In my current playthrough, the endgame lag has become literally unplayable, by which I mean when my full fleet is in combat, a single day (not month!) will take 20-30 seconds. While different people obviously have different priorities, this is currently the primary factor reducing my enjoyment of the game. (Although the bugs and wrestling with the UI aren't too far behind.) So with the hope that performance improvements will also be a high priority for the developers, I've been making some notes that I hope can help to identify the major bottlenecks.
- Playing on a small barred spiral galaxy (400 stars); starting with 12 AI empires, plus 2 fallen empires and a couple marauders, who are sadly no longer with us. Currently there are 6 AI empires left. GA, midgame scaling, midgame at 2300 and endgame at 2400.
- The game ran quite smoothly up until around somewhere around 2350. The first major slowdowns occurred when two large federations went to war. (Although there were a couple times when the galcom declared a crisis, and those also seemed to run a bit slower.) In general, the game appears to run much slower during large-scale conflicts between the AIs. Even so, at this stage the game generally was able to run at least one day per second (and usually several days per second during peacetime).
- The really bad slowdowns happened when I mobilized my fleets to fight a crisis. I've split my forces between 630 battleships (FE/carrier/WW) and 4760 missile corvettes, at least at full strength. The primary culprit here seems to be the corvettes.
- Even moving the corvettes would cause a lag spike, but the real problem was when they'd enter combat. This was when you'd start getting days taking 20-30 seconds (I timed one at 42 seconds, but I think that might have been an outlier). This doesn't seem to be a rendering issue, as it wouldn't run any faster when I was in the galaxy view not looking at any ships.
- Combat with the battleships didn't seem nearly as hard on the processor as the corvettes. This is maybe a little surprising because they've got over 10k strike craft between them. I need to go back and double check this, but my impression is that combat with the carrier battleships will render very slowly (<10 fps), but doesn't slow down as much on the galaxy map view.
- I did build one million billion trillion deep space citadels and defense platforms. (Haha Eternal Vigilance goes brrrrrrrr...) I don't think those have hit the performance too much, because (1) mostly they're just sitting there (nobody's even tried to go through Terminal Egress in ages, it's actually a little disappointing); and (2) the circumstances when the game slows down seem pretty identifiable, and I've had loads of defense platforms since well before the major lag started to hit. But it's possible I'm underestimating how much of an effect these have.
- The major source of late-game performance woes is almost surely something related to fleets, ships, and space combat. I don't have hard numbers, but this seems noticeably worse than it did when I last played in 3.7 or so.
- Based on the fact that the corvettes seemed to decrease performance more than a roughly equivalent naval cap worth of battleships, it seems very likely that the number of ships is a factor in the game's performance. So at least some of the lag is caused by having lots of ships, not having lots of fleets.
- It's a little harder to tell what's going on with the slowdowns during conflicts between the AIs, as there's potentially a lot of factors at play: pathfinding per individual fleet, keeping track of individual ships during combat, updating AI military objectives too frequently (cf. fleets moving back and forth but not actually attacking a particular target). So I can really only speculate about what's going on here.
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