Performance since the patch has rendered the game unplayable

[Had a dad]

I agree that they should calculate only on a monthly basis. But I think they should keep rendering things in days. Just spread all the various calculations across the month.

that only works well if everything can be queued including research

 

[jaerv]

link please

The file's attached to my comment from sunday.
Here it is again along with a video showing my stuttering issue.

EDIT: Please make sure to enable the 3dstats graph via the console while testing it.

 

[TheFunMachine]

all pds games slow down over time, just the nature of what the games are

I don't think anyone is expecting that performance from the start of a game of Stellaris to the late game will remain constant, and that some level of performance degradation is expected, however the experienced difference of in-game performance between the 2.1* version and current is staggering, especially as performance gains were touted on a number of occasions in the dev diaries.

In the 2400s of 2.1* I could play the game with considerably smoother ticks into the 2500s, enjoy (for the most part) larger fleet actions, experience far less UI input lag and hitches, etc. For me, the 2400s are currently unplayable, before a crisis is active, and with much smaller active AI fleets (because the AI has also regressed considerably). I observe performance degradation occurring in the mid 2300, and it goes downhill from there.

I am not inflexible or unsympathetic to the devs, however the current experience is completely unacceptable and a lot of effort going forward should be directed toward smoothing out the late game experience. It needs a lot more work as things stand, and fancy features are no good if I don't want to even play the game.

 

[ShaTiK]

Perhaps a radical solution to address performance issues is to switch the game turn length from a day to a month. Almost everything in the game is month based and only updated once a month, so it would change very little in terms of gameplay. Sure, one can shave off few days of the travel time by expertly piloting a science ship, but the performance cost of having such small features seems hugely disproportional.

I'm sorry, but WUT? 'Almost everything'? Resource income tick (all of them, including research and unity), pop growth, diplomacy stuff (truce, relationship, integration etc). That's all monthly. Planetary buildings, fleet movements, space and land battles, all space building (ships, stations, mega structures), bombardment and colossus weaponry - that's all daily. Plus I suspect mtth (mean time to happen, that's very often a trigger for in-game events) is in days mostly. So around half if the game is updated monthly and half - daily. You can't make space battles monthly affair, there is just no way. You could argue that a lot of stuff could be counted in months instead of days, but that breaks as soon as you introduce any kind of time reduction modifier. +15% build speed - and voila, you would have to round stuff up or down. Balancing this for EVERY builidable thing in the game..
That being said, there is a speculation going on that game bad performance is tied to game needlessly re-evaluating stuff like trade routes. In theory there is a lot of stuff that could happen that would result in changes in trade routes. In reality these events are quite rare, so there is no need to update ALL trade routes even monthly, only when there are changes in ownership/new shortcuts (gateways and wormholes). But even they should be done with regards to reality - no need to update traderoutes of a faraway empire if you built two gateways inside your own territory. I'm no programmer, so I have no idea whether it's actually the case tho, and if this is - if there is an easy way to eliminate unnecessary re-evaluations while retaining needed ones.
To go back to your idea - I'm sorry, but idea to just throw away daily update.. That's insane.

 

[nfmarque]

Alrighty, so I'm out of ideas on how to fix the lag.

1. Disabled steam overlay, logged out of Paradox, and went offline.
2. Disabled wormhols and gateways. Upon galaxy generation (ie starting a new game) disabled Distant Stars to prevent Lgate spawns.
3. Graphics to low settings.
4. Later typed into the Console "Tweakergui draw.dust" to turn off galactic dust. Is quite ugly and impractical, but hey, gotta do what you gotta do.
5. Downloaded Stellar Performance mods of the workshop.
6. Caved in and finally downloaded the trade nerf mod someone posted a few pages back.

Sad to say that even with all of those combined, the performance post 2400 is still intolerable. Never had these issues with any previous patch. Of those steps, 2/5 had the most noticeable improvements (those steps alone bought me at least 30 years I wager), 1/3 had the least effect.

I did the same thing but got frustrated, so i started to look around and the ai had 60+ unemployed on each planet so to speed up i made an event that kills unemployed pops once it goes over 10.
Try and see if helps. Copy the file to the folder stellaris/events start your save and let it run for a couple of months, if it works fine, if it doesn't just delete the file.

 

[stumason]

Just thought I'd chime in as well - fairly decent rig (i7 3.6G, 1060 GTX, 16GB RAM, SSD and a shrine to the machine spirit) and while the game flies along quite nicely for the first 40-50 years, once we start getting closer to 2300, there is a noticeable slow down and a stutter if things are attempted with the game unpaused (smooth as a babies arse if paused).

As an illustration, at the start I play on "fast" and probably get 2.5 days/sec. By 2060 (on a 1,000 star galaxy with 25 civs), its dropped ever so slightly, but noticeably to around 1.5/days/sec. By 2080 it's 1 sec/day on fast, to the point where normal now feels slow so I have to play on fast just to feel normal... Get it? Good..

As for stutter, this too becomes more pronounced as the game wears on. Personally, if I have to do anything, I will simply pause the game and it goes away, allowing me to build/purge without the game jittering on me. It's not "unplayable", but it makes getting into the late game a chore to the point I usually give up and start again.

 

[ShaTiK]

As an illustration, at the start I play on "fast" and probably get 2.5 days/sec. By 2060 (on a 1,000 star galaxy with 25 civs), its dropped ever so slightly, but noticeably to around 1.5/days/sec. By 2080 it's 1 sec/day on fast, to the point where normal now feels slow so I have to play on fast just to feel normal

I had a quick test for gamespeed: it took my pc 20 seconds on normal, 12 on fast and 6 on fastest to progress 1 month on default Large ironman-enabled galaxy in the very beginning.
With AI mod and no ironman, the game galaxy, in 2320, in was 25-20-17. So even normal speed slowed down and fast literally became normal. But that's with AI mod - this means galaxy was filled with pops, traderoutes, AI have a few gateways, wormholes was all over the place etc. Without AI mod slowdown wouldn't be that big, I guess, just because the galaxy would've been much less densely populated.

 

[stumason]

I had a quick test for gamespeed: it took my pc 20 seconds on normal, 12 on fast and 6 on fastest to progress 1 month on default Large ironman-enabled galaxy in the very beginning.
With AI mod and no ironman, the game galaxy, in 2320, in was 25-20-17. So even normal speed slowed down and fast literally became normal. But that's with AI mod - this means galaxy was filled with pops, traderoutes, AI have a few gateways, wormholes was all over the place etc. Without AI mod slowdown wouldn't be that big, I guess, just because the galaxy would've been much less densely populated.

Yeah, I am using Glavius AI mod (along with about 30 others) so tbh, I expect a certain amount of "less than optimal performance" and I can easily live with it. That said, since 2.2 dropped, I haven't taken a single game past 2300 - largely because of just getting used to the new systems etc, but also due in part to the slowdown where fastest simply doesn't work, fast is normal and normal is slow. It's quite playable, but slightly annoying.

I also always, when at War, play on normal. When Fast is Fast, it's too fast, but when fast becomes normal, I worry due to the stuttering the game will trip over (it does from time to time) and crash.

I have this week started a game on a 1,000 system galaxy with the new patch and it does "appear" to be better, but I have only got to about 2040 so far (damned Xmas stopping me playing!!") so will see how it goes. I'll be playing the crap out of it tonight, so will report back. Tbh, I can live with it as long as it doesn't become 2-3 seconds per day on normal, at which point the game then would become "unplayable" for me.

 

[ShaTiK]

Tbh, I can live with it as long as it doesn't become 2-3 seconds per day on normal, at which point the game then would become "unplayable" for me.

You, sir, have a large tolerance, I must say. Having 30 seconds per month is too much for me. Especially mid to end game, when stuff takes a lot of time, all these megastructures, big fleets and starbases. That's waiting game and that's no fun

 

[stumason]

You, sir, have a large tolerance, I must say. Having 30 seconds per month is too much for me. Especially mid to end game, when stuff takes a lot of time, all these megastructures, big fleets and starbases. That's waiting game and that's no fun

Been playing games for 30+ years and have seen the worst the world has to offer - Civ end turns used to take 5 mins plus, Total War could be 5-10 mins to load a battle (improved since I use SSD's now) and the end turn a few mins.. I've learnt to just make tea and, er, smoke..

That said, I don't think 30 seconds for 1 month is that bad at all. If it went to 2 mins, I'd be raging, but 30 seconds (1 sec per day) is fine by me

 

[ShaTiK]

Been playing games for 30+ years and have seen the worst the world has to offer - Civ end turns used to take 5 mins plus, Total War could be 5-10 mins to load a battle (improved since I use SSD's now) and the end turn a few mins.. I've learnt to just make tea and, er, smoke..

That said, I don't think 30 seconds for 1 month is that bad at all. If it went to 2 mins, I'd be raging, but 30 seconds (1 sec per day) is fine by me

I gotten very used to SSD, I'm afraid. And I'm too playing games for a loong time and seen 'shit'. But I guess my tolerance was never that high. I remember I hated saving the game in Severance Blade of Darkness because it took around 2 minutes to do so. But the game was pretty harsh and difficult, think Dark Souls way before Dark Souls. So you died a lot. But loading also took a long time. Gosh I'm thankful for SSD nowadays. I played Empire and Napoleon on a usual hdd and that was not nice. Even on SSD Shogun 2 was sometimes trying my patience in battle loading.

 

[Colchis]

Getting about 26 seconds per month on fastest, year 2336 with 30 empires on 1000 stars. That's 5.2 minutes per year. 100 years would take over 8.5 hours at this rate. Some people were saying 1 day per second is acceptable, but then it'll take almost 10 hours to play 100 years.

My computer is *pretty* good. Performance is the same on my laptop and other PCs I've had access to.

Game is in observe mode. Mods enabled: Glavius AI mod for test version. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1591738937&tscn=1545779724

Makes no difference with mod off. Should work without mod, since it just changes AI behaviour.

Gonna do a game now with L-gates and wormholes off (downloaded a mod that disables L-gates).

 

[stumason]

1 day per second is, near enough, what the game should be on "normal", hence why I view it as "acceptable" and WAD. It's when it take 1 day per second on fast and fastest simply has no affect, that it irks me.

 

[Colchis]

1 day per second is, near enough, what the game should be on "normal", hence why I view it as "acceptable" and WAD. It's when it take 1 day per second on fast and fastest simply has no affect, that it irks me.

I misread and agree. At 1 speed it would be fine.

 

[stumason]

I misread and agree. At 1 speed it would be fine.

Np

Totally agree though that 1 day per/second is the maximum you can get is too slow - there are long periods where there is little to do and you want to shoot through it - in the later game, you can't.

 

[Had a dad]

The file's attached to my comment from sunday.

I'll check it later today

 

[alexti]

I agree that they should calculate only on a monthly basis. But I think they should keep rendering things in days. Just spread all the various calculations across the month.

I don't think the rendering is tied to the day, they definitely render more frequently, many times per day - if you run on slower speed it is obvious. So I would expect that rendering would stay the same regardless of whether the turn is one day or one month.

 

[alexti]

I'm sorry, but WUT? 'Almost everything'? Resource income tick (all of them, including research and unity), pop growth, diplomacy stuff (truce, relationship, integration etc). That's all monthly. Planetary buildings, fleet movements, space and land battles, all space building (ships, stations, mega structures), bombardment and colossus weaponry - that's all daily. Plus I suspect mtth (mean time to happen, that's very often a trigger for in-game events) is in days mostly. So around half if the game is updated monthly and half - daily. You can't make space battles monthly affair, there is just no way. You could argue that a lot of stuff could be counted in months instead of days, but that breaks as soon as you introduce any kind of time reduction modifier. +15% build speed - and voila, you would have to round stuff up or down. Balancing this for EVERY builidable thing in the game..

For buildings (including space buildings) it's all effectively monthly already. Because the buildings effects are only computed monthly, it doesn't matter if the building is done on day 1 or on day 30 of the month. Things like combat and fleet movement are already taking long enough, so that changing the turn length to month won't have much practical effect. Consider fleet moving from X0 to X30 in a month. Now the game will compute movement from X0 to X1, then to X1 to X2 and so on. Instead it could directly compute it from X0 to X30. What it changes is that you won't be able to alter the path in the middle of the month. Same applies to battles, except in the case of battles, there is not much input you can give during the battle even now, so there's even less change.

That being said, there is a speculation going on that game bad performance is tied to game needlessly re-evaluating stuff like trade routes. In theory there is a lot of stuff that could happen that would result in changes in trade routes. In reality these events are quite rare, so there is no need to update ALL trade routes even monthly, only when there are changes in ownership/new shortcuts (gateways and wormholes). But even they should be done with regards to reality - no need to update traderoutes of a faraway empire if you built two gateways inside your own territory. I'm no programmer, so I have no idea whether it's actually the case tho, and if this is - if there is an easy way to eliminate unnecessary re-evaluations while retaining needed ones.
To go back to your idea - I'm sorry, but idea to just throw away daily update.. That's insane.

The game was getting slower in the late game pretty much on every patch, including the ones before the trade routes. The problem with daily approach is that every time developers add new mechanics or change something there is a good potential to ruin performance. They fix and optimize those things, but it takes time and resources and since they keep adding new things this is an endless chase. From business point of view, those are much more difficult and expensive tasks in comparison to balancing few modifiers. So getting 20-30 times better performance for very little effort makes a lot of sense.

 

[ShaTiK]

For buildings (including space buildings) it's all effectively monthly already. Because the buildings effects are only computed monthly, it doesn't matter if the building is done on day 1 or on day 30 of the month. Things like combat and fleet movement are already taking long enough, so that changing the turn length to month won't have much practical effect. Consider fleet moving from X0 to X30 in a month. Now the game will compute movement from X0 to X1, then to X1 to X2 and so on. Instead it could directly compute it from X0 to X30. What it changes is that you won't be able to alter the path in the middle of the month. Same applies to battles, except in the case of battles, there is not much input you can give during the battle even now, so there's even less change.


The game was getting slower in the late game pretty much on every patch, including the ones before the trade routes. The problem with daily approach is that every time developers add new mechanics or change something there is a good potential to ruin performance. They fix and optimize those things, but it takes time and resources and since they keep adding new things this is an endless chase. From business point of view, those are much more difficult and expensive tasks in comparison to balancing few modifiers. So getting 20-30 times better performance for very little effort makes a lot of sense.

So you are saying - screw the whole battle system? Okay, fine, let's just toss it. I mean - how on earth you think the game should calculate battles then? Two fleets meet - and then what? I'm really curious, what happens next?
And btw, 2.1 was no way slower or faster then, say, 1.6. And I was playing from 1.0

 

[Acenoid]

Hello everyone!

I want to chime in here. First game - ironman - as megacorp. During 2400's I noticed a slowdown in a 600 stars galaxy with only few AIs being active about 8 if I include all the fallen empires. Buyers should get an acceptable performance on the recommended specs:

• 
  Recommended:
  • OS: Windows® 10 Home 64 Bit
    
  • Processor: Intel® iCore™ i5-3570K or AMD® Ryzen™ 5 2400G
    
  • Memory: 4 GB RAM
    
  • Graphics: Nvidia® GeForce™ GTX 560 Ti (1GB VRAM)
    
  • DirectX: Version 9.0c
    
  • Network: Broadband Internet connection
    
  • Storage: 10 GB available space
    
  • Sound Card: DirectX 9.0c-compatible sound card
    
  • Additional Notes: Controller support: 3-button mouse, keyboard and speakers. Special multiplayer requirements: Internet Connection or LAN for multiplayer.

Please, paradox please priotize the performance issues.

Anyone knows or can say what the official statement is on how fast the speed settings should reflect in in-game days / months per second?
Is there a list of possible actions I can take to improve the performance from my end?

Other than that great DLC!