• We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.

Ashantai

Lost in Time
Moderator
55 Badges
Aug 4, 2009
6.087
685
  • Rome Gold
  • Victoria 2: A House Divided
  • Victoria 2: Heart of Darkness
  • Heir to the Throne
  • Europa Universalis IV: Pre-order
  • Crusader Kings II
  • Europa Universalis III Complete
  • Divine Wind
  • For The Glory
  • Rome: Vae Victis
  • Stellaris: Galaxy Edition
  • Crusader Kings II: Reapers Due
  • Stellaris: Galaxy Edition
  • Cities: Skylines - Natural Disasters
  • Stellaris: Galaxy Edition
  • Stellaris
  • Europa Universalis IV: Mare Nostrum
  • Cities: Skylines - Snowfall
  • Europa Universalis IV: Rights of Man
  • Stellaris: Leviathans Story Pack
  • Europa Universalis IV: El Dorado
  • Stellaris - Path to Destruction bundle
  • Europa Universalis IV: Mandate of Heaven
  • Stellaris: Synthetic Dawn
  • Age of Wonders III
  • Stellaris: Humanoids Species Pack
  • Stellaris: Apocalypse
  • Stellaris: Distant Stars
  • Stellaris: Megacorp
  • Stellaris: Ancient Relics
  • Stellaris: Necroids
  • Europa Universalis IV: Wealth of Nations
  • Crusader Kings II: Charlemagne
  • Crusader Kings II: Legacy of Rome
  • Crusader Kings II: The Old Gods
  • Crusader Kings II: The Republic
  • Crusader Kings II: Sons of Abraham
  • Crusader Kings II: Sword of Islam
  • Europa Universalis IV
  • Europa Universalis IV: Art of War
  • Europa Universalis IV: Conquest of Paradise
  • Crusader Kings II: Conclave
  • Europa Universalis III Complete
  • Europa Universalis III Complete
  • Victoria 2
  • 500k Club
  • Cities: Skylines
  • Crusader Kings II: Holy Knight (pre-order)
  • Crusader Kings II: Way of Life
  • Europa Universalis IV: Common Sense
This thread is for all discussions related to performance in the game.

In order to prevent this forum from getting flooded with threads discussing the same topic, all Performance discussions will now take place here.

Until further notice you may only discuss Performance here and in any Dev Diary that directly mentions it in the dev diary itself. All other Performance threads will be merged with this one or locked.
 
  • 4
  • 2Like
Reactions:
Every day when I start my PC i stare at my steam games library and image how wonderful a new game of stellaris might be.... discovering anomalies, designing ships, shifting ethics, colonizing planets...

but then I remember than I can't even play a small galaxy with 10 ais after 2400 as the slowdown is just unbearable. And I start up POE again.
 
  • 5Like
  • 2
Reactions:
I still remember when we were all promised increased performance from the pop changes. Most of us are having problems even in the mid game. It always seems to come back to pops, pathing, and the ancient engine.
 
  • 4Like
Reactions:
That's great that we have a place to cry, but i sure hope you did tell us some news about this. Just like Hal9k i'm dying to play but the fact that every game will end with infinite amount of lag and stutter prevent me from buying all the missing DLC and starting new game.
 
At this point I don't think that there is a fix for either the performance or the AI troubles without another redesign of the economy. I'm not saying we should go back to 2.1 tiles, but to me the system introduced in Megacorps clearly still isn't working almost a year after its introduction.
 
To echo the sentiments disclosed by many other users, it has been my experience that pops contribute to the slowdown the most. My last game I played as DE and by 2350 or so, faster speed was about equivalent to slowest with fastest being unnoticeable in its increase. However, after the Contingency and I had eradicated 4/5s of the populations, the speed of the game jumped back up to near start speeds. In my current game, I started with 0 other empire and right now the galaxy has about 3k pops due to primitives evolving and fallen empires and I am playing on fastest with no noticeable slowdown well into the 2350s.
 
I'm in the same boat as hal9k and chaines, stellaris has been my new favorite game since launch, I've put possibly too much time into it, I hate to piss and moan about things that everyone else is but it has to be said. The new pop system hasn't been working form the time it was introduced, and seemingly gets worse with each new patch, I'd be more open to game lag if the system actually worked but my industrial pops keep working food, my agricultural pops work minerals, and my repugnant pops keep promoting to entertainers. At this stage we are getting the worst of all worlds with unbearable lag, poor pop assignment, and incompetent AI.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
This was a comment I had in another thread: Maybe think about moving away from a visual representation of each individual pop to maybe a numbered or percentage representation for each world/habitat would make a difference accompanied by a single portrait for each species that inhabits said world/habitat? I know it would require a possible complete rework of the Job System, Economy and Planetary Development i think tho.
 
  • 4
  • 1Like
Reactions:
That's great that we have a place to cry, but i sure hope you did tell us some news about this. Just like Hal9k i'm dying to play but the fact that every game will end with infinite amount of lag and stutter prevent me from buying all the missing DLC and starting new game.

Ey, c'mon, don't be so negative... you can have now a hive mind with life seeded!
 
I find the lategame playable, but I use these settings, effectively designed to keep the planet and pop count as low as possible:

Galaxy Size: Tiny (200 Stars)
Galaxy Shape: Elliptical
AI Empires: 6
Advanced AI Starts: Off
Fallen Empires: 1
Marauder Empires: 1
Tech/Tradition Cost: 0.25x
Habitable Worlds: 0.25x
Primitive Civilizations: 1x
Crisis Strength: 0.25x
Mid-Game Start Year: 2225
End-Game Start Year: 2250
Victory Year: 2400
Difficulty: Captain
Scaling Difficulty: Off
AI Aggressiveness: Normal
Empire Placement: Random
Advanced Neighbors: Off
Hyperlane Density: 1x
Abandoned Gateways: 1x
Wormhole Pairs: 1x
Guaranteed Habitable Worlds: Off
Caravaneers: On
Ironman Mode: On
 
I wish we could have 2 fallen empires on tiny, because you can't get war of heaven with just one. I would also remove natives completely.
A big issue is ending up with multiple species and subspecies. Avoid that like the plague.
 
Well the title is kinda clickbait, but this solution would absolutely work. In a nutshell:
Problem A: The game treats AI as it does for the player, making the math for each planet, each, pop, tradition, etc... You can imagine that in a large galaxy this is insane, maybe in 10-20 years the CPUs will be able to process that amount of data without lag. I think you can optimize as much as you want, but we will always have late game lag and I believe this is the reason the AI sucks so much in everything, devs can't improve it because it would suck even more resources from the CPU.
Problem B: The AI can't handle jobs distribution and ends up with bad economy.

Solution: People wouldn't like this solution and I'll get a lot of disapproval for this post, but this wont change the reality of things. If you just simulate AIs pops and economy, you fix all the problems. How do you do that? All AIs start like they do now, but instead of getting resources and stuff from pops, they get flat incomes calculated at the start, with some random factors. They would expand and build normally, so the player wouldn't notice any difference. When you click on AIs planets, you see pops and buildings normally, the difference is that the AI would ignore those things when calculating the income, the only things that matter would be:
  • Empire's size in terms of pops and planets.
  • Initial factors (empire civics, empire behavior, etc...).
  • Random factors
  • Difficulty
This way AI's economy would not be affected by bad jobs distribution.

However, people would not like this system because it feels like AI is cheating, but in the end you can't have late game performance and 100% simulated economy realism.
 
  • 2
  • 1Like
  • 1
Reactions:
that is exactly what it means, mega threads are a great way of making it look like a niche problem for people in a kooky echo chamber. Makes us easier to ignore.
Exactly, it also lets mods lock and delete any critical posts they don't like elsewhere with the excuse that the post should have been quietly buried here instead. *screams internally at the sad history of FTL discussions and the like*

I know it's silly but seeing the creation of this megathread made me really depressed about the performance situation, if the official response is to silence criticism rather than... you know... to actually have an official response then there's very little hope it's going to get fixed.

Also for reference Major Malfunction's .gif looks just like my last game (mid crisis). I went from seeing fleets move smoothly to being able easily to count the days fleets spend flying between stars and knowing I'll never be able to stomach the lag to finish the game (it feels like one of those free-to-play games seeing 300 days travel time and having a 5 mins real-time counter tempting you to spend money to speed it up. But that same journey takes far longer than 5min when you include the exponentially increasing time spent paused micromanaging planets... it's sad. The amusing side-effect is that I'm in a far better economic situation as I have lots of time to think about things, not miss any unemployment icon or dip in stability when buildings finish and pops get taken away from maintenance jobs and any of the hundred other little bits of busywork that needs managing.

My Experience: (5x slower a hundred years in, haven't managed to play past 2400 yet since the 2.2 rework, 2360 is my longest endured recent save. I absolutely love marathon game settings... but this feels like a short snail race rather than a marathon)
2212: 300 day travel time, on fastest speed takes 59 seconds (5 days per second on fastest)
2360: 300 day travel time, on fastest speed takes 5min 28 seconds (0.91 days per second on fastest)

Relevant Game Settings:
Galaxy Size: Medium (600 stars) (I should probably try on smaller... but that just feels sad)
Empires: 18 (I don't like vast swathes of unclaimed space with too few AI players)
Advanced AI empires: 2
Fallen Empires: 2 (still hoping for my first war in heaven after 1653 hours)
Marauders: 2
Habitable worlds: x0.25 (to reduce pop numbers and planet micro)
Primitive Civilizations: x0.25 (to reduce pop numbers and planet micro)
Crisis Strength: x5 (for some challenge)
Mid-game Start Year: 2225 (to end the game before the lag from pop numbers)
End-game Start Year: 2250 (to end the game before the lag from pop numbers)
Hyperlane density: x1 (to speed-up travel times a bit, I'd prefer x0.25)
Abandoned Gateways: x1 (to speed-up travel times a bit, I'd prefer x0.25)
Wormhole Pairs: x1 (to speed-up travel times a bit, I'd prefer x0.25)
Guaranteed habitable worlds: 2 (I could reduce planets here but hate crippling AI players)

My computer:

(could be better, also I don't really like posting specs - feels a bit like walking around naked and letting everyone look at my dangly bits and leave comments. But anyway, here's my flabby bits. Only shown so that the above figures make sense to those playing on God-tier computers and the smallest maps and not noticing anything.)
AMD FX 6350 (6 cores, 3.90GHz - exactly the minimum spec on the store page)
8 GB RAM
MSI NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 2 GB (my old graphics card died, I wanted something with a slightly lower power use, prefer it to run silent and this makes 0 noise)

I know people are going to attack those with inferior computers that barely meet the min specs... but I could honestly play Stellaris on my shoddy old laptop, far below the current min with its integrated graphics card and I would get far better performance and manage to play complete games without any noticeable/irritating slowdown. That was a few years ago (version 1.0 - 1.9 in 2016-2017), feels strange how badly the performance has been creeping downwards with the economy changes. If I was in charge of things and a proposed change resulted in introducing a 5x slowdown I would have scrapped that experiment and gone back to the drawing board for better ways of achieving my desired goals, because something had obviously been done very, very wrong in the code somewhere.
 
  • 2Like
  • 1
Reactions:
Oh you mean Empire Earth AI, which was so bad, it could build battelships, despite having no trees anymore to build some. That is just boring. I love rushing for a capital and seeing how their economy goes to shit. We need another solution. For instance a better way to calculate all the stats the pops are affected by
 
The problem is that you run calculations for pops finding new jobs every single day.

Pops don't even produce except once a month! Its also silly that pops can start a job and then the next day have a month worth of production. Seriously, you could eliminate over 96% percent of the calculations used by job searches by eliminating over 96% of the calculations and as far as I can tell, nothing would change.
 
  • 2Like
Reactions:
The problem is that you run calculations for pops finding new jobs every single day.

Pops don't even produce except once a month! Its also silly that pops can start a job and then the next day have a month worth of production. Seriously, you could eliminate over 96% percent of the calculations used by job searches by eliminating over 96% of the calculations and as far as I can tell, nothing would change.
I do think some considerable under-the-hood work needs to be done on pop calculations. But I don't know the negative consequences of lumping the calculations together on a single day rather than having a proper system in place.

Honestly I just want more things to be calculated only when the associated variables change (total income, stability etc. when a job changes, and jobs when the pops change, or after new techs/events) as it's very annoying to make changes and wait a month to see if it had the desired effect. If I had to wait a month for my newly relocated pops or newly built building to be fully staffed it would be even more annoying. The lag makes the game feel sluggish and the income bar at the top taking another 30 seconds to update on the fastest speed makes the game feel as thick and slow as cold treacle.
 
Oh you mean Empire Earth AI, which was so bad, it could build battelships, despite having no trees anymore to build some. That is just boring. I love rushing for a capital and seeing how their economy goes to shit. We need another solution. For instance a better way to calculate all the stats the pops are affected by

Let's be real, there is no alternative solution. They tried for years and things keep getting worse. You would trade the joy to see AI economy going to shit (it probably was already shit anyway) for good late game performance, if that would depend on me <<Where do I sign?>>.
 
Last edited: