I have a really buff PC IMO:
- 16GB 2800Mhz RAM
- 12 Thread i7-3930K
- SSD
- gtx 780ti
And I've settled with only playing medium-size systems.
Yet the end-game events will inevitably lag my PC (especially a galactic war with two sides started by dormant empires waking up and fighting each other).
(I will recognize the lag I'm talking about with a medium-size galaxy is in no way comparable to the lag you get late-game with the biggest galaxies where there is an active /5 and up to /15 slowdown, here my end-game event is the prethoryn scourge and I'm on a medium-size, I'm just having a /3 slowdown and some stutter, but I just really don't like lag. Also, the whole app freezes for 3 to 30 seconds which can be a major hassle)
I'm willing to sacrifice a whole lot (I play almost only using the galaxy map and with a real macro approach to Stellaris in general. I'd be willing to let go of a lot of the less primordial simulations happening for every game tick, and even of battle visualizations):
What are your best suggestions to fix Stellaris' godawful optimization?
Best Answer
There's nothing you can do from a hardware perspective; you have a very good CPU for this (though it is quite old--consider upgrading soon!), which is where the performance bottleneck comes from; the devs as you know need to spend a lot of time optimizing the CPU calculations.
From a game-play perspective, your best bet is to only use certain play styles:
Each tick, the game checks for unfilled jobs and tries to assign people or migrate pops to planets that need jobs. You will get lots of unrest, crime, etc. optimizing for pop unemployment instead, but it makes the game playable, at least.
For reference, I am able to play through year 2700+ on a large galaxy at a speed of about 1.5 game-days per second by playing with slavery disallowed and with all my planets having more pops than there are jobs available. My specs are: