Pop lag issue worse now than before?

[Razorbloom]

For me, the game slows down very early on now. I used to be able to get to about 2300 on a huge map before the timer started ticking noticably slower but now it's like 2230 when I start to notice it. Anyone else have the same experience?

 

[ToneyT]

I had a similar experience on the one game I managed to play (before it got bricked by something at a specific date). I my case it slowed down to a crawl somewhere around the 2250s. I decided to power through and it eventually cleared itself up after a long while, maybe a decade or two.

Never had that happen. Not before the early-mid 2300s.

 

[NightcoreFireX]

I've the same problem with this pop lags

I got the game last week and played it a while to figure out how it works

Played first with standard-settings and without any DLCs for the first time on a large map with 6 AI, around 2270 the game starts to lag on every 1st of the month.
Started a new one on a medium map with 6 AI, same lags started around 2290
Now on the 3rd map, also a medium one with 13 AI it's 2260 and the lags starts again

I asked a friend who played this game a "little" bit longer as me and he said it's because of the calculate of pops and ressources.
Tryed to reduce some settings, but it don't work, it's not possible to avoid this hell of lags.

Played one game till 2355, then it is nearly unplayable.
I need to pause everytime on months 1st to stable the game a bit, but the lag is meanwhile around 4-5 sec

Is there any possibility to fix or at least reduce this problem?

 

[Enero]

There is a significant slowdown when the planet or leader windows are open.

 

[Wintermist]

My guess is it's perhaps not from the change in how pops work in itself, but something else they missed to update related to it that is causing issues. But who knows, suffice to say the game is running slower than it was before.

 

[HP Delron]

The game is currently suffering from slowdown, but there's no indication it is "Pop Lag" causing it. The new design of pops is just fundamentally faster than the old one. From what they've presented, the old system was pretty close to as slow as such a system could be. This means even if the new system was horribly botched it kind of can only wind up where the old one was at the worst.

The changes with 4.0 were huge and touched every part of the game. So while the slowdown is real I don't think the smart money is on it being the fault of the new pop system, or at least the core implementation of it anyway. My money is on it being due to a bug, and probably a pretty weird one at that. The kind that makes you go "Huh?" when you read the patch notes.

 

[NightcoreFireX]

I'm not sure what's the reason, but everyone I asked mean it's a population problem, because the lag is only, when the game calculate a new month tick where pop grow and everything will be new calculated

I just can say it make the game unplayable in mid game and I would like to see the endgame also.. and not only play for around 100 years and abaddon because of that and start a new one

 

[Ingri]

There were many problems with memory leaks and some other performance issues. It turned better with every patch after 4.0 but its far away from faster than 3.xx.

i played multiple test-games and every time after about 130-140 years the daily ticks are slowing down massively -> so the posibility that it has something to do with the population seems legit... but there have to be some other issues as well! i will try to get the new achievements as fast as possible and then i will make a break for a month or so

 

[RoverStorm]

From my own testing, it doesn't seem to be reliably caused by pops.

It's easy to assume late-game lag = pops caused it.

But I've been running experiments with basically turning off pop growth and having all buildings and districts produce resources directly.

There is still slowdown, even though these are galaxies with less pops than the galaxy starts with.

Pops "could" still be causing lag, but it means that there is absolutely a source of slowdown that is not pops at all.

For example, something a lot of people constantly forget is that ships are another cause of late-game lag, both from rendering the visuals and the battles, as well as path finding since it checks practically constantly if it needs to re-direct.

Then there are just memory leaks from time to time...

There could easily be new issues as well. Perhaps AI calculations broke and end up on a feedback loop. Might explain why the AI is sometimes so stupid this patch.

 

[Voidian]

From my own testing, it doesn't seem to be reliably caused by pops.

It's easy to assume late-game lag = pops caused it.

But I've been running experiments with basically turning off pop growth and having all buildings and districts produce resources directly.

There is still slowdown, even though these are galaxies with less pops than the galaxy starts with.

Pops "could" still be causing lag, but it means that there is absolutely a source of slowdown that is not pops at all.

For example, something a lot of people constantly forget is that ships are another cause of late-game lag, both from rendering the visuals and the battles, as well as path finding since it checks practically constantly if it needs to re-direct.

Then there are just memory leaks from time to time...

There could easily be new issues as well. Perhaps AI calculations broke and end up on a feedback loop. Might explain why the AI is sometimes so stupid this patch.

This is kind of old news but since most people don't know this here it goes.

Late game lag was caused by ships, and seeing them somehow made things worse.

I remember distinctively when I played a feudal empire with many, many vassals in GA difficulty (so even those vassals had very big fleets as their economy allowed them to) that the game slowed down to a crawl and never recovered after I finished building that giant radar megastructure, I never built one of those again and I never got lag that bad, even in previous versions, the instant the entire galaxy and every ship icon shows up on your screen the game starts stuttering and a month take far longer to go by.

When both you and your enemies have so many fleets the numbers go off the screen like this the game slows down to a crawl regardless of pops.
This was in a medium galaxy, GA difficulty (AI had strong economies and giant fleets) with an i9 13900k.

Of course, when you move that fleet with a giant swarm of vassals several times bigger following them from behind and try to zoom into a system to see what it looks like the game nearly stops and you can't move anymore.

PS: That's vanilla gameplay, not some crazy mod, the only mods are dyunamic UI and ASB ironman version (nothing but visual effects for weapons)

 

[NightcoreFireX]

If you're right and the problem is not the population, rather the ships, why it's always laging on 1st a month?
My game runs smoothly, exept the 1st a month.

Do the game calculate all movements only on 1st a month? I don't think so

I can't say how it is after 2335, maybe there it lag even more or almost always, but before it's only in every calculation for pop and ress.

 

[Voidian]

If you're right and the problem is not the population, rather the ships, why it's always laging on 1st a month?
My game runs smoothly, exept the 1st a month.

Do the game calculate all movements only on 1st a month? I don't think so

I can't say how it is after 2335, maybe there it lag even more or almost always, but before it's only in every calculation for pop and ress.

It was both.

But yeah, there's no way ships are the problem before 2300+++

That being said, I've not experienced any lag in this version in my current game but I haven't reached endgame yet

 

[Enailios]

Something i noticed in my current run: made it to 2500 and about to face the fourth crisis. Only time i noticed a discernible lag was when i was battling the third crisis and i hit the “reinforce fleet”. When those ships arrived they didnt merge with their corresponding fleets but instead join the battle as a single ship fleet. Noticed this behavior before back in 3.x and it didnt matter at the time since every gun was needed. What was interesting (and pertinent to this discussion) was after the battle, i had 50 fleets instead of 20 (20 titans with their battleships) and the lag was unreal as they went from system to system! Made me realize it wasnt the number of ships that matter per se since i was running 6k fleet capacity before and after the crisis with no lag, but the number of fleets even tho the majority of fleets was only a ship of 1. Survived the lag and crisis, cleaned up my fleet back to 20 and there was no lag again. Made me think that maybe a fleet was similar to how the game treats a pop group, it less about whats in the fleet but more about how many fleets there are. Similar to the infinite science ship spam bug or some such

 

[Sweeze]

This is kind of old news but since most people don't know this here it goes.

Late game lag was caused by ships, and seeing them somehow made things worse.

I remember distinctively when I played a feudal empire with many, many vassals in GA difficulty (so even those vassals had very big fleets as their economy allowed them to) that the game slowed down to a crawl and never recovered after I finished building that giant radar megastructure, I never built one of those again and I never got lag that bad, even in previous versions, the instant the entire galaxy and every ship icon shows up on your screen the game starts stuttering and a month take far longer to go by.

When both you and your enemies have so many fleets the numbers go off the screen like this the game slows down to a crawl regardless of pops.
This was in a medium galaxy, GA difficulty (AI had strong economies and giant fleets) with an i9 13900k.

Of course, when you move that fleet with a giant swarm of vassals several times bigger following them from behind and try to zoom into a system to see what it looks like the game nearly stops and you can't move anymore.

PS: That's vanilla gameplay, not some crazy mod, the only mods are dyunamic UI and ASB ironman version (nothing but visual effects for weapons)

I can definitely see it being ships, or also being fleets.

They are separate because having lots of ships but not many fleets means a lot less potentially needed pathfinding calculations and AI decision making.

I wonder if its possible to force all AIs to just have one doomstack fleet of 9999 command limit and see whether that improved things. If there's one thing that the AI in stellaris is awful about its having 300 different mini-fleets running around everywhere and its actually a major weakness that makes them unable to fight lategame wars (see AIs with 1M fleet power getting wrecked by 300k fleet power FEs because the AI has 50 fleets while the FE has only 1).

 

[Ingri]

yesterday i also checked my PC-resources while playing and CPU is about 10-20% with no single core above 30%... and only 4GB of 32GB of RAM is used. I'm the only one left in a medium galaxy and deleted my fleets -> it is about year 2350 and 1 day takes 1-2 seconds! did i miss something?

 

[Adaman5280]

The first of the month lag is bad pretty much from the start of the game on (2230+) Its genuinely scary sometimes, my whole pc takes a 2 second pause each month and it literally feels like it might crash.

The game performance in general at 2270 does feel quite a bit worse admittedly. I have to pause the game before entering the planet or ship builder UI because otherwise its just painstakingly slow, i cant watch fleet battles, clicking on things becomes slightly delayed, moving the map causes frame drops and slight stutters, etc. I'm already considering abandoning this game but I wanna wait for crisis at 2300, hopefully it spawns as early as possible.



Anyways the difference here in my case is that I'm playing as if it was 3.14 with the anti xenophobe growth required scaling turned off so i have like 500k pops and around 100k pre sapients from having the nascent stage trait. I'd wager in my case pops are absolutely the cause of my lag. This is perhaps unsurprising given the sheer amount of them i have, what is surprising though is that this is nothing compared to my average 3.14 game where i would usually turn on growth control edicts after reaching around 10k pops, usually around the year 2350. In other words it seems like pops are causing more lag than previously, I never had lag to this extent before, certainly not this early on. I'm not a huge math guy so correct me if I'm wrong, but i think 10k with the old system would be equivalent to 1 million with the new system. With that in mind the lag caused by pops is either much worse than before, or there's other major contributors.

 

[aadf97799c]

wilderness doesn't have much pop but they have insane lag after 100 year too

maybe the amount of ship cause late game lag

 

[Ingri]

it seems that the performance problems are issued from different parts of the game, but not from limited PC-resources... so there is nothing we realy can do at the moment