Started playing stellaris some weeks ago. The performance is so bad that I have yet to finish any game.
It's year 2453 and an in-game year takes more than 4 minutes. It's so discouraging that I literally don't even care about winning anymore, I just want it to end. It's going to hit some real fun levels of unplayability once the crisis starts.
How long has this issue been around for? I've seen a lot of negativity, is there realistically any hope?
The only 100% effective lag-reduction is pop-reduction.
So, what most people missed in the Necroids announcement, is that it's actually providing a solution to late game lag. If you kill everyone in your empire through new death cult mechanics ... presto, no more lag
In all seriousness though, I've found that when I play as an exterminating empire (fanatic purifier, etc.), if I simply raze 1/2 the galaxy and leave it as a desolation within my borders, late game performance improves markedly. But, this is just a different way of playing on a small map, and IMHO no less irritating, since the game essentially punishes you for winning/playing well (the bigger your empire population, the worse the game performs). The game is demonstrably *incapable* of processing late game populations, even x.25 planets on 800 stars slows to a crawl by 2450. The current AI propensity to spam habitats just makes everything much, much worse.
I think there is legitimately *some* hope that they have realized the error of pops, and we might get a system that functions in Stellaris 2, which (given the commercial success of Stellaris is very likely to be made several years from now). But ... I'm not holding my breath. No one from PDX has (or likely will) ever admit on the forums (or anywhere) that they totally screwed up the game with 2.0 & 2.2, so there's really no way to know whether they understand the mistakes they've made and if they will avoid similar pitfalls in future projects.
I'd like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they learned nothing from the quagmire of EU4's mana systems & launched Imperator with similar systems that (almost) everyone hated, and vocally hated on the forums when they were announced during the first month of dev diaries for that game, but the lead designer just thought he knew better. To their credit, they worked really hard to try to salvage that game. I have no idea to what extent they've succeeded, but it's an interesting example of PDX both not listening to the community, and then listening *real* hard when a big, new IP completely tanked. So, they are clearly capable of totally failing to learn from their mistakes, and then admitting their mistake s& massively retooling a game, which is pretty incredible when you think about how much work got signed off on for which they just ate the cost. But, I'm sure that cost was nothing compared to the projected earnings on DLC on a "successful" Imperator, so it was probably very much worth the doubled-down investment.
It seems unlikely, though, this late in its life cycle, that Stellaris is "worth" the kind of re-investment it would take to really, genuinely fix---especially since that's what 2.0 was *supposed* to be. They already got the moneybags to fund a massive re-work of the game's core mechanics ... it just caused as many problems (or more) as it fixed.
It's really hard to imagine a 3rd iteration of core mechanics getting green-lit, unless that 3rd iteration is a full-on sequel which would then bring in a whole new 6-10 year cycle of DLC $$$.
But, hey ... prove me wrong, PDX. Prove me wrong. I can't imagine a better gaming-present for the holidays than a Stellaris 3.0 that fixes the economic & military AI, crisis AI, planetary automation, planetary management UI, pop-migration UI, late-game lag, and a partridge in a pear tree.
