Need some aspect help

[rallythelegions]

So, I bought my little brother the complete collection so we can play together. He absolutely loves the game. The trouble is that he is on a nice, fast desktop and I'm on my dinky laptop so everytime we have our fleets together in the same system, the game lags like crazy on my side while the ships lag on his side, but his UI works smoothly.

This occurs even with all my graphics settings disables, so I decided to try cranking down the aspect ratio. It worked, except that I lost some of the UI. I quit and restarted hoping that it would resize the UI, and it did. The trouble is that the buttons aren't where the screen says they are. So, in the menu if I hover my cursor over the "save" button, it lights up but when I click it I actually select whatever is above it. I thus cannot select save or cancel and am stuck in this ratio.

I tried uninstalling on steam and reinstalling, but it doesn't help. What can I do? Is there any other way to help the game run smoothly?

[keith.lamothe]

First make sure that the more capable computer is doing the hosting.  The host has the AI thread to contend with, etc.

Second, what resolution are you actually trying for?  And do you have a screenshot of it putting stuff in the wrong places?

As far as improving performance, you can try playing on ultra-low ship cap scale and on "Extremely Low" performance profile (which will make the game more choppy, but potentially a "regular" choppiness, rather than the irregular lagging).

[Aklyon]

What ship cap are you using, and which performance profile? Low or Ultra-Low caps tend to work better in MP, and in general my MP games tend to slowly drop through the performance profiles as the gamespeed slowly (or quickly) drops to keep up with everything on everyone's ends.

[Alex Heartnet]

[Cinth]

As far as improving performance, you can try playing on ultra-low ship cap scale and on "Extremely Low" performance profile (which will make the game more choppy, but potentially a "regular" choppiness, rather than the irregular lagging).

Definitely allow the better PC handle the hosting duties.

From personal experience, I can say that this generally doesn't cause that much of a noticeable performance drop.
Even on my laptop which has seen better days, "Extremely Low" is fairly smooth.  From what I have observed, the largest impact to how smooth the game runs is the number of entities in the game.  Try to be diligent about keeping excess threat cleared out.

[Alex Heartnet]

You could also try playing against a "Vanguard", "Starship Fanatic", or "The Core" AI Type.  That way you are fighting low numbers of high-quality ships instead of lots of little ones.

Additionally giving the AIs a handicap at start makes for less ships as well, especially if the above types are too much to handle otherwise.

The Photon Lances on the Spire Starship and Fallen Spire ships wreck performance, avoid using those.

[rallythelegions]

I ended up having to uninstall the game and delete the app folder in the steam folder so it would forget my options and reset to default. My problem was that I selected an aspect ratio that doesn't scale to my actual aspect. Dumb mistake.

I had no idea that you could set the performance to low. I knew that we could lower the ship cap, but my brother is 10 so he really likes the big battles and would rather the game be a little choppy than he would to cut the game down in ship amount. So, we switched the performance in the settings menu and that pretty well fixed it. If we hit about 2k ships it'll lag a tad, but nothing too bad.

Thanks for y'all's quick response!

[keith.lamothe]

Glad we could help

And even on lower caps the battles tend to get pretty big, but to each their own

[Aklyon]

Low ship cap can still get respectable fleets, and the AI ignores your ship caps anyway. (although I think they get effected by the ship scaling?)

For changing performance profile, click the stats button on the lower left. It probably starts at high or average, lower it if you get too much slowdown.