Last week, I got this game for a friend's birthday, as we used to play Total Annihilation fanatically when we were kids. I am confident it runs fine on his desktop, since he has a pretty hefty machine. However, I also got myself a copy, so we might play together again, figuring I could see how it runs later, and ask STEAM for a refund if it doesn't. The system requirements were a bit vague, and I've read mixed messages about the games performance. Now I've booted the game for a few minutes, and I am still not quite sure. The menu, server navigation, and setting up a game seems terrible, yet it works more or less fine ingame. The game also says my machine's specs "do not meet requirements for offline play", even though on paper minimum requirements are passed, and I was under the impression that offline play would generally be less demanding than online play. So, I was hoping some of the more experienced players could tell me a bit about the game's performance on the long term, during actual prolonged matches. I am playing on a laptop with the following specs: - AMD A8-7100 APU - with R5 Graphics - 8GB RAM I know I can't expect a "master race" performance, but I'm not looking for that. If it runs smoothly on low settings, with all bling disabled, I'm fine with that. Not being salty here, just clueless. I really like the concept, I just want to know whether I'll actually be able to enjoy it a bit on my office-grade hardware, and STEAM's 2-hours isn't actually a whole lot of time to test a game like this properly.
From steam reply... You'll only be able to play online with shared public servers.... which is LESS demanding. For a local server / offline you really need 12GB with integrated graphics and a higher spec CPU. Your CPU will be weak for bigger / longer games. GPU should be OK for low settings depending on resolution. https://wiki.palobby.com/wiki/Planetary_Annihilation_Server_Sim_Performance_/_Time_Dilation_/_RAM_Usage
And to add to that, you probably get the "does not meet requirements for offline play" message because some of your RAM is being taken by your graphics card, putting you below the minimum requirement of 8GB for offline play. The reason that the offline play is heavier is because PA uses the server-client model and in off-line mode, the server runs on your computer while in online mode, the server is hosted on Uber's servers (even for single player). The PA client doesn't care and just connects to a server. Also, one of the heavier impacts on starting a game is the loading of the data from the hard drive. If you don't have a SSD, it will take a while indeed. Once you get in-game, that doesn't matter so much anymore, so the game play itself will be just a smooth. I somewhat recently did the upgrade to SSD and the difference was very substantial in starting PA.
