The cause of horrible stuttering in the lategame is probably because of AI pathfinding.

[Dsingis]

tl;dr Open gateways and open wormholes cause the AI pathfinding to go hamwire and slow down the game heavily. Disable them until Paradox fixes this issue.

So, I'm pretty sure many of you have experienced this.
After a while, the game starts to severely slow down, and stutter heavily everytime a day passes.
So severely indeed, that for me at least, the game becomes unplayable.

Now I wanted to find out what could possibly be the cause of this, so I set this game up and cheated a whole lot to progress much faster than normal.

I tried many pops, large galaxies, small galaxies, many empires, few empires, megastructures, no megastructures etc.
But still, there was no improvment no matter what I did / did not.
Until I read something in the bug forums from one user who said, that gateways and wormholes are the reason this happens.

So I loaded up this game on a tiny galaxy (because there are fewer gateways), in which I have opened a couple gateways already and manually removed every single gateway in the galaxy using " effect remove_megastructure= this " on every single gateway.

And guess what? It worked. performance has skyrockeded. It's not comletely gone, but it's much faster and playable.
If anyone wants to see it for yourself, I will upload two before/after savefiles, on in which the gateways are opened and stuttering is heavy, and one where I removed every gateway manually which runs relatively smoothly.


This makes me think, that somehow the AI's pathfinding may be the root of this problem. The more gateways are open and the more empires know about them, the worse the performance becomes and the worse the stuttering gets.
This also works with wormholes and the L-Gate.

Hopefully this will help Paradox to identify the issue and remove it. I for one will play all my games with 0 gateways and 0 wormholes until this is fixed xD

 

[The Village Idi]

The AI also sometimes is constantly reassigning stuff, like every day there is a different researcher and fleets that get orders that are instantly cancelled over and over. All that stuff takes cycles.

 

[Dsingis]

The AI also sometimes is constantly reassigning stuff, like every day there is a different researcher and fleets that get orders that are instantly cancelled over and over. All that stuff takes cycles.

True, I have also seen empires constantly do deals, and instantly break them over and over again.
Like trade deals, or research agreements. Was spamming my top bar pretty heavily.

 

[The Village Idi]

True, I have also seen empires constantly do deals, and instantly break them over and over again.
Like trade deals, or research agreements. Was spamming my top bar pretty heavily.

Yep, I have been running some obvserver games to compare vanilla to Glavius's AI mod and see this stuff popping up all over but not constantly.

 

[wundte]

True, I have also seen empires constantly do deals, and instantly break them over and over again.
Like trade deals, or research agreements. Was spamming my top bar pretty heavily.

I have an AI empire that opens and closes borders for me once every month or so. They were doing it for several yaers until i insulted them

 

[Rithral]

Watching this thread.
i7-7700K and this game performance is unacceptable after 2.2.

 

[ToNieMiasz]

So I turned off AI, turned off bunch of things, stopped every single ship in the galaxy including contingency and turning CPU into turbo mode... nothing changed.
After few hours of trying things I started looking through the forums, noticed this thread and it just turned out to be true!

Well, I hoped that I can build some gateways to protect my territories from contingency but it looks like game does not let me to do that.
Well, time to put this game and the plan to buy some DLCs away and just play the things that work.

 

[Riftwalker]

tl;dr Open gateways and open wormholes cause the AI pathfinding to go hamwire and slow down the game heavily. Disable them until Paradox fixes this issue.

So, I'm pretty sure many of you have experienced this.
After a while, the game starts to severely slow down, and stutter heavily everytime a day passes.
So severely indeed, that for me at least, the game becomes unplayable.

Now I wanted to find out what could possibly be the cause of this, so I set this game up and cheated a whole lot to progress much faster than normal.

I tried many pops, large galaxies, small galaxies, many empires, few empires, megastructures, no megastructures etc.
But still, there was no improvment no matter what I did / did not.
Until I read something in the bug forums from one user who said, that gateways and wormholes are the reason this happens.

So I loaded up this game on a tiny galaxy (because there are fewer gateways), in which I have opened a couple gateways already and manually removed every single gateway in the galaxy using " effect remove_megastructure= this " on every single gateway.

And guess what? It worked. performance has skyrockeded.
If anyone wants to see it for yourself, I will upload two before/after savefiles, on in which the gateways are opened and stuttering is heavy, and one where I removed every gateway manually which runs relatively smoothly.


This makes me think, that somehow the AI's pathfinding may be the root of this problem. The more gateways are open and the more empires know about them, the worse the performance becomes and the worse the stuttering gets.
This also works with wormholes and the L-Gate.

Hopefully this will help Paradox to identify the issue and remove it. I for one will play all my games with 0 gateways and 0 wormholes until this is fixed xD

this is probably due to how all gateways are connected to each other. if you have a node with a lot of connections it can severely slow down even A* pathfinding(you're now investigating several erroneous paths). this may make it so almost all pathfinding requests poll most of the galaxy. they could probably fix it, IF this is the reason, by also using distance heuristics (ignore far away gates from the target using raw distance values in space.)

IDK, personally i thought it was a bad idea to make all gates connect to all gates.

OP if you want to test this for me, flood the galaxy with gates, if there's a ton of them, the problem should also disappear. Also force spawn xenophiles so they all like each other and keep borders open. if every star has a gate on it, it SHOULD be really fast, it's when you have middling gate numbers so there's a lot of them but they're not very dense in the galaxy that it should eat up more cycles.

 

[Lamey]

I'm curious how the trade protection and trade collection systems are calculated. I was a bit shocked to see that they do actually move through gateways and wormholes. Once I had gateway network set up in my empire I found that every single starbase was protecting every star system and my capital was capable of collecting all the trade by itself.

That said I don't think this is solely responsible for the terrible performance. For me the game runs in the early phase at the speed it used to run in the midgame, and that point there are no open gateways or explored wormholes. (assuming that it's not failing to cull closed wormholes/gateways for pathfinding purposes)

 

[Zag14]

Same here, i just destroyed all gates and wormholes via save editor in our mp game and perfomance is much better now

 

[Durham Dave]

I'm curious how the trade protection and trade collection systems are calculated. I was a bit shocked to see that they do actually move through gateways and wormholes. Once I had gateway network set up in my empire I found that every single starbase was protecting every star system and my capital was capable of collecting all the trade by itself.

That said I don't think this is solely responsible for the terrible performance. For me the game runs in the early phase at the speed it used to run in the midgame, and that point there are no open gateways or explored wormholes. (assuming that it's not failing to cull closed wormholes/gateways for pathfinding purposes)

It might be, I know my science vessels auto-explore through unexplored wormholes.

 

[#Tukuro]

Great... because without wormholes, travel times combined with the performance slog make playing unbearable after ~2300... something something watching paint dry... I guess the only solution is to just set hyperlanes to 5x, which appears to improve performance on it's own.

 

[CyberianK]

THANKS ALOT for this I change galaxy settings of my new game.

Every bit of performance helps.

 

[Leylos]

It's definitely pathfinding related.

I get a massive lagspike when a war either starts or ends, which is when I assume the AI recalculates where their fleets are supposed to go.

 

[durbal]

I think it's actually caused by the new trade routes/trade collection and how it's calculating them. If you have all empires as Hive Minds, for example, someone reported that the slowdown doesn't occur because there's no trade, yet pathfinding still exists.

My guess is that the trade routes/collection are going through one gateway, moving one system over, then back through the same gateway and resulting in an infinite loop.

 

[Longprao]

I have been playing for weeks with Distant Star DLC turned off, because L-gates also add a lot of lag to the already-existing gateway lag issues. You can notice performance drops significantly after someone open those gates.

 

[CyberianK]

Don't put Hyperlanes to Maximum it kills your Empire by COhesion value that thing is always negative.

I put it to x2 for now and disabled Gateways hope that helps.

 

[Razzlie]

Problem is, if I start a brand new game, go the galaxy map, and then pan my camera around the map while in fastest, the stuttering is still there. This is before any of this is factored in, so I think it's an additional cause of extra stuttering rather than the root cause of it.

There's something much more fundamental than wormholes or gateways causing it, ultimately.

 

[wundte]

Problem is, if I start a brand new game, go the galaxy map, and then pan my camera around the map while in fastest, the stuttering is still there. This is before any of this is factored in, so I think it's an additional cause of extra stuttering rather than the root cause of it.

There's something much more fundamental than wormholes or gateways causing it, ultimately.

Yeah but somehow it started only after 2.2. Now I get lag in 2280 worse than it was in 2450 in 2.1.

 

[Volapyk]

It isn't the only problem, but it certainly is a big one. The amount of stuttering/lag from before opening the L-gates to after is hard to miss. However event before you start using gateways the game doesn't run as smoothly as before (not that it was perfect), now it really takes any joy out of playing the lategame (or even mid game in larger galaxies).