PA Offline: My first Impressions

So far... thank the heavens for this getting released... It was a long time coming and very happy that it came.

System setup: 1 massive planet earth biome with max height and a size of 1300 (max size)
1 Gas Giant
2 small moons

Game setup: 6 players, Me + 2 AI vs 3 AI in a teamed skirmish (could not setup a shared army game in offline mode)

Performance: Ran great for the most part, and what you would expect mid to late game but I felt it still ran faster than say Supcom:FA ever did when you reached late game there but I have to say playing against normal AI they didn't launch out to orbit while playing against them on Normal mode, perhaps that is actually the point so everyone including me stayed on just the one planet (I couldn't figure out where on earth the Orbital Launcher is) even though I built T2 fabs of air/bot and land factories . Was a little confusing I felt like I was missing buildings from the last time I played it but never the less the AI got orbital launchers going no problem but never moved off-world.

My starting FPS was 60FPS, then about just about the quater of the match in it dipped to between 40-50 and then around 30FPS around half way through the match. towards late game I was running at 12/15/18FPS (it flucturated a lot between those three figures but I have to say, the sim didn't stop, I think I just purely ran out of RAM.

My System Specs:
AMD FX 8320 @4.2Ghz
ASRock Extreme 3 Motherboard
16GB of DDR3 1866 Gskill RAM
Zotac Nvidia GTX 760 4GB VRAM version (running 344.11 drivers. yes i know not the latest not updated yet)
Windows 7 x64 Ultimate
Running the game through the Uber-Launcher not steam.

Overall Thoughts: A Very enjoyable match with acceptable performance, yes my frames dipped really low but the game ran just fine, game didn't run slow because of my frames, the sim slowed down, so it was due to time dilation not my frame rate which I'm used to with playing supcom so much. I managed to kill off 2 of the AI's, one was with a lucky nuke in the water where he kept building navy and hammering any units that came down and knocking on my door lol. the 2nd was the last AI to kill, took some time to find him actually, but once I did it was just a matter of time, I went very air heavy late game, and was using gunships (ones with no AA) but they kept getting taken out, his commander was very protected by AA guns but after several runs with a little bit of cat and mouse finally got the bugger!!! was really fun enjoyed every minute of it.

I must say, that this was actually just simply a stress test, to see how offline worked, what the performance was ect.... I'm at evens on this particular aspect because I think having that size of a planet as I did probably hit the performance more then anticipated, I normally have planets around 600-800 in size, not 1300. On the other side of the same coin, no one moved off planet either, there were 2 moons and the gas giant as well which were un touched, so I'm humming and arring about the performance right now so I'll have to run another test to really see I guess, didn't see 1000s of units on this one because of that fact. I didn't feel like the game was offline sometimes, like where the server option is in the menu in the game, the lobby system feels like its still having me log in to....something...... but this was already explained in the forums here.

My CPU hit 60% and the RAM hit 98%, so there you have it, a full impression of my first game I suppose along with some performance impressions. I am really shocked it used up my entire 16GB of ram which is already an insane amount already lol. I did however set the local server to on, not auto or off and that might have something to do with things to I just simply haven't had enough time with the game yet. I love it, I had so much fun and felt so nice to be able to actually finish a game without the sim slowing down to a complete halt, or crashing, or running at 2 fps. With that, I knew it wasn't running online, to me, it seemed much faster late game, but perhaps uber servers may still be the way to go for more players, not sure. Anyway I only grabbed 2 stats screenshots so, here they are. Sorry no action orientated shots and sorry to the wall of text but I wanted to give peeps a real accurate account of what the game was like, under my system which I personally feel is a pretty beefy machine in itself...

Sounds great looks like its only a matter of hardware to get us to 40+ player & 1 million+ unit games.

The new pathing code is a lot more efficient, so I bet Uber servers have a big performance increase as well

I'm gonna go update it now and do something crazy like 10 2000 planets.

I'll call the fire brigade now, shall I?

Heads up, there's a new number:

When I try to start a local game I get an error and the game returns to the main menu...

You can't share armies with AI online as well.

Well, thank god it's just the fire brigade. If I went and did that on my specs, the fallout would render the northern hemisphere uninhabitable for the next 250 years.

Fallout? Is your computer nuclear powered?

I live in Australia anyway, so doesn't matter to me. I'm safe.

Any element can go throuh spontaneous fission or even fusion if you give it enough energy (I think). So the qmountof energy my computer would require to run such a game wojuld be enough to weaken the strong nuclear force binding the neutrons and protons togeher on my computer internals causing them to undergo spontaneus fission creating enough energ and pressure to cause the nucleus of ny computer frame and the plates to undergo fussion thus causing the nuclear reaction with the intensity of multiple atomic bombs causknf aforementioned damage and fallout.

Yes. I have too much time on my hand. My lecture start in about an hour and I have noting better go do.

Is it on nuclear physics? You might need that.

Nope it's on termodynamics and its practical application in the chemical industry.