Hello, I have been playing with a couple friends for a while now, and we haven't had any major issues. Sometimes really large battles will cause a bit of lag, but nothing more then 5 or 10% slower, and the game still responds, so it's not a big deal.
But in this most recent two player game, about 7 hours in we found a Dyson Sphere, and the game speed fell through the floor, and now it's lagging, and freezing all the time. I have included 3 autosaves from this post, one from right before we found the Dyson Sphere, one from right after, and our latest one. Exiting to Windows each time and then reloading the autosaves and disabling the second player, I get the following:
The first, from 6:49:21 into the game, runs pretty well, a tiny bit of lag, but nothing major. Ships in game is ~34,500
The second save, from 6:59:21 into the game, is from shortly after finding the Dyson Sphere. The game freezes a few times in my test minute. Ships in game is ~35,100.
The third save, from 8:04:57 into the game, has quite a bit of lag, and freezes often. Ships in game is ~33,600.
I am our host, and I have a quad core AMD Phenom X4 9600 running at 2.3ghz; 2gb of ddr2 ram, running dual channel; an 8800 GT with 1gb memory; and the game is installed on a striped raid 0 of two WD Raptors @ 10k rpm. We have played games that lasted over 10 hours, have played games with 3 players, never had any issues until now. It's been confirmed that it's my process (not render) time that hangs when we freeze, and I'm the only one that freezes, my friend just gets a waiting for players message.....
Any ideas what I could do about this, other then try to clear the system with the Dyson sphere extra fast, or start a new game without a Dyson Sphere in it? This is the first time we have played with one, and I have noticed a few other posts about people lagging and also mentioning a Dyson Sphere somewhere in there, they just didn't blame it. So here I am, connecting the dots, and attempting to figure out the problem. :-)
~Dragon