Love this game but biggest disappointment of all

No it's not offline mode, no it's not no save feature, etc etc to be honest I don't play single player and don't care much about that

It's that this game pretty much can't handle more than 6000 units in the game at once, otherwise the game slows down to a craaaaaaawl.

I've had countless of FFAs I just had to leave and state "this is a draw" and leave simply because the game bogs down to such a crawl and runs at 10% of the normal speed. TA suffered from this problem ( especially the netcode ), Supcom 1 and 2 did, and now this does. It seems like theres no solution really, the problem gets worse the bigger the planet is and more units are on it. Planet invasion isn't even an option when the games running at so slow it takes almost an hour to get sats to their planet.

Before anyone goes and blames my system I have an overclocked i7 3770k and 780 gtx, so I really don't think it's my system thats causing the lag. It's possible my opponents have much slower computers which might cause a bottle neck, but this has happened in more than enough games for me to suspect the game just simply can't handle the unit load.

Heres a perfect example of a great tournament game they just had to abandon because the game slowed down to such a crawl it would take days to complete:



is the technology just not there yet to have huge games involving thousands of units?

The game slows down to a crawl because nothing is done locally yet and everything is done serverside. It's most likely the strain that is put on the server which results in this slowdown. I'm guessing that this shouldn't be as big an issue once we get the local server (offline mode) and are able to host our own more powerful servers.

Yea my biggest problem is that my computer although very capable of doing a lot of processes has no load on it, but as nicb1 said once they localize the game and start utilizing localization performance should be a lot better. If my computer was handling all the load and couldn't handle the amount of units I wouldn't complain, but the fact that it isn't doing anything is a bit frustrating, but with some patience we'll get through this just fine.

I pretty much won't play large games (lots of units) in PA due to this reason. Until it is fixed by whatever means it takes I recommend to everyone to only play small PA games.
Otherwise lagfest will happen. No it isn't us. It is them and their servers and server code.

The plus side is that small games run great and most people never have connection issues because it is server based networking. It basically has tons of potential once the server gets some love.

uh WTF? so let me get this straight none of the load is done local? It is all server side? no way?

That is correct. If it was local, that would be offline capabilities. As of this moment, 90% of all PA stuff is handled via servers.

This is one of the major engine advantages of PA - the game doesn't slow down when you have a guy with a 10 year old computer joining your game. However, your server has to be quite fast (when we have offline mode, you can use your own computer as a local server and play the game simultaneously) - and we don't have our own servers yet.

There will be a considerable performance improvement upon release of the server code, however spam is still going to bog down the game, especially if your computer doesn't have a good upload or download.

The answer from some of you guys that offline mode is going to solve this problem is bullshit. The game is on online multiplayer game and the fact that Uber's servers can't handle the load, when the server architecture for this game was touted as bleeding edge (asynchronous - where you aren't slowed down by the slowest players computer)... in the games curent state, they have failed to reach their vision. We aren't being held back by the slowest players computer, but by Uber's servers. Uber are hosting multiple games on one server, and it's obvious that each game requires more processing power than what is being allocated, so my question to Uber is, why are you trying to host so many games on one server? Uber said they were releasing the game because they had achieved their intitial vision, so are they saying that their Kickstarter vision was to make a game that runs in slow motion?

Taken from their Kickstarter page...
Client-Server Networking Architecture
Other than Total Annihilation, which was asynchronous, most Real-Time Strategy games use a synchronous networking model, which means that all the computers in a given game are held back by the slowest machine. The Planetary Annihilation engine uses a client-server model so that the “heavy lifting” can be done on a game server, freeing up gamers’ machines to engage in bigger battles with more players!

Which is all true unless your pc, or server is better than ubers are. In which case, you'll see an improvement in performance when they release the server code.

What will or will not happen after server code is released (is it even going to happen?) is up to Uber and you're just guessing that it will be better. Same with blaming performance on their servers running multiple games at a time. It's all just guessing.
Trust me, I'm an engineer.

With respect to the server component, Brad had this to say yesterday...

As for the server, I've been experimenting with the performance and there are a few things that are worth keeping in mind:

The game *can* handle very large numbers of units, however there are certain things that seriously harm performance which are:
1: Area patrols of large numbers of ground units
2: Pathing of ground units with high numbers of obstacles (e.g. trees)
3: Large number of units making orbital transfers

Area patrols for air or orbital don't appear to harm sim performance (which makes sense as air / orbital ignore collisions).

With respect to the game running faster offline- this will remove network issues so there are some players who will benefit significantly due to poor internet. With respect to resources allocated per server, we know Uber hosts 8 games on an 8 core server. What is interesting is currently you can play PTE or Stable and both are the same build, the PTE runs on Amazon servers though instead of play fab and there are virtually no games on the PTE. Interestingly, *running the same build* (at least client side) games appear to handle larger numbers of units better on the PTE servers than the Play Fab ones. This is difficult to test objectively as you can't play exactly the same game twice, still it does suggest that a decrease in total load on the server improves game performance so there is at least some basis behind the idea that offline could provide smoother play for larger games.

The other thing that backs this up is that I didn't hear *any* complaints about poor performance from PAX, where Uber were playing some pretty large team games on the 'PAX' map (5 reasonably big planets). This was on a local server due to the lack of worthwhile internet at PAX.

Final thing, server performance improvements are coming...

Except it's not guessing, we know how many games are being hosted per server computer, and we know what the specs of said server computer are.

In favt, just a month ago or so there was a problem where a server computer was running more than eight servers, and the load was tremendous, games just starting would lag.

Why would this not apply in the reverse respect? A quad core machine with 8 gigs of RAM should host a server, easily.

(As long as your upload speed doesn't bottleneck you)

Of course running less games per server is going to improve performance. But less games per server, means more servers are required, and more servers cost Uber money. And your observations about the games they ran at PAX back this up. This can also be backed up by the fact that things ran a lot smoother before release, probably because there were less people playing maybe, therefore less games per server?

You guys are missing the point! We shouldn't have to host our own servers for a game which is, in most respects, a multiplayer only game. Good performance for public online matchmaking is a must for this game.

My point is, this is one of the reasons people are quite keen to have the server capability. I mean renting a private server (where you can control how many games are playing at once) isn't out of the question for clans and whatnot. I know Promethean, the Realm and so on would probably do this to get some really smooth large team games.

Edit: Also I do see your point, and I'd argue the performance of the Uber servers is getting better. 1 v 1 and 2 v 2 games are pretty much fine now. What I would say though, irrespective of anything else, it does look like releasing the server will be a real performance boost for offline & LAN play

Yes I understand that one of the reasons people want offline is because they think they will get better performance. But I just don't understand why Uber are allowing online performance to suffer due to lack of server resource. If I am way off mark here, then I would like to hear what Uber have to say about the matter. They admitted there was a bug which meant servers were hosting too many games on each server. However that bug was fixed and we still have terrible server performance. They are still hosting too many games on each server, but unfortunately now this appears to be by design, not just a bug.

Excuse me? Most games played on PA are ai games, just take a peak at the replays tab. Not to mention this has always been the case, with both Supcom and TA, most people just play single player, play am ai skirmish, or play with their friends exclusively.

Maybe that is true, however one of the big selling points of their Kickstarter campaign was...

Client-Server Networking Architecture
Other than Total Annihilation, which was asynchronous, most Real-Time Strategy games use a synchronous networking model, which means that all the computers in a given game are held back by the slowest machine. The Planetary Annihilation engine uses a client-server model so that the “heavy lifting” can be done on a game server, freeing up gamers’ machines to engage in bigger battles with more players!

The main reason game developers would implement peer-to-peer rather than a client-server setup is so that they don't need to host servers. This game has always marketed towards massive 40 player games. How many people do you think can afford to host their own servers for games of this size?

Also don't forget server costs. I have no idea what servers Uber is using or how expensive they are.. I am just saying i've seen them go for $30.000 a month!