Hey there,
me and my friends are experiencing a really bad performance issue. It bothers us so much, that we’d rather not play this game than having a stuttering fiesta in late game when a lot is moving on the screen. We all have hardware that’s overkill for this game, and I tried literarily everything I found on the internet, but nothing helped. I also play with maxed out graphics since it’s irrelevant whether I play with everything maxed out or with everything at the lowest possible, it’s always the same outcome.
I show you 3 screenshots for better understanding of the situation that you exactly know what I mean. The screenshots were taken in late game as you can tell by the time. But it would also happen in early game, if there are lots of units moving and fighting on the screen. This happens not often in early game, since you don’t have that many resources and units in early game. But I also tried exactly that in early game with infinite resources, and to no surprise, it was the same issue.
The first screenshot was taken to show the performance when there is nothing going on, on the screen. Performance is pretty playable, nothing too bad or too good, but still absolutely playable.
The second one shows exactly the situation I mean. There is a lot going on and it shows. The fps are so low, that it’s basically unplayable for us. It’s just a really bad experience overall. I sometimes even get under 30 fps, but most of the time between 30 and 60 in those situations. It really drops a lot and stutters as you can see by the frame times.
On the third screenshot you can see the exact same scene with the exception that I paused the game. But the really important thing to note here is, the performance. I get max fps, since I can’t find a way to go over the games limited 144. So, I probably would have had a lot more.
While I searched the whole internet about a solution for this issue, I didn’t really find much. There were just a few who said that it always had performance problems and all, but no one who really talked about this kind of issue. I even looked for reviews like IGN or DSOGaming from back in the day, but no one talked about this problem. Only one in the forum, but there was no solution to this, so maybe everyone that’s playing the game, just plays it with this poor optimization? I really love the game, it’s one of my favorite games of all time, but the performance kills it for me and also my friends, unfortunately. I really would love to know if everyone has said problem and if the devs would probably optimize it, because I don’t think, that the devs or anyone would play like this.