the Phoenix team to remove trade lanes as well as a part of 4.0.

Spoiler

(Though PDX accomplished no performance gains even though the mod did... but let's not think about that too much shall we.)

My speculation is that the economy changes combined with AI changes have resulted in the AI building a LOT more military early, and since fleets are a known performance hog thats where most of the gains have gone.

 

[DarkHelmet110985]

Fleets are a major resource hog and one thing I've noticed with respect to the AI is that they love to build Corvettes and Frigates in **LARGE** numbers. Considering the quantity of Ships yields a massive drain on system resources so the only way to limit the drag is to thin the herd by exterminating AI Empires early and often. If left to their own devices, the AI will be splintered by Civil Wars and other rebellions because their Economies are piss-poor, culminating in tons of small fleets that have to be accounted for. Mercenary Enclaves exacerbate this. It's partly why I play on Tiny maps for this reason alone since it generally spawns with ~4 Empires + 1 FE and no more. Meaning if you're able to eliminate one or two will yield far fewer Fleets.

 

[Nakkivene]

was the performance fine up until 2.0? I didn't know that, frustrating if it just gets worse and worse

It wasn't super good with the hardware of the time, but it's great now. I just like that particular version the most overall.

And it is frustrating. What, am I supposed to buy new computers every year to play this game? Why not cater to the market that isn't upgrading all the time?

 

[hart30]

was the performance fine up until 2.0? I didn't know that, frustrating if it just gets worse and worse

The performance was not fine almost till 1.9. I remember it being horrible slow. But in 1.9 the had fixed all the big bugs and many of the performance issues that plagued the game before.

Then 2.0 started and we were sent in performace/bug hell. This then got fixed over the course to 3.0. Further improvements (but also balance issues) came to 3.14. 3.14 was by no means perfect. Fleet/ship numbers had expanded greatly tanking late game performance. But till lategame the game was running quite smoothly due to pop calculation improvements.
4.0 completely removes pop and trade related performance issues, but its quite the rough shape. It needs to be formed again and the fleet/ship issue railed in (that one cannot ever be perfect. Otherwise there would have to be sacrifices too great to be made, sacrificing loads of ship individuality/control).

The two best performing patches are 1.9 and 3.14. Anything else is probably worse performance and bug wise. Balance wise i am not sure.

 

[RingworldUtopia]

I really enjoy playing on a huge map with 30 ai empires, for the first 100 or so years I can run the game fine but slowdown is so apparent I just can't play anymore with it being so slow. I ran some benchmarks and it really starts picking up around year 50. I know about the performance issues, I think I read a lot of it is game engine related? I have a seriously beefy pc (5090, 9950x3d) and I still get slow down. I tried using the tick rate command in the console but the fps drop is not work it to me.

Anyways, I was wondering if anyone also enjoys playing on huge crowded maps and knows a good set up or mod config to avoid slowdown. I know about decreasing habitable worlds, map size, and AIs. Is there anything else I can do? The mods I know about Casako's Framework utilities/better performance utilities, AI game performance optimization, and Stellaris Fixes. Not sure if I should run them all, or a combination, also load order. I know pops cause slowdown but I also read somewhere that it might be something else too, really I would like insight into whats causing the slowdown, or if it really is just pops. I wonder if there a particular system or thing that's very unoptimized that can be disabled?

love the game, but the performance issues really push me away from it sometimes. i really hope it improves, then again its been like 10 years. I should also note I did play with other mods but for my testing I disabled them all and slowdown was still there

try the open beta. apparently they increased command limits for performance reasons, and i suspect a huge galaxy with 30 AI is going to massively benefit from having WAY less fleets per AI, in terms of performance.