Performance drops in the late game - How do you deal with them?

[Midnitewolf]

Looking for some advice/options here. I have a pretty beefy computer. 3800X, 32 GB of overclocked RAM, Fast Nvme SSD, RTX 3080 GPU however I am starting to see a pretty dramatic performance drop in my current game, things like hesitations when moving around the map and the ship icons on the map are moving like they are in a slide show rather then smoothly moving from point A to B. Also started to see my stuttering and lurching in the cockpit or when watching a battle in the external cam.

I am given to understand that such performance drops aren't abnormal especially later game and if your using a lot of mods which is the case for me so I am wondering if there is anything, aside from removing/disabling mods, that can improve performance. It isn't unplayable yet but it is slowly getting there.

Note: I am using a ton of mods which I know are probably causing havoc on the performance so I would be curious what types of mods cause the biggest issues.

[al_dude]

Don't know how you refine late game but I have never really had any performance drops in all plays I've gone through, a few of which had some hundreds of hours.

I use only one mod though, the cheat menu mod.

[Midnitewolf]

Don't know how you refine late game but I have never really had any performance drops in all plays I've gone through, a few of which had some hundreds of hours.

I use only one mod though, the cheat menu mod.

I am having some pretty major frame drops. Nothing is smooth anymore but I expect it is mostly due to mods.

I have all 4 Faction Enhancer Mods, VRO, XR Ship pack, Ship Variation Expansion, Weapons pack, FOCW which added about 4 times as many ships to the game, The Mules, Supply and Warehouses Extended, Civilian Fleets, Sector Patrol, Cheat Menus, Mobile Repair Service, Better Target Monitor, Crystal Rarities, Fly by Looting, Fly by lockbox, Subsystem Target orders, Capitol Ship Loot Magnet, Inventory Collector, X4 Fire and Smoke, Formation Unlocked, Sector Explorer, improved mining operations, Faster Crew Leveling, Dynamic wars, Immediate Orders, Info Center, Recycle Ships and Stations, RelationHaggling, Resource Rebalance, Secret Stash, Sector Satellites, Ship Sale Fix, Trader Bought Notification, and a few other mods that do things like make thrusters quiter or change the colors of engines , things like that.

Quite a few of my mods modify the AI behaviors and increase the number of ships NPC's use so I know they are beating my up performance. The bad part about it is, aside from a few of these mods, I feel the game isn't worth playing without so I am kind of at an impasse unless I figure out something. Some of these mods can be removed like Crystal Rarities since I don't need to mine crystals for money but those that somewhat fix the broken economy, increase fleet sizes to number that actually make the game challenging for me or adds much needed functionality to mining and trading, those I can't live without.

[dholmstr]

Well you have so many mods that I'm supprised that the game even work.

I again had a opposite thing happen to me few days ago. The game has been getting slower and slower as the size and stuff been added to the game, but suddenly out of nowhere I got some 20 FPS back in every place, be it dense populated or empty sectors. Like something was just glogging the whole system and now it was resolved, getting smooth again. And no mods whatsoever.

[Buzz2005]

I have all 4 Faction Enhancer Mods, VRO, XR Ship pack, Ship Variation Expansion, Weapons pack, FOCW which added about 4 times as many ships to the game, The Mules, Supply and Warehouses Extended...

This are your fps killers, mules can outright make the game unplayable (0 fps) when those ships start to search for trades and not finding them, idk if they fixed that I think no
Imo there is nothing you can do

[gevers]

For me, the problem was mules and their search for trades, but I found a workaround.
Station mules and distribution mules work fine, travel and supply need to search for trades, so I mainly use them station and distribution now.
For travel and supply mules, just set the max jump distance to 4/5 gates max and manually select the wares you want them to trade, the less jumps and wares, the better performance you will get.
Remember to activate "lock wares to user selection" or the mules will forget what wares you want them to trade after the first trade.

Did this on my 100h save with around 100 mules and no more stuttering!
I also have a pretty old system (i7 3770k, gigabyte 980, 24 gb ram) but now I got no more frame drops.

Watch out for resource probes and upkeep missions, no resource probes will get your frames to drop, too many resource probes will get your frames to drop, too many upkeep missions (restock drones, assign subordinate) will get your frames to drop.

Hope this helps.

[blackice7777]

There are several mods that can improve FPS:
No Fog,
Less masstraffic,
No small asteroids,
Star dust reduction,
Remove station Dock glow,
Remove Dirty Glass,
Remove blinking ship lights
And also it is good to turn satelites off to hide npc traffic when not needed.

[slober]

I again had a opposite thing happen to me few days ago. The game has been getting slower and slower as the size and stuff been added to the game, but suddenly out of nowhere I got some 20 FPS back in every place, be it dense populated or empty sectors. Like something was just glogging the whole system and now it was resolved, getting smooth again. And no mods whatsoever.

Microsoft had some issue with Windows 10 update what drop FPS for a lot of games

[Artean]

I again had a opposite thing happen to me few days ago. The game has been getting slower and slower as the size and stuff been added to the game, but suddenly out of nowhere I got some 20 FPS back in every place, be it dense populated or empty sectors. Like something was just glogging the whole system and now it was resolved, getting smooth again. And no mods whatsoever.

Microsoft had some issue with Windows 10 update what drop FPS for a lot of games

I just updated my win 10 to 20h2, and it might have yielded me a slight performance increase. Hard to tell for sure though.

[Midnitewolf]

I have all 4 Faction Enhancer Mods, VRO, XR Ship pack, Ship Variation Expansion, Weapons pack, FOCW which added about 4 times as many ships to the game, The Mules, Supply and Warehouses Extended...

This are your fps killers, mules can outright make the game unplayable (0 fps) when those ships start to search for trades and not finding them, idk if they fixed that I think no
Imo there is nothing you can do

The bad part is that I consider these essential mods. Well honestly I don't know how essential the economy mods are because with out without them there is still major issues with the economy. I am just afraid the issues would be worse without the economy mods.

just a side note, I figured out why the economy flops. It has nothing to do with production and everything to do with logistics. The problem is that the NPC factions don't build enough ships and do a good enough job to move the wares they are producing to where they are needed to go. If someone made a mod to fix that, I think all the economy mods would no longer be needed.

Oh and as far as the Mules go, I don't really seem to have too many issues with them just sitting there looking for trades but then again, I had to cheat heavily to create my perfect game which is why I am not having trouble with the mules. I basically made territory control meaningful by cheating so that if I took control of a sector, I got all the industry in that sector that wasn't destroyed. I basically took out the Godrealm and now have 161 of their stations all working for me and have my mules only trading internally moving goods around my empire to make everything work. This is how I figured out that the issue with the NPC economy was in the logistic side of things, not the production. I have about 100 Supply Mules all moving goods from sector to sector as needed for production plus a minimum of 2 miners for every station needing raw resources. With actual logistics in place, I am producing a massive surplus of everything I need using only the existing stations that the Godrealm had access to when their entire economy stalled and I am ONLY trading internally, not going outside of their sectors to seek goods. There should be no reason for the NPC economy to flop providing they actually mined and transported goods to where they were needed.

Anyway, that is another topic but I honestly feel the game is unplayable without Mules and I have to have something to keep the NPC factions producing ships. When I took over the Godrealm, they only had 5 capital class warships total. 5 for an entire faction. That is how badly the economy in my game without mods got.

[Midnitewolf]

There are several mods that can improve FPS:
No Fog,
Less masstraffic,
No small asteroids,
Star dust reduction,
Remove station Dock glow,
Remove Dirty Glass,
Remove blinking ship lights
And also it is good to turn satelites off to hide npc traffic when not needed.

Damn I hate to have to add more mods to fix having too many mods but if it works, so be it.

Also @gevers, I unfortunately rely pretty heavily on the Supply Mules because of my cheating in meaningful territory control and inheriting 161 small factories from the Godrealm as war spoils. To be honest, having 161 factories might be part of my issue hehe but man is it rewarding to actually have a purpose for conquering territory and managing an actually empire has added a whole new level to the depth of gameplay. In any case, I have my Supply Mules set to service the entire sector rather than just a station. I only trade internally but that way if any of the 161 factories divided between 7 sectors needs anything at all to produce goods, the supply mules go out and get its for them and any surplus is shifted over to my Trade stations for external sale. Having 10-15 traders assigned to supply a sector is about the only way I can think of to operate and service 161 stations. The good news is they hardly ever are in a "looking for trades" status as there is always something that needs to go somewhere. No way in hell could I assign each station transports for example.

[Buzz2005]

I think you just explained why you have problems, many mules,many stations and many ships, oh and many many mods, you turned your game into something that cant really happen in vanilla, modding has its consequences

Imo I don't think any of those performance mods would solve your problems

also don't agree at all with your view of vanilla economy, but that's OT and kind of subjective

[Midnitewolf]

I think you just explained why you have problems, many mules,many stations and many ships, oh and many many mods, you turned your game into something that cant really happen in vanilla, modding has its consequences

Imo I don't think any of those performance mods would solve your problems

also don't agree at all with your view of vanilla economy, but that's OT and kind of subjective

Well it isn't so much as not knowing what is causing the issue, it is about trying to figure out what I can do to perhaps make it less of an issue and I got at least a few ideas.

As to the economy, I don't know what else to say aside from it obviously doesn't work in vanilla. I turned to mods because the game just died out on me. I jumped into the game and looked around and there were no ships anywhere. The Godrealm for example only had 5 capital class warships total for their entire realm when I decided to take them over. Also I literally put in an order for a ship up at the Free Families Shipyard and it told me it didn't have the hull parts so after almost an hour of waiting for the ship to complete with no progress, I decided to transport the hull parts myself only to find that a station literally right next to the Shipyard had 23k hull parts available. Hell I experienced this again last night. The Teladi Shipyard didn't have the resources to build the Battleship I wanted for them so I had to bring over the resources myself. Everything needed was either in the same system or no more than 2 jumps away at stations all owned by the Teladi. Obviously the economy isn't working if the AI can't figure out how to move hull parts between the Shipyard and a station located right next to it.

So yeah I love the concept and premise around this game but to enjoy it, I seem to have to mod the hell out of it to "fix" all the issues, with the resulting performance loss unfortunately.

Anyway, like I said, I was hoping for some advice that might help aside from removing mods and like I mentioned, I got some ideas. However, looks like I have to try to figure out how to streamline what mods I consider critical to the game if I really want to see any real improvements.

[debstar2610]

Hi my experience so far
I have two profiles of game play
- vanilla pure
- modded - vro focw fe dead air

In a fresh gamestart, the game is always fast

After several hours, the maps start to slide show for both.

To increase performance in the map I teleport in a calm sector : no lots of stations asteroids or fleet in high attention.

In system : traders, large fleet battle and worst of all lots of drone swarms are performance killers for me.
Never stay near mega complex (or bigdock or faction warf .too) , better to leave them OOS if you want to use the map

In the future I think I should take over a sector and build self sufficient economy. So that I ll stop sending traders and miners to other factions. That would decrease some computing but maybe Tha would increase the faction station spamming and the performance would go worse.

[af_2017]

This is actually interesting problem.
So the game potentially has no limits on amount of objects to display.
Also the game does not care about keeping high fps.
That might look like expected and the solution is "please use modern hardware".
Ok, I will. But that actually will postpone the problem and it will return later when amount of objects will become big enough.
So... in this current situation the solution is "keep amount of objects small enough".
Although that makes perfect sense I guess the solution is not that expected.
But I am not really sure that ways to render/handle unlimited amounts of objects do exist.
Yeah, the problem is really interesting.)

[Waltz99]

I had lots of performance drops also when playing for a long time.
Changing the volumtric fog option to a lower setting changed a lot about that for me.

[debstar2610]

I had lots of performance drops also when playing for a long time.
Changing the volumtric fog option to a lower setting changed a lot about that for me.

Oh man thanks for this tips ........my game is sooooooooo better now !!!

[Nort The Fragrent]

My Long game, over two years playing. Is over loaded with ships and stations. The odd stammer when getting close to one of my mega stations is the only evidence of the game having to choke.
The rest of the time the game runs surprisingly smoothly.
Yes I do have a capable computer.

[Midnitewolf]

There are several mods that can improve FPS:
No Fog,
Less masstraffic,
No small asteroids,
Star dust reduction,
Remove station Dock glow,
Remove Dirty Glass,
Remove blinking ship lights
And also it is good to turn satelites off to hide npc traffic when not needed.

Just wanted to say, I loaded a few of these mods. I think it was the No Fog, No Small Asteroids and the blinking lights I ended up using and I am seeing a massive amount of improvement so thanks for the advice.

[Midnitewolf]

My Long game, over two years playing. Is over loaded with ships and stations. The odd stammer when getting close to one of my mega stations is the only evidence of the game having to choke.
The rest of the time the game runs surprisingly smoothly.
Yes I do have a capable computer.

Mine is pretty capable as well.

3800X
32 GB of overclocked RAM
Super fast NVMe SSD
RTX 3080

But I am definitely experiencing slow down. I know it is the mods that are doing the damage though.