Is the mid-late game playable for you guys? How can I improve performance?

[Amyntas]

I gotta say i'm still having trouble -- i'm currently at 2270 and it takes 23 seconds exactly for one month to pass, in a 1000 star galaxy. I have a gaming PC and it just shouldn't be like this.

The last update made things a lot better, but I'm still frustrated -- i'm having SO much fun with this latest campaign and I do not want to abandon it. I haven't yet seen an actual crisis before quitting due to bad performance in this game since Megacorp.

Do you guys have any tips that help with performance? I have no interest in hearing that "I need to play on a smaller galaxy size". The full experience is the only fun one for me, it feels way too cramped otherwise. Is there anything other than that that improves performance for you folks?

Thanks a ton!

 

[Defiler99]

Nothing that I've found; currently I just pause the game when taking actions, so my clicks don't get lost in the slowdown.

 

[Methone]

Perfectly playable for me on 2.2.4. I'm at 2450 right now, in a 1000 star galaxy filled with ~25 empires and it's as fine as it was in 2.1.3.

Do note, 2.2.5 has much worse performance.

Though... 23 seconds for 1 month to pass seems pretty good? I mean, if Normal is 1 day to 1 second, then you're still doing very well. I know what I'm about to say is profoundly unhelpful and frustrating, but maybe your standards are just unreasonable?

 

[The Bored Chairman]

Perfectly playable for me on 2.2.4. I'm at 2450 right now, in a 1000 star galaxy filled with ~25 empires and it's as fine as it was in 2.1.3.

Do note, 2.2.5 has much worse performance.

Though... 23 seconds for 1 month to pass seems pretty good? I mean, if Normal is 1 day to 1 second, then you're still doing very well. I know what I'm about to say is profoundly unhelpful and frustrating, but maybe your standards are just unreasonable?

It shouldn't take that long on the maximum speed settings. At later points in the game, when you've hit critical mass, there's a lot of waiting around for things to happen, which is exactly when you want the game to pick up, not slow down.

The early game's speed vs the late game's speed is a huge difference. I understand there's many more variables in the later game to keep track of (such a thing is inevitable) but it feels like Paradox's reach exceeded their grasp here. While I'm 100% behind their decisions to improve gameplay, I don't think the current system can handle how much more complicated the game is getting.

 

[Amyntas]

Perfectly playable for me on 2.2.4. I'm at 2450 right now, in a 1000 star galaxy filled with ~25 empires and it's as fine as it was in 2.1.3.

Do note, 2.2.5 has much worse performance.

Though... 23 seconds for 1 month to pass seems pretty good? I mean, if Normal is 1 day to 1 second, then you're still doing very well. I know what I'm about to say is profoundly unhelpful and frustrating, but maybe your standards are just unreasonable?

It absolutely is not good. It takes ages to do anything. It takes eight minutes to move a fleet from one edge of my empire to the other. I just got done playing CK2 where it doesn't take an eternity to do anything and it is quite a contrast.

I didn't know 2.2.5 was worse in terms of performance though. Perhaps i'll revert...hmm.

EDIT: 2.2.5 has no difference with performance compared to 2.2.4, at least on my save.

Moreover, it's gotten even worse -- it's now down to over 30 seconds at 2278. I'll have to quit the game, I think.

Stellaris could be something really great. I've had a lot of fun with this. But it's just not that intense of a game to run this badly. Very frustrated right now.

 

[Matoro_TBS]

Well, the most effective solution would be less stars and less planets, but if you're decided on 1000-star galaxy, your best bet are performance updates and better computer.

 

[PeterPancake]

I do have a potato, but luckily some mods do exist. Otherwise you can nibble around some data figures. Got a real nice FPS-Boost even in 2450 (around 40 FPS in Galaxy Mode).

Workshop-Mods 3 perfomance mods from the author with "Dark Core" mod are nice:
https://steamcommunity.com/id/LtFairace/myworkshopfiles/?appid=281990&p=1
Reddit-Thread with console commands:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Stellaris/comments/8jerem/performance_boost_and_better_looking_galaxy/


Just got a new problem. Turned my 9000 multi-species population through Synthetic Evolution (most dumb idea ever - lost my cybernetic, psionic Spiritualist Fallen Empire pops). Planets have huge lag spikes with these new pops. Everything else is fine as long as the planet view isn't open.

 

[Peter Ebbesen]

Perfectly playable for me on 2.2.4. I'm at 2450 right now, in a 1000 star galaxy filled with ~25 empires and it's as fine as it was in 2.1.3.

Do note, 2.2.5 has much worse performance.

Though... 23 seconds for 1 month to pass seems pretty good? I mean, if Normal is 1 day to 1 second, then you're still doing very well. I know what I'm about to say is profoundly unhelpful and frustrating, but maybe your standards are just unreasonable?

Perhaps he doesn't consider 30 days in 23 seconds "very fast", when that is only a 7/30 improvement over normal. If so, he is entirely normal and does not have unreasonable expectations.

Alternatively, given that in the early game one can blaze through a month in a few seconds, perhaps he considers the huge slowdown that makes very fast setting approach normal to be an unacceptable slowdown? If so, he is certainly not alone. After all, in a truly well designed piece of software and a speed setting would be invariant and setting X would result in the same speed of progress regardless of the statecof the game rather than being bottlenecked.

It is clear that design decisions and implementation have not adequately taken performance scaling with galaxy activity into account as too many factors scale linearly. That has been true since launch, but that doesn't make it acceptable.

 

[Rhym3z]

The rule of thumb for me is that if your in late game and can play at normal speed with each day at 1:1 on maximum size galaxy and ai empires with mods then your doing fine.
Since 2.2.4 came out the performance increased a lot for me compared to before.

Something doesn't sound quite right with it taking that long, at that point of the game. may I ask your specs?

 

[KingAlamar]

I doubt that I can make performance of your existing games better BUT here's what I've tried to do so far:

• I gave up on larger galaxies. I mostly play on Small 400 star galaxies.
• I've lowered habitability to 0.25X and start with 0 guaranteed planets. This is mostly to cut micromanagement BUT it might help performance.
• With 2.24 + Glavius AI mod with the above settings I was chugging along at about 7.5 seconds per month in late 2400s.
• With 1.0x habitability and 2 guaranteed planets I was running closer to 11-12 seconds per month.

Note: I was at one point seeing 40+ second months with occasional day 1 lag so bad I thought the game had crashed. 2.2.4 [maybe .3?] fixed the mega lag. I also ran some HW utilization metrics and discovered that I had one STUPID h/w mis-configuration AND was overtaxing my nearly 7 year old system. Both were video related issues. Fixing the "stupid" error on my end did a lot. Lowering the video settings down to 1080P "low quality" was the other fix.

If it matters my ancient rig is Core i5 3570K ; Radeon HD 7850 2 GB ; 16 GB system memory ; SATA 3 SSD. Not bad for nearly 7 years old but nothing compared to today's shiny systems.

Also note: Haven't tested 2.2.5 overall performance or stutter but the posts I've seen make it look like things are worse.

 

[DiscoRay]

Noticed a bit of an improvement in 2.2.4, though there is still quite the delay at times when ticking over each month.

I've got an Intel i9-7940x processor, 128GB of DDR4, an 8GB Nvidia card, and run the game off a Samsung PCI SSD evo drive. User specs seem to have only a marginal impact on performance with this particular issue based on what people have been reporting.

 

[Dustman]

I play the game on a laptop, and anything bigger than Small galaxy is out of question. It takes ages after first 100 years even on fastest speed.

 

[Amyntas]

Well, the most effective solution would be less stars and less planets, but if you're decided on 1000-star galaxy, your best bet are performance updates and better computer.

I have a gaming PC. it runs AC Odyssey smooth as butter. That is an excuse for poor optimization and I do not credit it.

i’ll have to wait until they fix it. I guess.

thanks for the tips, all. I’ll try some of those mods.

 

[KingAlamar]

I'm worried that the problems are a combination of:

• Engine limitations
• No desire [ROI] to dramatically overhaul things
• Perhaps poor skill in being able to parallelize tasks
• Perhaps bean counters not letting the devs really shine [goes back to ROI]

I'm sure we can see some improvement, maybe even significant improvement but I'm not sure this game will ever leverage what the new CPUs can really do.

 

[Amyntas]

I'm worried that the problems are a combination of:

• Engine limitations
• No desire [ROI] to dramatically overhaul things
• Perhaps poor skill in being able to parallelize tasks
• Perhaps bean counters not letting the devs really shine [goes back to ROI]

I'm sure we can see some improvement, maybe even significant improvement but I'm not sure this game will ever leverage what the new CPUs can really do.

I completely agree. It’s certainly a mix of these factors. I just wonder how the devs themselves deal with it in their games. It must drive them insane. Do they just pretend it doesn’t exist?

 

[KingAlamar]

I completely agree. It’s certainly a mix of these factors. I just wonder how the devs themselves deal with it in their games. It must drive them insane. Do they just pretend it doesn’t exist?

I have experience where "bean counters" get in the way of delivering a superior product. I wind up doing about what you'd expect ... gripe a little officially, gripe a lot unofficially, and then proceed to do whatever's needed to keep my job

My best guess at a single driving factor is economics / bean counters. There's not likely an obvious ROI involved with optimizing the game further ; significantly bettering the AI ; etc. If I [in my case] still buy DLC then what economic motive does the company have to do better? It's only when I [and others] stop buying DLC that they can tangibly measure the impacts and make a decision on how to best move forward.

 

[Rhym3z]

I have a gaming PC. it runs AC Odyssey smooth as butter. That is an excuse for poor optimization and I do not credit it.

i’ll have to wait until they fix it. I guess.

thanks for the tips, all. I’ll try some of those mods.

AC oddyssey isn't the best example since it's got far less going on under the hood compared to stellaris. People used to say the same about arma 3 with its terrible performance until they realised it's a lot more cpu intensive.
It doesn't make sense to some that a graphically superior game runs better than a graphically worse one.

 

[Secret Master]

Do you guys have any tips that help with performance?

Here's my tip from 2.2.4:

The launcher has a log in for the Paradox account. I've found that logging out before starting the game improves performance in the game.

Note that I have no idea why this helps. By all rights it shouldn't have an effect.

 

[xxdspawnxx]

the lag seems (at least for me) to come from the AI empires mostly which is surprising given how few are actually in game compared to ck2 or eu4 but ive noticed whenever the AI goes to war the time it takes for a month to tick goes noticeably up.

Stellaris also suffers from(to my knowledge) running on the same clausewitz engine that every paradox game has been running on since EU3 im sure there has been optimization since then(god i hope so) but they really need a newer game engine.

 

[Amyntas]

So I did some experimentation and started a game with WAY fewer AI empires.

And it's made it way better. It is a shame to have less foes and rivals to play around with, but at least it is playable. I think AI empires are the source of much of the lag.

I hope they just improve performance in the next update. It is still direly needed.