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Entering late game - Shakturi are inbound any moment now while the Galaxy is submerged into a titanic war.
12 out of 15 starting empires are still alive. 4 more races enabled by me (Securan, Kiadian, Wekkarus, Ugnari)
(Really eager for Wekkarus & Atuuk DLC)
The Dhayut are the most powerful race and fight a brutal war with Wekkarus and Ackdarians since over a decade.
No side seem to be able to gain a decisive advantage.
Fleet and troop strength is off the charts and important planets are filled to the brim with defensive installations and troops.
The Shakturi will come thru the rifts anytime now.

Terrans are not the biggest empire but rock solid economy and their unique super heavy frigates and cruisers can take an incredible beating while dashing out
enormous amounts of damage. Will it be enough, though ? War with the Dhayut is unavoidable and the Shakturi roll in any moment.
An existential frontier war is looming...it will be awesome

2000 Stars Galaxy and performace is really good so far.
Whats your mileage ?
You can peak yourself by loading the save
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Tt9vOV ... sp=sharing

That looks so epic! I wish my PC could run a 2000 star galaxy. I'm afraid it would catch on fire if I tried
Out of curiosity what's your PC's specs? very tempted to upgrade mine so I can play a game like this one.

Colwolf77 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 13, 2025 10:08 pm That looks so epic! I wish my PC could run a 2000 star galaxy. I'm afraid it would catch on fire if I tried
Out of curiosity what's your PC's specs? very tempted to upgrade mine so I can play a game like this one.

I was actually playing with 2000 stars a couple of years ago on my ancient Intel i7-5820K (release date - 2014 + 32 GB DDR4 + GTX980Ti, and the game was probably on HDD, don't remember), and the game was playable most of the time. Devs have done a great job regarding performance ever since, so it's worth trying to play on huge maps. The 1500-2000 stars map is a really epic journey.

Currently I own Intel i7 13700K with 128GB DDR5 and RTX 4080, game plays well at 8x speed at the start and mid-game, and late game is playable at 2-4 speed. Random crashes here and there, but not much, current stable version is indeed stable (current beta is less stable, played a couple days ago). However these days I prefer to play on 1500-star map, just because I'm a perfectionist and prefer to take over the WHOLE galaxy by the end of the game, and on a 2000 map it's just really long and a bit boring due to the invasion fleet behavior (constant lack of troops).

PathSeeker wrote: ↑Thu Mar 13, 2025 11:35 pm

Colwolf77 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 13, 2025 10:08 pm That looks so epic! I wish my PC could run a 2000 star galaxy. I'm afraid it would catch on fire if I tried
Out of curiosity what's your PC's specs? very tempted to upgrade mine so I can play a game like this one.

I was actually playing with 2000 stars a couple of years ago on my ancient Intel i7-5820K (release date - 2014 + 32 GB DDR4 + GTX980Ti, and the game was probably on HDD, don't remember), and the game was playable most of the time. Devs have done a great job regarding performance ever since, so it's worth trying to play on huge maps. The 1500-2000 stars map is a really epic journey.

Currently I own Intel i7 13700K with 128GB DDR5 and RTX 4080, game plays well at 8x speed at the start and mid-game, and late game is playable at 2-4 speed. Random crashes here and there, but not much, current stable version is indeed stable (current beta is less stable, played a couple days ago). However these days I prefer to play on 1500-star map, just because I'm a perfectionist and prefer to take over the WHOLE galaxy by the end of the game, and on a 2000 map it's just really long and a bit boring due to the invasion fleet behavior (constant lack of troops).

Ah nice, thanks for the info. On that last note its one of the reasons I really like playing as the Mortalen if I'm in the conquest mood. Them being able to rapidly train up troops as long as they're at war comes in very handy. I'd imagine the refreshed Boskara will be just as good with their ability 'War spawning' which can instantly convert colony population into new troops at no cost.

Colwolf77 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 13, 2025 10:08 pm That looks so epic!

its a mod build for a challenging human campaign. The aim is having no pushovers around and make it so that the player has to watch out to not be pushed over
I never seen the amount of vanilla races develope that much of fleet and troop strength and planets filled with troops and defenses while having very strong reserch points and solid economy.
Usually if vanilla empires grow bigger they are either steamroll the others or are giants on feet of clay.
Here plenty factions have lots of research, high tech level, solid economy and solid fleets and armys.
So Dhayut, Wekkarus and Ackdarians fighting since a decade and no end in sight and they still go strong

I literally fiddle around with the game since a year for getting to the point you see in the screen.

Colwolf77 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 13, 2025 10:08 pm Out of curiosity what's your PC's specs?

Its not enthusiast level. I play on 1440p 32,5`monitor and all the crap benchmark and techtubers tests show peak performance but its not real life scenario so its kinda irrelevant for me.
Also, Im not willing to buy "midrange" GPU for a 1000€ with 300W TDP while only 10 years back the top GPU was 650€ (980Ti).
So this a new machine AM5 platform
7800x3d
64GB 5600 RAM (faster RAM gains are marginal so its not worth it)
RX7800XT (bought the GPU in 2023)
as you can see from the performance overlay on the screenshot it does not get into a sweat, the GPU even less as DW2 is a lot more CPU dependant but with 8 cores and 16 threads its a piece of cake even in big Galaxys.
I think a 12 core Ryzen would even look better but for me its good enough

Colwolf77 wrote: ↑Thu Mar 13, 2025 10:08 pm very tempted to upgrade mine so I can play a game like this one.

If you not on an AM5 platform I would not bother and rather build a new AM5 one to enjoy 4-5 years.
And while you at it slap 64GB RAM on it so you not have to upgrade/change RAM till end of life of the PC.
You only may need/want to change CPU or GPU depending on what you build with.
In my case I got the 7800x3d for 350€ in Aug 2024 just before the prices skyrocketed and my 7800XT is from 2023.
So I skip Ryzen 9000 and will upgrade CPU with next gen and also the GPU probably swap for a 9700XT in a year or so when prices dropped considerably.
I not consider NVIDIA GPU at this point as NVIDIA screwed us with the Raytracing nonsense which made GPUs much more expensive and took away busloads of performance with no real perceivable or relevant visual or gameplay gain.

PathSeeker wrote: ↑Thu Mar 13, 2025 11:35 pm However these days I prefer to play on 1500-star map, just because I'm a perfectionist and prefer to take over the WHOLE galaxy by the end of the game,

Well, in the game you see in the screen I doubt you could take over the Galaxy at this point as the factions are really really strong with lots of research, loads of ships, troops and defenses on important planets, all this while having strong economys as one would expect with a big civilization
Its not a vanilla game, mind you
I mean you can donwload the save from the link and give it a go but have a good look at the tech tree and especially human ships, there are differences

PathSeeker wrote: ↑Thu Mar 13, 2025 11:35 pm and on a 2000 map it's just really long and a bit boring due to the invasion fleet behavior (constant lack of troops).

Understandable, this why I balance this campaign on the premise: Not getting pushed over, survive Shakturi and beat the "evil" race/races (Boskara/Ghizurean/Dhayut) that try take over the Galaxy is a win.
After that there is no more objectives and I end the round anyway. I cannot be bothered to try take over everything

ChrisGb wrote: ↑Fri Mar 14, 2025 3:26 pm Well, in the game you see in the screen I doubt you could take over the Galaxy at this point as the factions are really really strong with lots of research, loads of ships, troops and defenses on important planets, all this while having strong economys as one would expect with a big civilization
Its not a vanilla game, mind you
I mean you can donwload the save from the link and give it a go but have a good look at the tech tree and especially human ships, there are differences

Well, here's the screenshot of the very old version of the game, early 2023 I'd say, no "endless" research yet, as well as DLCs, no Shakturi, "medium" difficulty, but also a lot of habitable planets. Not sure about planet destroyers though, I have them in some sessions, but not in all of them, this one probably with them. Based on the post info (I posted this screenshot in some social network), the strongest competitor is just 4M of power.


My current game session is on the latest version, all DLCs, and "very hard" difficulty, and currently my fleet is ~65M strength, while Shakturi, fighting the Freedom Alliance (which I'm not a part of), is just 17M (and the alliance is loosing). So numbers like 1M total power doesn't frighten me, however I'm not aware of your settings for your mod, so maybe I'll indeed try it and see how it goes. But only after I destroy these nasty Shakturi and Teekan-based Freedom Alliance in my current game

PathSeeker wrote: ↑Mon Mar 17, 2025 4:53 am My current game session is on the latest version, all DLCs, and "very hard" difficulty, and currently my fleet is ~65M strength, while Shakturi, fighting the Freedom Alliance (which I'm not a part of), is just 17M (and the alliance is loosing). So numbers like 1M total power doesn't frighten me, however I'm not aware of your settings for your mod, so maybe I'll indeed try it and see how it goes. But only after I destroy these nasty Shakturi and Teekan-based Freedom Alliance in my current game

Totally awesome, must be pretty high tech level for the fleet power to be that high.

Well, the settings of the mod include all races can build all tech & other buildings so they can get to the higher tech stuff easier and also get all bonues from the other big buildings and oh boy do they build them all, troop maintenance is way lower so they have plenty more troops without getting broke, all facility maintenance is aprx 50% and all AI factions have between 15% to 25% to all Research and flat 25% to colony income + whatever their vanilla race specific bonuses. Also Ghizurean, Boskara and Dhayut have increased aggression and hate humans with a passion. They also kill all agents they catch.
While playing I frecuently check other empires thru the editor to see how they doing and they go pretty strong on these settings. On Research and Economy.
Having always the biggest, strongest, highest techlevel empire and only wait till late game to destroy everybody is not really a memorable game for me.
I want to be squeezed and frightend and sometimes getting my butt whooped

Also I harmonized plenty race specific techs so they have high tier versions of their own and not end in the generic "available to all" branch, this accentuates a wee bit more the differences in certain fields.
Things like the Dhayut Hyperdrive, the Ackdarian Turbo Thruster Engine, Quameno Bubble Shields and Novacore Reactor, Megatron Z4 shields etc

Waiting now for Wekkarus and Atuuk DLC to drop (however Wekkarus are in my game already- I enabled them with specific tech and their own policies and they do pretty strong !)
They use Ackdarian shipset for now but Im excited for the coming DLC. Then over April I rebuild everything and have new version up in May.

My aim is not a balanced or fair game from all sides but a game that I remember cause it was on the edge, it was tight, I almost got beaten up, I could overcome the adversities and I finally prevailed when it did not look so good. There is plenty new things in the mod. Lot more than what I just said. But it still preserves a vanilla kind of feeling.

here a look at Dhayut home planet - there is not that many troops there cuz they are biggest faction with 9000 research and 100 planets - no invader would get there anyway right now - but all the weapons platforms, though


and this Wekkarus home planet - good luck invading


Kiadian home planet yeah,bring more troops baby


Fleet Maintenance base with refuel & repair facilities at Caslon Gas Giant close to the border - cannot build ships for not make it OP but repair speed is increased and it mines Caslon for supply of Fleets


Size comparison Super Heavy Cruiser to Advanced Cruiser - still smaller than Battlecruiser but can take more of a beating due to higher reactive rating but a lot slower than normal due to increased armor

had to take a peak

had to purchase shakturi because of the peak....

loads game

sees everything moving

feels satisfied

edit:

CPU load at around 60%

Chris0War wrote: ↑Sun Apr 13, 2025 2:02 pm had to take a peak

Chris0War wrote: ↑Sun Apr 13, 2025 2:02 pm had to purchase shakturi because of the peak....

see the positive..now you have it
now I gonna see if Matrix shells out some comission

Chris0War wrote: ↑Sun Apr 13, 2025 2:02 pm loads game
sees everything moving
feels satisfied

Chris0War wrote: ↑Sun Apr 13, 2025 2:02 pm edit:
CPU load at around 60%

but..how much power does it draw cause my CPU could show 60% load and still not draw 60w

Chris0War wrote: ↑Sun Apr 13, 2025 2:02 pm edit:
CPU load at around 60%

but..how much power does it draw cause my CPU could show 60% load and still not draw 60w
[/quote]

I can check, i would not be surprised if my draw is actually, a lot, higher. The 7800x3d is a beast of a gun!
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Okay, well, as i suspected my powerdraw is twice as high if i drive in power efficient windows mode and about trice as high if i enable windows performance mode.

So with this setup, Ultra 285K 2x24GB Ram running at 8000 hz

mode 1 - windows power efficient mode
66 -130Watt

mode 2 - windows performance mode
120 -170Watt

I also increased CPU load in the menu to 70% and increased speed x2 for mode 2

It seems intel is only recommended for gaming if you are a team blue boy
thought of course, in secret I know for sure that my CPU calculates the game better

Chris0War wrote: ↑Sun Apr 13, 2025 5:11 pm Okay, well, as i suspected my powerdraw is twice as high if i drive in power efficient windows mode and about trice as high if i enable windows performance mode.
So with this setup, Ultra 285K 2x24GB Ram running at 8000 hz

It seems intel is only recommended for gaming if you are a team blue boy
thought of course, in secret I know for sure that my CPU calculates the game better

holy mother of god these watts on intel are insane...but its also subject to a lot of criticism since years because it looked like Intel drew its performace increases mostly from upping the power draw of its CPUs...just like Nvidia
However your powerdraw seems a wee bit high when looking at some performance comparison between 7800x3d and 285k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n1Xjm6UGBM

Well, back in the day when Ryzen 3000 and 5700XT released I went full AMD and not looking back, AMD support for its platforms AM4 + AM5 is off the charts (like 3 generations of CPUs) and for GPU not need top shelf as I limit powerdraw by locking 60 fps on most games and I couldnt care less for Ray Tracing. Looks like an Nvidia scheme to up to GPU prices to absurd levels for literally little to zero equity return. 10 years ago the top GPU was 600$, now for 600$ you get entry midrange GPU...excuse me !?

ChrisGb wrote: ↑Sun Apr 13, 2025 10:33 pm

Chris0War wrote: ↑Sun Apr 13, 2025 5:11 pm Okay, well, as i suspected my powerdraw is twice as high if i drive in power efficient windows mode and about trice as high if i enable windows performance mode.
So with this setup, Ultra 285K 2x24GB Ram running at 8000 hz

It seems intel is only recommended for gaming if you are a team blue boy
thought of course, in secret I know for sure that my CPU calculates the game better

holy mother of god these watts on intel are insane...but its also subject to a lot of criticism since years because it looked like Intel drew its performace increases mostly from upping the power draw of its CPUs...just like Nvidia
However your powerdraw seems a wee bit high when looking at some performance comparison between 7800x3d and 285k
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n1Xjm6UGBM

Well, back in the day when Ryzen 3000 and 5700XT released I went full AMD and not looking back, AMD support for its platforms AM4 + AM5 is off the charts (like 3 generations of CPUs) and for GPU not need top shelf as I limit powerdraw by locking 60 fps on most games and I couldnt care less for Ray Tracing. Looks like an Nvidia scheme to up to GPU prices to absurd levels for literally little to zero equity return. 10 years ago the top GPU was 600$, now for 600$ you get entry midrange GPU...excuse me !?

Well, i would like to add that I didn't look for the lowest point yesterday. For example, maybe i can run the endgame quite well if i limit the CPU to 20% load.

Also, as someone else on the forum mentioned, the calculations for the game does seem to scale with the amount of calculating power available (maybe for some reason)

Also, as you yourself noted, optimization for this game might be in favour of AMD, since this is actually the only title in my library that acts this way, Cities Skylines 2 for example, so far operates bravely, but who knows what will happen if i have 2 million inhabitants, i bet figures will go through the roof too.

Another thing noteworthy might be like how my GPU freezes when confronted with for example the highest level of path tracing. I have a 400W GPU but i encountered situations when i go for 'max' settings that the damned thing won't reach higher than 250Watts, as if it is overwhelmed by the calculations needed.....

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Concerning GPU prices, it seems we have lot more technical progress hidden in those babies these days, and probably some wizzkid understood that the tiers in CPU systems for the consumer market lie very close together. Especially if you count in the fact that most computer users do seem to earn a nice wage

edit:

anyway- i just returned home with a back injury, made wrong move so i might figure out some answers this week

Here you can see how that CPU performs
Prozessor Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz 2.60 GHz (2 CPUs)
Installedr RAM 64,0 GB

GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (6 GB)

Link to the Video.

Now my question is:
What the heck does the fps slider do as well as the cpu usage slider?
I can see no difference..

By the way. Big universe you have there

rxnnxs wrote: ↑Mon Apr 14, 2025 6:02 pm Here you can see how that CPU performs
Prozessor Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz 2.60 GHz (2 CPUs)
Installedr RAM 64,0 GB

GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (6 GB)

Link to the Video.

Now my question is:
What the heck does the fps slider do as well as the cpu usage slider?
I can see no difference..

By the way. Big universe you have there

Both limiters seem to work a bit wonky atm

Normally these sliders are used to exactly determine how high your FPS should be or what kind of impact the game may have on your CPU

Atm i suspect these sliders influence some kind of quantum calculation

rxnnxs wrote: ↑Mon Apr 14, 2025 6:02 pm Here you can see how that CPU performs
Prozessor Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2650 v2 @ 2.60GHz 2.60 GHz (2 CPUs)
Installedr RAM 64,0 GB
GPU NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (6 GB)

looks like a time machine back to 2015
Still have a MSI GTX 1060 Gaming X 6GB sitting in a box on a cupboard

Anyway, at the settings we can see I locked my display at 60hz with VSync enabled but Maximum FPS slider set to 240.
Weirdly enough this makes it so that the game stays a lot closer to 60fps (56-60) than what it did when the slider was at 60fps (46-54 more or less)
My guess is that somehow this gives more headroom resulting in a closer to 60fps experience.
With that massive Galaxy and massive wars going on I think overall performance is pretty decent as I play on 2k and not 1080p

As you have AMD gfx, have you tried their "best kept secret" Chill? I set its minimum to the lower Freesync limit of the monitor, and when there's movement FPS will scale up accordingly. Much better than the old hard fps limit and ancient vsync from CRT times.

I still have a fifth-gen i7 with 32 Gb, it runs 1K stars without problems. When you give DW2 more CPU it will increase the granularity of the simulation with more frequent updates.

Ax wrote: ↑Tue Apr 15, 2025 9:30 pm
I still have a fifth-gen i7 with 32 Gb, it runs 1K stars without problems. When you give DW2 more CPU it will increase the granularity of the simulation with more frequent updates.

While the tooltip ingame for the CPU slider only indicates that more or less CPU resources are used, so, you might be right

There is also this other post i found

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... ?p=5097433

Ever since it was introduced, I check new patches to see if it's "fixed"
I'm talking about that performance change that makes the cpu go 50% usage when paused with a freshly started galaxy.

I'm against the idea and here is why. I like to play games in the background. Do some work, alt tab give some orders, alt tab work etc. Now, if I leave system load target at the default 60, my cpu is 50% usage all the time. It does not matter I'm in game, or if I'm paused or if the game is minimized. It's 50% usage ALL the time. If I reduce it to minimum it goes to 25%. This still enough for my laptop coolers to take off and just spin spin spin.

We live in a modern world. C# is a high level language. It has so many ways of synchronizing threads, and signaling and locking. Must we really do while(true) or thread.sleep on all workers or whatever it is happening?

Can we not execute work when work is available to be executed?

I hope this way of doing this is just for the beta, but I keep checking the logs and it seems it's not being touched anymore.

for reference I'm on a laptop with Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-10750H CPU @ 2.60GHz
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Erik Rutins
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Re: [1.1.3.9] I strongly disagree with the new CPU usage policy
Unread post by Erik Rutins » Fri May 05, 2023 4:22 pm

I'm sorry, but in order to simulate a living galaxy, the game requires a certain level of CPU resources. Laptops are unique in that they put a lot of hardware into a small space and want to also run on battery power. As a result, when gaming you typically want to be plugged in and I would guess the vast majority of 3D games will in fact require a laptop to engage its cooling system.

Will the CPU usage decrease with future optimizations? Certainly, but more changes to that area are bigger than will be done in this round of updates, we're stabilizing the current changes to go official before we start a new round of risky changes. The CPU Load slider is the provided solution to decrease CPU usage. The other thing that may help is choosing to play on the smallest galaxies.

Getting the living galaxy working with great multi-threaded performance and stability on all systems is a very hard task which has been an ongoing challenge for years now. We've made huge progress, but I can assure you that it's not something where we could just get the CPU usage to be much lower without much work because we're in a modern world using C#. It will take time and more optimization and testing to maintain the better performance of the performance updates while decreasing CPU usage and I expect there will never be a point where a large galaxy requires minimal CPU usage or where a well-developed mid to late game situation doesn't want more than 25% CPU.

Regards,

- Erik
Erik Rutins

I would just expect that when I hit pause, the cpu usage is low because there is nothing to calculate.
How can this be hard to achieve?