I always figured the poor performance late game was due to the servers. That Uber didn't want to invest large sums of money on (renting) servers, untill the game got released. Well, release happened, more players bought the game, yet the lag became worse. Didn't they anticipate the extra players? Or can't they afford decent hosted servers? The way I see it multiple things can be done. A performance fix, and I mean a huge, huge one, double what can be done at this time unit wise. Betters/more servers Player hosted games, instead of the servers. Allow for private servers.
The heavy server lag is the result of a glitch in which servers host more games than normal, causing the games to freeze. I would definitely want a performance fix at this time, as sometimes I experience said lag.
I experience the lag in over half the games I play. And 'the lag' or some form of 'the lag' in 100% of the 4+ planet, 6+ player matches I play. Freezes aren't that bad, but then again, I didn't complete all of the matches..
on steam alone there are over 1000 players playing at any given time so there needs to be some kind of expansion or optimization on there side
Virtually every game I play these days end up ridiculously slow to the point its not even enjoyable (like 1 in-game second is about 5 real seconds), using ctrl+p the Sim FPS is like 1FPS. If this is due to the servers I really hope it gets fixed because honestly how can you play an enjoyable game when it goes in slow motion? It seems to be the mass spam of Dox which create it. If the engine/servers can't deal with the sheer amount of units then something should be done to cap it or improve the situation somehow? Its just like the old Supreme Commander slowdown
i have had in game lag while playing against the AI where rockets for example will stop mid air for a split second, then continue, or voice alerts are a few seconds behind what has actually happened... I have a fairly beefy laptop as well so i don't think that is the issue, even with an 860M mobile, 16Gig of memory, an i7 4810 and a 240G Samsung EVO SSD.
I think there are a few things hurting the server performance: 1: Land based area patrols kill the sim performance 2: Trees- too many trees really cause lag as well 3: Large number of orbital transfers. You can play a very large game with little lag if you eliminate those 3. The current balance that promotes mass production of dox is also a cause of sim slow down I think, as it rapidly increases unit count far more quickly than with slower, heavier units. Edit: Also have you tried playing via PTE? At the moment it is the same version, however the PTE is hosted on different (Amazon) servers and in my experience the performance is *much smoother*...
You just look at the system, look at how easy people will get mex/metal and how long units will stay alive. Then you calculate all metal/sec income and see howmany dox/minute that is. This will tell you if the lag becomes unplayable or not. People don't realise this and trow systems full with planets and metal and gas giants as if this game can run everything. I mean okay you might be able to load the system, sure, but you wont be able to handle the lag when both teams make dox.
i think it is like most RTS games, once you start getting hundreds of small items on the screen, and especially if you gave AA on, you're performance is going to go to crap on most systems.
