here is a planet.

Lol I think the labels should have been "Radius PAs" along the bottom and "Surface Area PA^2" for the vertical...

I wouldn't say "terribly low end" but for this game to run well you definitely need more then 8GB really in my opinion especially when doing the things we're talking about in here and in other threads about playing with dramatically large planet surface areas and 40 player cap limits, you're gonna need a hell of a lot of RAM, 8GB won't cut it, in some circumstances 16GB won't cut it either.

Nah, really even 4gb is enough, except for the very beginning of the game. I play 5v5's and things on size 1000 planets, thousands of units each. 60fps early game, 20 or so late game, depending.

I agree with Squishy here, 8GB is enough as long as they keep cutting down on RAM usage as they want to (at least for the common sized planets, larger ones seem... backward), and believe it or not, players don't make the game use more RAM. I'm not even sure if units cause the game to use significantly more RAM (tests incoming!), so if you think about it, you should be mostly fine on 8GB or less. 16GB if you want to be overkilling it.

The biggest issue I see is the server using RAM. Once we get offline, we'll be running the system twice-- once in-game, once server-side.

Your right on the units, I'm thinking its more CPU power and cores that reflect the performance on things like that, all i know is i made a planet of 3000 radius and it used all 16GB just to render the thing, and its in this instance what I was referring to as 8GB wouldn't cut it in some circumstances. Then you have all the players and units ontop of that, even on a 1200 radius planet the ram usage can definitely get up there. Games runs good for ya on 4GB i cant argue about that lol, but I imagine that will definitely limit you on how many planets you can have ect...

Or de-optimized, if a 17% larger planet in August now uses double the RAM from a planet in April.
And that frozen biome doesn't even have any trees!

Has RAM usage decreased for the normal planet sizes?

I'm thinking on buying a pc then buying PA. Would it be wise to get 8gb RAM or 16gb RAM with the intention of playing the finished version of the game.

I am heavily into the concept of playing with dozens of people in a huge solar system.

Then 16gb, although Uber may well reduce memory utilisation, the way the planets are built basically means more ram = more planets.

This is also one game where lots of graphics memory is a good idea, 3 or 4gb of graphics memory is good as it can avoid disk cashing of textures for planets. 2gb is the minimum I'd recommend. The card doesn't even need to be that fast (my GTX 560 is fast enough, it just doesn't have enough memory annoyingly so I have to keep textures on minimum). There are a few GTX 660 / 760 cards with 4gb memory, they look like an ideal fit for PA. If your budget is tight then the Radeom R9 280 / 280X cards both come with 3gb memory and are pretty decent performers.

I'm not sure, I know overall ram usage is up quite a bit from earlier builds (due to the various additions to the UI and such). It's really starting to become a problem getting into a game on a machine with 4gb ram Hopefully I'll have some spare cash in the next month or 2 so I can do something about it. In the mean time I'm hoping Uber are able to reign in the memory usage again now that I think the UI is pretty much there...

After a brief consolation with my hamsters, we have decided to admit defeat to the superior computer.

(I'm lucky to get a 1000 radius to load up in any reasonable time, let alone 3000).

the hamsters are in wheels that power the PSU, right?

Yes. And the monitor is a monkey casting images in stone. That leaves me with a whopping 1 frame per day.

Such a noob... you need *moar monkeys*!

*admittedly the running cost in terms of bananas does go up quite a bit, but the performance boost is worth it imo*