Performance Megathread

[GnoSIS]

Following my above post, I just tested a quick N dirty edit to make pop growth 10x faster and limit it when housing cap is reached:

 from within Npop in 00_defines.txt
REQUIRED_POP_GROWTH                    = 10    # Required growth to make a new pop    ####
OVERCROWDING_NO_GROWTH_THRESHOLD    = 1.02    # At this amount of overcrowding, growth stops entirely ####
REQUIRED_POP_ASSEMBLY                = 10    # Required assembly to add a pop    ####

now my game is running easily 3x faster after just a few months of letting the game's planets fill up with pops (im using More AI with about 40 AI on a 600 or 800 star galaxy and Asymmetric Advanced AI which basically lets me start with a "midgame" style galaxy in 2200, and the communication console command to see everything). Was lagging like crap till 2212, been running this pop edit for about 3 years and its now a lot smoother.
View attachment 526985

Naturally, this isnt balanced at all (food prices are going to skyrocket) but it's illustrative.

Edit, after checking out the galaxy for a bit. a lot of AI planets are force-unemploying their artisans / alloy workers. (if i remember right, there was a limit imposed a while back on the AI where it would always try and maintain a mineral stockpile or a CG stockpile of X size. This may be exacerbating the vacant job issue, by forcing jobs to stay open. Im not sure if a planet with 1 vacant job has less performance hit than one with say 10 - as it may be re-checking the whole planet if even 1 job is free). If i give an AI a load of free minerals, they suddenly populate all their alloy jobs again, for what its worth (but not the artisan jobs), so its probably the 500 mineral stockpile causing this.

The problem with this solution is that by increasing the growth of the galaxy, you make other sources of lag worse much faster. On such a game empires will build and fill colonies faster and you will end up hitting another lag wall on other subsystems like trade, gates, migration and such at x3 or x10 the speed.

Not sure if such a thing would happen before you conclude your game or not. It needs testing. But I like how that partially solves the problem for the AI. I would love a stand alone mod that could do this selectively only for AI empires, after say year 2290 or sooner as an additional difficulty.

 

[GnoSIS]

Based on the stuff GnoSIS said, vacant jobs are the main problem. If that's the case, then I propose a question/solution:

Does using the manual job prioritization mechanic to decrease free jobs improve performance? And if so, the devs should use that to their advantage (and maybe even do a hotfix for it if it can be done quickly wink wink nudge nudge @Moah). You can still see the "x/y" jobs filled number when you use it, meaning that you can use that number to show the free jobs instead of the actual vacant jobs. Vacant jobs can simply be deprioritized and when you want to do a job check (monthly might be fine, among other triggers), restore those jobs back and then deprioritize them once all pops finish taking jobs. Makes it feel like a monthly hiring process.

Unfortunate that we can't mod in job deprioritization (as far as I know).

EDIT: For those who want to test it, here's my additional files. And yes, I did all of the deprioritizations manually...

In my tests so far (playing on fastest for 30 days as FoP on galaxy view using littlemod from GnoSIS), it doesn't seem like it does. I'm getting two totally different times for the save without deprioritization. Want to note that I experienced slowdowns when an empire claimed a system on me and while the game was transitioning from 3/1 to 3/2.

EDIT #2: Turn off the AI for more accurate results because they may reprioritize the jobs back. Didn’t do this in my tests so I’ll do it after I sleep.

What definitely works is disabling buildings and you should do this to save on upkeep. Hence why I asked for the ability to disable districts as well.
It would be trivial to have a few extra lines of code there to do this automagically for both AI and the player and an option to do it even for partially filled buildings/districts.

For your testing please try killing the AI empires, use gestalts and have no gates to have a more extreme contrast.

 

[sortulv]

I think even those who are okay with the current levels of performance can at least agree that it is significantly worse than it was pre-megacorp.

Since I'm currently playing a 1.9.1 game - nope, pretty much the same level of performance in the latest patch as then. Mind you, I have a prewarp computer, so my values my be a bit on the low end...

 

[Pancakelord]

The problem with this solution is that by increasing the growth of the galaxy, you make other sources of lag worse much faster. On such a game empires will build and fill colonies faster and you will end up hitting another lag wall on other subsystems like trade, gates, migration and such at x3 or x10 the speed.

Not sure if such a thing would happen before you conclude your game or not. It needs testing. But I like how that partially solves the problem for the AI. I would love a stand alone mod that could do this selectively only for AI empires, after say year 2290 or sooner as an additional difficulty.

Yeah thats what i was wondering. You do hit a celing for growth of 1 pop per month. Im running a test game now (reddit link with my various notes/updates, mod link on forums for mirror when i eventually upload this). Settings for my current test game pic1 pic2. with 0.25 hab worlds lots of primitives and 5x wormholes and gateways on 1k stars with basically everything maxed on vanilla 2.5.1 (because if it can manage this, then its good enough). currently only upto 2278 and performance is fast I also just noticed this (copied from my update):

• Performance still feels fast. I've noticed that if I pan off the map, whilst on fast forwards the game is literally as fast as 2200.(so im just looking at a black starfield) when looking at the galaxy map , it does slow down a bit. Not 100% sure but turning off hyperlanes makes the days pass slightly faster.
• At this point vacant jobs are so rare that they (the job checks) have a negligible net impact on performance, because there arent many free jobs.
• I think rendering is dragging the game more down now. This might be due to some bottleneck in the rendering or UI thread? I don't know enough to speculate further, and any changes here would need access to stellaris' core code, probably, but there is definitely a small speed up when NOT looking at the galaxy on fast forwards.
• 3D Rendering on the galaxy shouldnt be enough to noticeably slow down the game at all, I'm able to play games like BF5 and Destiny 2 with 60fps no problems. So something else is at work here...

I plan to play this out to 2400 at least over the next few days and see. It may be that non-job factors ramp up to be far worse later on. Ive noticed a slight refugee crisis as lithoid refugees fleeing from an FP have dragged down a few democrat/xenophile colonies and the rockmonsters are breeding like nuts lol (balance comes after performace). The xenophobes refusing refugees arent having any really badly developed worlds. so the AI probably does struggle with 10x growth PLUS refugees. Migration isnt as big of an issue as pops cant outgrow my housing cap and the AI aggressively turns off pop/machine growth when the cap is hit. So my housing cap is actually keeping things in check for like 95% of the galaxy. pops basically stop growing at 1.02x the planet's housing limit.

Cant wait to see what 5x gateways do to my performance lol. Also want to see how the crisis does with purge rates = 1 pop a month (you cant overflow, so at most you can grow/assemble or decline 1 pop per month).

 

[GnoSIS]

Yeah thats what i was wondering. You do hit a celing for growth of 1 pop per month. Im running a test game now (reddit link with my various notes/updates, mod link on forums for mirror when i eventually upload this). Settings for my current test game pic1 pic2. with 0.25 hab worlds lots of primitives and 5x wormholes and gateways on 1k stars with basically everything maxed on vanilla 2.5.1 (because if it can manage this, then its good enough). currently only upto 2278 and performance is fast I also just noticed this (copied from my update):


I plan to play this out to 2400 at least over the next few days and see. It may be that non-job factors ramp up to be far worse later on. Ive noticed a slight refugee crisis as lithoid refugees fleeing from an FP have dragged down a few democrat/xenophile colonies and the rockmonsters are breeding like nuts lol (balance comes after performace). The xenophobes refusing refugees arent having any really badly developed worlds. so the AI probably does struggle with 10x growth PLUS refugees. Migration isnt as big of an issue as pops cant outgrow my housing cap and the AI aggressively turns off pop/machine growth when the cap is hit. So my housing cap is actually keeping things in check for like 95% of the galaxy. pops basically stop growing at 1.02x the planet's housing limit.

Cant wait to see what 5x gateways do to my performance lol. Also want to see how the crisis does with purge rates = 1 pop a month (you cant overflow, so at most you can grow/assemble or decline 1 pop per month).

At some point you run out of places to place colonies/habitats as well especially on smaller maps.
I find that I don't play what I ike with stellaris anymore, i.e. for gates I would build them in every system I have a colony in.

 

[Pancakelord]

At some point you run out of places to place colonies/habitats as well especially on smaller maps.
I find that I don't play what I ike with stellaris anymore, i.e. for gates I would build them in every system I have a colony in.

That was actually a criticism I remember seeing in a dev diary back when 2.0 came out lol, at some point you hit what I call "mass effect syndrome" (based on how the nations in ME mention resource and land shortages several times throughout the ME lore) despite seemingly inhabiting a huge galaxy, you'll actually run out of space quite quickly. And eventually you end up with a state where there isn't room for anyone anywhere anymore.

Part of me thinks (having now played upto the 2290s so far with 10x growth and seen how crime, stability, scarcity and other systems are more important - and to me - actually more enjoyable to consider) that originally population growth wasn't meant to be set at 100, but that it was going to be lower.

They may have changed this during development to be 100, or reduced base pop growth, for your very stated reason - so you don't fill up the galaxy too fast.

I'm not sure if there is really any way to Change the pop growth calculation but making it logarithmic might be better than the linear+compounding modifiers (which makes it more like geometric) that we have in-game now. Perhaps manipulation of refugee and immigration proeprties would help. I haven't really looked though.

 

[Blayze]

Part of me thinks (having now played upto the 2290s so far with 10x growth and seen how crime, stability, scarcity and other systems are more important - and to me - actually more enjoyable to consider) that originally population growth wasn't meant to be set at 100, but that it was going to be lower.

You should try a mod that removes all repeatable research, so that you can't just keep on expanding thanks to having infinite free energy, minerals and food.

 

[CMDR_HERNE]

I'm quite reticent to revert back to 2.1 as I like the changes brought about since and with Ancient Relics. I've finished a couple of games reaching the end using the default settings of a huge galaxy with the maximum amount of ai opponents but after a while i've tried the default settings and having a problem with the times each day is passing. Longest I got was mid 2400s and that was an issue with each day of passing I daren't play upto the 3000s

Now trying a 400 size galaxy with the 0.25 chance of habitable planets with ai opponents set to random and I'm having a far far better time of it. There was only 5 ai civs that spawned at first and I'm at 2400 and each day is only taking about a second to pass. Only 50 years left before the end of the game. It's still Stellaris and it's still enjoyable just relatively smaller.

I really want to try a default sized galaxy again with the same settings to take advantage of the Federations update when it drops. As an aside random number of ai is better for me now as it doesn't make every game feel the same. Just need to get more civs to play against with a few more stars to explore.

Noted Stellaris Immortal will give that a go when you can use it with gestalts. I haven't given up on this game at all far from it will try a game of 2.1 just to remind myself of what it was like.



For context I'm using a 3rd gen i5/GTX750 and I first started playing Stellaris on lower than recomended specs on a core 2 duo. Now that was laggy....

 

[GnoSIS]

That was actually a criticism I remember seeing in a dev diary back when 2.0 came out lol, at some point you hit what I call "mass effect syndrome" (based on how the nations in ME mention resource and land shortages several times throughout the ME lore) despite seemingly inhabiting a huge galaxy, you'll actually run out of space quite quickly. And eventually you end up with a state where there isn't room for anyone anywhere anymore.

Part of me thinks (having now played upto the 2290s so far with 10x growth and seen how crime, stability, scarcity and other systems are more important - and to me - actually more enjoyable to consider) that originally population growth wasn't meant to be set at 100, but that it was going to be lower.

They may have changed this during development to be 100, or reduced base pop growth, for your very stated reason - so you don't fill up the galaxy too fast.

I'm not sure if there is really any way to Change the pop growth calculation but making it logarithmic might be better than the linear+compounding modifiers (which makes it more like geometric) that we have in-game now. Perhaps manipulation of refugee and immigration proeprties would help. I haven't really looked though.

I feel I have to flex my sci-fi muscles after reading this, but coming from asimovs' Last Question mini story, in reality growth is really exponential, star empires will eventually grow to a point where they build up entrie star systems or even galaxies in a single year, even so that means filling up real sized dyson spheres and such and not the grossly watered down stuff we have here for megastructures. Since this game is about conflict, it must handle such scenarios, population load and build up to the level of a very crowded galaxy pronto because I agree that the interesting stuff start once we have tough choices to make.

playing the little bonsai galaxy simulator where you slowly fill up the galaxy always having space to grow and resources to collect is valid gameplay, but ultimately is not exciting - and many in the forums and reddit state so! I wanna see unemployed starving, riots in the streets of my enemies because I conquered their farming world, rebelions and planets glassed so that that the bugs from Klendathu can grow more pops. What we have now is just not interesting enough as gameplay, and as it is 10 more DLCs won't change that.

 

[Blayze]

I feel I have to flex my sci-fi muscles after reading this, but coming from asimovs' Last Question mini story, in reality growth is really exponential, star empires will eventually grow to a point where they build up entrie star systems or even galaxies in a single year, even so that means filling up real sized dyson spheres and such and not the grossly watered down stuff we have here for megastructures. Since this game is about conflict, it must handle such scenarios, population load and build up to the level of a very crowded galaxy pronto because I agree that the interesting stuff start once we have tough choices to make.

playing the little bonsai galaxy simulator where you slowly fill up the galaxy always having space to grow and resources to collect is valid gameplay, but ultimately is not exciting - and many in the forums and reddit state so! I wanna see unemployed starving, riots in the streets of my enemies because I conquered their farming world, rebelions and planets glassed so that that the bugs from Klendathu can grow more pops. What we have now is just not interesting enough as gameplay, and as it is 10 more DLCs won't change that.

I think for this to work, the devs would have to make your control over your empire mostly indirect. You'd need to have governors following the orders--or not--you give them, according to their skill and corruption, and you might need one for each planet or system to truly hammer home the chaos that would be involved in trying to organise a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy. Then you'd have generals and admirals with the risk of starting coups to get what they want, on top of scientists who research things you told them not to in their spare time, siphoning resources away from your empire for their own personal projects.

And of course, all those leaders and demographics would have their own political demands and cultural norms, causing more friction, crime and terrorism on even the most peaceful of planets, making you want to nerve-staple or glass your entire empire.

 

[Pancakelord]

I think for this to work, the devs would have to make your control over your empire mostly indirect. You'd need to have governors following the orders--or not--you give them, according to their skill and corruption, and you might need one for each planet or system to truly hammer home the chaos that would be involved in trying to organise a galaxy-spanning bureaucracy. Then you'd have generals and admirals with the risk of starting coups to get what they want, on top of scientists who research things you told them not to in their spare time, siphoning resources away from your empire for their own personal projects.

And of course, all those leaders and demographics would have their own political demands and cultural norms, causing more friction, crime and terrorism on even the most peaceful of planets, making you want to nerve-staple or glass your entire empire.

That sounds a lot like the quasi-agency your characters have in CK2 and Imperator lol.

 

[Blayze]

That sounds a lot like the quasi-agency your characters have in CK2 and Imperator lol.

How else could they deliver on the fantasy of being Space Emperor, instead of being an overworked Space Architect?

 

[Pancakelord]

Im trying to upload my mod for other people to try as its given me some good performance despite balance issues (the 10x growth one, that basically marginalises job vacanices) but this shit is driving me nuts.

it works flawlessly as a local mod. yet when uploaded through steam, then subscribed to and enabled in 2.5.1, it does shit all when in-game, like it's not even enabled, despite everything, seemingly, being set up correctly.

 

[AlknicTeos]

Does someone also resettle a lot of pops ? it became more and more a pain, and for my current census I've need about 90 min just for resettle pops. ( 30 min lost, due a ctd )
And I can observe following things ( maybe you look at the save again, before and after resettle pops )

1. resettle a pop to a planet with no vacant jobs goes normal ( like from planet 1 to some other planets at begin or end of list )
2. resettle the same job pop also goes normal ( like from planet 1 to planet 8, clerks), even if you move several (when opening the after resettle save, you would have to scroll to something about planet 20 as clerk target )
3. resettle the first pop after resettlement screen was opened with normal speed, and the pops after the first takes a lot of time ... ( like moving all unemployed from 1 to 17 or 21 , or any other arc world with vacant jobs)
4. and the ctd happenend, when I switched the resettlement planet ( left or right, doesn't matter) to another planet it takes time, and in this time the win loading circle animation appears and clicking in this timeframe leads to a ctd

not performance, but the deals vassal are doing are insane ... I also have developed feeling for my one star corporate empire . I could have also trade away less ressources for the deals, but I want to develop the vassal a little bit, also with tag switching. ... maybe you cancel the trade deals and try to make new deals.

And from the game pace, some days go "pretty" fast with about 1s/d and some days need up to 4-5 s , and the begin of a year or month (especially when new colonies are formed) take ages. I think the last year switch took about 30s.

And I hope in the save games, I have reached peak vacant job planets

edit: it takes about 4-5s to resettle a pop, if you move several, and opening the resettlement bar or change the target planets it takes about 8-10s
edit2: there are about 500 owned planets with about 35k pops doing about 650k base research a month and to finish the census ( give build orders) took only about 35 min for all planets

 

[Kiyosen]

Unfortunately, my tests have shown that job deprioritization does NOT improve performance. I don't know if my save has an insignificant number of planets and pops or what but it seems weird that jobs that can't be filled due to job deprioritization wouldn't improve performance since they shouldn't make any checks. Notes and saves attached.

Spoiler: Notes

Playing as determined exterminators in galaxy view on fastest for 1 year, results below.

w/o de-prio:
1m7.80s
1m7.50s
1m7.77s
1m7.90s
1m7.66s

w/ de-prio:
1m7.56s
1m7.77s
1m7.68s
1m7.50s
1m7.59s

Some notes:
-Used console commands and event modding to create this scenario.
-No other playable empires, no primitives, no fallen empires, no gateways (except l-gates).
-Killed almost all of the space monsters.
-I disabled the AI with console command "ai".
-I disabled autosave.
-I disabled growth and spammed generator districts for all owned planets.
-No random event pop-ups were seen in any of the listed times.

 

[Pancakelord]

I have just uploaded my mod to the workshop (the 10x growth mod), which I have affectionately called FPS THRU SNU SNU:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1917679422

The primary aim of this was to see if minimising job vacancies had a big impact on FPS. so performance > balance.

Primary Features:

* Reduced growth requirements (to 1/10th vanilla - functionally a 10x growth multiplier, before any addtional multipliers are added) and reduced pop growth cap to 1.02x housing cap.
* Reduce Demotion time to 2 days per stratum.
* Removed almost all AI normal and Gestalt job disable checks (to prevent it disabling jobs, which may/may not add to job vacancy checks, depending on how this was implemented).
* Increased Purge speeds: 10x extermination/crisis purge speed and doubled the rest, neutering unchanged.

The biggest issue (aside from generally throwing the balance out of whack) is that robots will not automatically stop building themselves if you are a human (AIs will stop assembly automatically when housing runs out). This makes playing machine gestalts very annoying, but I don't see an easy way to impose pop-controls on robots automatically.
I have seen marked improvements in mid/late game with this, and want to see how others do with it. please leave feedback in the mod thread HERE or on the steam workshop thread.

 

[alexti]

At some point you run out of places to place colonies/habitats as well especially on smaller maps.

That's more of a theoretical concern. Even on tiny there are 200 systems, so there is probably enough space for 400+ colonies+habitats. One would win the game long before hitting this limit.

 

[AlknicTeos]

hm, killing the neutral space whales seems to have increased the speed

 

[ringworm]

Hi All,

Not after a debate but just wondering if there is a reason Stellaris does not utilise my CPU? Rarely gets above 40% and never above 50% . I have a load of resources available why isn't it using them?

Many thanks

 

[The Founder]

Hi All,

Not after a debate but just wondering if there is a reason Stellaris does not utilise my CPU? Rarely gets above 40% and never above 50% . I have a load of resources available why isn't it using them?

Many thanks

Because Multitthreading is not a magical bullet that makes thing go faster.
After all, 9 Women can not get a child in 1 month either.