What are your specs, I want to remake what you have.

You can play fine without internet.

I play with the overlay and will un-check it just to see. My internet was completely down yesterday and steam will ask if you want to go in 'offline' mode. 

I did not know you needed steam to play and have not tried to close steam while the game is running. 

Likewise.

Speaking as an IT professional, the specs of the machine listed are really kinda bad, tbh. The CPU is quite old, and not particularly powerful. 8GB of RAM is fairly low for true 64-bit programs (I'm in the process of upgrading our work machines to 32GB each, though we do a lot of CAD work; but I wouldn't recommend under 16 for anything that has to run anything heavier than MS Office these days). The graphics card is.... horrible, really; about 1/8th as powerful as a modern card. I'm kind of impressed that just shutting down steam has reduced the problem.

While it's not ancient, this machine could quite easily have been constructed in 2009, aside from the GFX card - which was a sub-$200 budget model even when it was released in 2012 and relies on borrowing system RAM to make up for it's own lack of grunt.

As to the revealing the map etc - the slowdown once the game gets going is more down to the increase in units and planets than how much of the map you can see (the computer itself can see all of it regardless, and just doesn't let the AI subroutines see it at lower difficulties). 8GB should be fine to generate the galaxy (the game literally locks you out of map sizes that you don't have the RAM to generate), but probably can't handle much activity beyond that. There's probably still some garbage collection issues in the code as well, so expect a memory leak or two to exacerbate the problem.

Forgive me for saying so, but you sound something like a "Bigger is better" elitist.  But then, it IS something of a truism that "If you can buy it, it already is obsolete."  That's seems to always have been the case going all the way back to the '80s.  But as I see it, if a PC rig is inadequate, it would NEVER be able to run a hardware intensive game at "normal" speed.  Yet, with my archaic setup, I have been able to run the game for as much as 5+ hours at a time, with not the slightest hint of lagging.  Other times...

I'd really like to know where you shop for hardware.  "... a sub-$200 budget model even when it was released in 2012"?  I purchased it on sale at Best Buy at Xmas 2014 for $243.  The cheapest online price I could find at that time had it listed at >$200.  In 2014.  

It may be that revealing the map and increased number of colonies do go hand-in-hand.  When the lagging started (if there was lagging at all) was when I had @15 colonies and had uncovered @15% of the Insane galaxy hex.  (It may be worth mentioned that in setup, I tried for "Abundant" for both systems and planet count.).  But now that I've turned off the Steam overlay, despite having revealed >85% of the entire map and colonized @100 planets, I have only occasional lagging.  (@30seconds or less once every 10 minutes or so.)

Not really; a large part of my job is providing machines powerful enough to do the task at hand as cheaply as possible, so I generally have to be pretty spot-on when it comes to power vs price. As I say, we do a lot of CAD work, so I'm used to Revit and Photoshop files than regularly hit 10-20GB of RAM on their own. I also work with ESXI VM hosts that make ANY desktop machine look fairly puny, and need to set up virtual servers in a manner that uses resources sparingly... so yeah, I'm not really in the business of just saying 'add lots more expensive RAM for no reason!!!'. 

That's because the amount of RAM used isn't constant. As I say, you can construct the galaxy with ~6gb or so. Once that's done, the size of the map really ceases to play a part in the RAM calcs, and it more becomes a matter of how many units are in play - and that number rises over time. As it's a 64-bit program, GC3 can address upto something like 17TB of memory, and will continue working it's way up there as the game heats up. Combine that with poor garbage collection and you end up with lots of stuff sat in RAM at once; 8 GB will fill up faster than you think. Also, do bear in mind that on the laptop I'm typing this on (with 4GB), the game won't even let me attempt to generate maps larger than Huge.

What, this card which 6 months later is £83?:

https://www.alzashop.com/msi-n650ti-2gd5-oc-d2145420.htm?kampan=adeupla-uk_produkty_graficke-karty&gclid=CKCv2c7hnsYCFXQatAodmwYADg

Though actually, this one is the upgraded Ti config of the same card... which means it has twice the GFX cores. It's an upgraded version of yours. Yours is this one:

http://www.justop.com/catalog/asus-gtx650-e-2gd5-geforce-gtx-650-2gb-gddr5-graphics-card-unplugged-oc.html

Being sold for £90; about $140. I found these two on consumer sites in 2 minutes of googling. If I actually went to one of my regular suppliers and bought it OEM, then it'd be somewhat closer to £65.

Now, I do generally buy from trade sources, so the prices I expect are maybe 15-20% lower than you'd get in a retail outlet... but yeah, the 650 series was never intended to be high-performance. It, and it's various derivatives, were produced toward the end of that chipset's life cycle, and so were deliberately positioned as budget models.

Well, there's no argument against Steam being a bit of a resource hog for what it is; however, your OP suggests that you were under the illusion that you have a bit of a beast of a machine, which isn't really the case. Your processor architecture is dated, your GFX card is low-end, and while a couple of years ago 8 gig of RAM was sufficient, it's now also coming to be the low end for intensive applications - especially games. The processor is probably OK for a while, but I'd recommend adding in another 8 gig of RAM.

You're likely one of the players Stardock was hoping to help with the 1.1 habitable planet nerf; there's now 1000 less planets on an insane/abundant map compared to 1.0 maps. This is something Stardock may look to increase back up over time. You're likely also benefiting indirectly from the AI's self-gimping behaviour - it doesn't specialize very well, and so also tends to under-perform in military production as the game progresses, which is hopefully something else which will improve. As a result, expect the lagging issues to get worse rather than better with future patches; Stardock have said that they're considering raising the minimum specs as the game progresses.

 17 terabytes?  It's hard to imagine 95+% of players having anywhere near that kind of computational ability.  Anything above ONE terabyte is just now starting to become commonplace.  (>10% of consumers)  And that's for the hard drive.  Last year (last time I had my PC upgraded) 8 Gb of RAM was considered "more than adequate".  16 Gb is this year's "must have more than to have a high end machine" guideline.  32 Gb is what "bleeding edge" top performers for a Personal Computer would be.  Heck right now, the going rate for 32 Gb DDR3 is >$200, just for the RAM of the system.  That kind of pricing would put the cost of the rest of the system at >$1000 ... for a rig that WILL be inadequate in less than 3 years.  That kind of pricing would be out of the reach of nearly everyone that isn't at least Upper Middle Class.  (A shrinking percentage of the population.)

Except I think mine was the Zotac model.  However, the link you posted for my card said 89.99 pounds = $142.91.  The "good" price now is $138.69, but that's for just 1 Gb of VRAM, but mine has 4 Gb.  And last December, Amazon.com was listing that 1 Gb version for $212.  From @$210 to @$140 in six months is actually about how fast hardware prices drop -- which is why so so many players are using "last year's hardware" instead of buying the current "latest and greatest".  [And then being told six months later, "Your system really is outdated and and underpowered for the current generation of games."]   How many players do you think have access to the kind of deals you get from "my regular suppliers"?  Your price is probably tied into the volume discount you get from being a regular commercial buyer for your job.  The rest of us mere mortals can only dream about ever getting those kinds of discounts. 

 Actually, I was striving for "adequate".  Older, yes, but well within the spec parameters for what Stardock was describing in the "Recommended specs".

I believe that I started this game some time before the 1.1 patch was released.  That would mean that the number of planets would remain the same as to the program, the map is already mapped out and pre-determined, even for those (few) areas I haven't uncovered yet.

All that aside, given the woeful inadequacies of my hardware, how would it even be possible to get several hours of late gameplay at a stretch with no lagging at all?  The stuff that should overload 8 Gb of RAM still remains.  Yet the lagging comes and goes... and now when it comes (if it comes at all), it's for a MUCH shorter duration, and the recurrences come further apart than they did before.  This suggests to me that there is something else in effect than just "your hardware is outdated and inadequate".  That is, something entirely outside of my rig.  As far as Steam interference, according to the Comcast speed test, I'm getting 90 Mb/sec Internet speeds.  [Hard to get speeds much faster than that without having a dedicated T1 line.]  Anyway, given the problems I have, I have to conclude that either A) nearly EVERYONE playing GC3 has enormously more up-to-date systems than I, or B ) they just aren't bothering to complain.  (Probably because they just set the game aside and went off to play games that weren't nearly so demanding.)

My game slowed down, too... I have 4790k @ 4Ghz with 16 GB RAM... But didn`t a dev say its the pirates and they are working on it?

In fairness, I personally would have said this had someone even entertained the notion of buying a Core 2 CPU in 2013, let alone 2014.

Given your rather dated CPU, odds are this is the case. Even being beaten or matched by a number of low end i3 CPUs, it isn't even comparable to CPUs found in budget tier PCs that are in the 300-400 USD range.

To be honest the official system requirements for Galactic Civilizations are quite optimistic when it comes to RAM to say at least. And yeah, I don't actually mean that in a positive manner.

If it were more realistic it should say something like this:

So what OP is experiencing is what I've seen with hundreds of other people over at Steam or here on the forum, and what I have been experiencing myself before I put more physical RAM into my computer.

The Game preloads so much stuff at the startup that together with Windows programs running in the background, your system hits 8 GB of RAM usage very easily right from the beginning.

If your system has only 8 GB of Physical RAM installed then you are pretty much screwed at that point because when Windows notices that your system will run out of memory (which kicks in at somewhat 90-95% of total physical RAM) it starts to swap contents of the RAM to your harddrive and that kills the overall performance of your entire computer, especially if you are still using an oldschool HDD as harddrive instead of an SSD, but it is also quite noticable when using older SSDs with less than 500 MB/s read/write capability.

You can't do anything about that at all other than putting more RAM into your computer, because you can't kill important Windows tasks to save on RAM.

That said, there is also a major memory leak in the Game's engine which I don't think the developers know of yet, at least I never heard them speak about such a thing on the Friday Dev Streams and also I haven't seen a single developer commenting on any of the threads here on the forum dealing with the RAM problem. Maybe they know it already and working on a fix, but at least I haven't read anything official about that.

At least there is a memory leak. I've been tracking RAM usage of the game over the course of some hours, so I know there are some serious problems with that. The memory management of the game seems to forget to free memory contents it no longer needs and so it starts thrashing up your memory periodically... and therefore increases its RAM usage by 1-2% every 15 minutes on an 12 GB system.

Eventually any amount of physical system RAM will run full, but with 16 GB or 32 GB most people will never notice it because they'd have to play 12-16 hours in one session or even more to finally notice degrading system performance.

But with 12 GB or less the problem becomes quite obvious after already a couple of hours and the only way to fix that is to save and restart the game after about 2-3 hours of play, which in fact becomes quite annoying because the longer you are in the game the longer each turn takes due to more planets that need to be managed and more fleets that need to be moved.

Also what should be said, or at least I experienced/noticed is that once Windows starts to swap RAM content belonging to the game to the harddrive not only the computer will lag like hell, but the game will also start to glitch out and show strange behavior, especially with UI elements. It won't recognize half of your clicks and clicking multiple times on the same element might cause it to freeze and the turn button as well as others might become stuck. Also if the game runs from the Virtual Memory on the harddrive for too long it will increase the crash chance by each minute and it will eventually crash.

TLDR; You should have at least 12 GB of RAM (better 16 GB) if you want to ensure a decent performance and also the game suffers a serious memory leak.

Stardock please update the minimum RAM to 8 gigs and recommended ram to 12 gigs of ram for this game. Similar people playing on insane maps with 6 or 8 gigs of ram perphaps on a laptop give the game bad reviews.

Gray out excessive maps if less than 12 gigs of ram, gray out insane maps if less than 16 gigs of ram. Or give players a warning that they might get poor performance due to low ram.

I never play on maps larger than huge because I have 8 gigs of ram.

Ah, but being a PC, not everything gets swapped out at the same time.  The CPU and RAM date from 2012.  The motherboard and video card date from 2014.

And I might add that this system (as fluid as the components are) has not choked on any game until GC3 came along.  It's easy to think that a rig is "adequate" if everything thrown at it works just fine... until it doesn't. Is GC3 sooooo much more demanding than practically everything else that has been released up to GC3?  If not, then it's a case of "One of these things is not like the others" and then finding out in what way it differs that it overloads a system that all the others do not.  And if it is more demanding than everything else, one has to ask, "Why?"  It effectively jacks the cost of playing the game up considerably, being not just the retail price of the game, but also the cost of all the new-and-improved hardware players MUST have to get a smooth performance.

17 TB is the theoretical limit, not something I'm suggesting you should aim for And it's actually exbibytes. Which are so big that even the present-day supercomputers running the LHC at CERN don't have that much. But yes, in theory, Gal Civ 3 can generate and use a map that big. It probably isn't capable of addressing that many registers (Windows certainly isn't), but in theory, if you mod the game, then you can certainly push mere galaxy creation way beyond 32GB.

Brad has mentioned that he feels Stardock's 'recommend specs' are kind of low atm. Also, 'recommended specs' means 'can play fine on a medium map', rather than 'comfortably capable of playing the game on the largest possible settings with all the features turned to maximum'. Sorry, but that's just how it is.

Well, couple of things:

a) A T1 line is a bit of a blast from the past - it's a 1.5mb/s copper twisted-pair cable. Your internet is considerably better than that - and probably has been since about 2005

b ) There's a third option that you've missed - that nearly everyone playing GC3 will never play on maps larger than Large. Seriously, it's like 90% of players, according to SD's (admittedly rather bad) measurements.

I'm well aware of this; I'm in the same boat with my own, self built, PC.

CPU is from 2012 eh? So in that case, it was 5 years old! Which by any respectable measure is a poor choice of components.

Actually, GC3 isn't so much more demanding than anything else, so much as it is a game that is finally made for the average hardware on the market. This is a game that has been a long time coming; for multiple years the PC gaming market has been crying for the end of 32 bit games and GC3 is on the forefront of this. Speaking of consoles, your CPU is actually weaker than that of the current generation consoles, and as such if a PS4 or XOne could theoretically play GalCiv, which I wager is indeed the case, than the argument that "new-and-improved hardware is required" does not hold, as current gen consoles are the primary standard for video game hardware.

But isn't that like saying, "This car model has LOTS of safety features.  But they only work if you keep the car below the speed limit"?  Even if the car is advertised of being capable to doing better than twice the speed limit.  Meaning that they created a program that has this potential of doing things like Insane-sized maps.  HOWEVER, to fulfill that potential -- which they describe in the manual -- requires hardware that far exceeds the "Recommended specs" -- but they did NOT mention in the manual just how much more RAM would be required.  In Recommended specs it calls for 6 Gb of RAM.  Having 8Gb of RAM is 33% more than Recommended, which most people would be thinking "That much more should fulfill the 'more' requirement."  But now, here, we're being told "more" = "16 Gb at least, but 32 Gb would be better" -- which is 5 times the Recommended amount listed.

Overall, it kind of feels like a Bait-'n'-Switch.

As said many times the recommended specs are for medium settings only in this case, medium, large or huge maps. The new norm for memory is 16 gigs. 8 gigs was the normal a few years back. I know many companies list their specs as low as possible so people will actually buy their games. I see many games on steam list their recommended specs for memory as 4 gigs of ram. What I like to see on steam (can it be done?) is min. specs, recommended specs, and a new "optimized specs" List it as 12 or 16 gigs of ram.

Playing on excessive and immense maps is like playing on very high or ultra settings with all the eye candy turn on.

At least with the graphic specs, a game's full content can be accessed by setting the Graphics to Low settings.  But for cache memory, there's no way to "dial it down" to at least get smooth gameplay.  For a company to deliberately set Recommended specs to a number that isn't anywhere near what is actually required to get full performance, that IS deliberate bait-'n'-switch.  As you suggest, they are saying whatever is needed to make the sale.  Otherwise known as "deceptive Marketing".  

I heartily agree with your idea of game publishers posting a "Optimal" category for system specs.  But I doubt that they will do so because if consumers saw just how wide the gap was between Minimum and Optimal, Sales would plummet.  ["If I would have to buy a whole new PC just to get everything I'm paying for, why bother?  I'll just go play something else."]

Look! Look! LOOK! https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/cpu/ you can get good CPUs right now for cheap. They are so cheap right now you can buy three processors and use two of them to rub together till they make a fun little squeaky sound.

Like captain patch said there is a fog when it comes to hardware specs and performance. With so many parts and builds and software, it is a challenge to optimize the game for everyone and make sure every feature is playable for everyone e.g insane maps. And with a plethora of new tech on the horizon like the cheap yet fast processors and ram sticks, you can see how one part can bring you whole pc down if you aren't upgrading. And from a game development stand point you make your games to last so pcs just hanging on the bottom of the requirements spectrum get left behind in, "maybe it will work" land. Once again having a good pc but having one bad part today is a death sentence it seems as yu are only as fast as your slowest component so the modern pieces get bottlenecked and makes everything worthless. 

Seems to be a problem for everyone eventually, but it's nothing a few dollars can't fix$

I think we should also remember that many games include some 'future-proofing'; that is, they have various features which are intended for hardware that isn't even on the market yet. If you want the recommended specs to mean 'can run literally every god damned thing in the game on maximum possible settings', many of those games would need to ask for literal supercomputer configs. Above and beyond that, many people who really could play the game quite happily on lower settings would skip it in the belief that it's too much for their machine to handle.

This really is just a case of a user with somewhat dated (though not quite obsolete just yet) hardware discovering that his machine can only play the very highest-end settings if he tolerates some slowdown... it's kinda hard to believe we've nearly hit 3 pages discussing something so blindingly obvious.

As you can in Gal Civ 3. I get every feature in the game on a medium map as I do on an insane one.

I think the graphics setting is the best argument I have heard towards this. The game is fully playable on the hardware, just not at the absolute peak that is possible.

Quoting DARCA1213, reply 42

Look! Look! LOOK! https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/cpu/ you can get good CPUs right now for cheap. They are so cheap right now you can buy three processors and use two of them to rub together till they make a fun little squeaky sound.   

 ....

Seems to be a problem for everyone eventually, but it's nothing a few dollars can't fix$   

"Few dollars"?  First, that's quite the price range, just for a CPU: $24.98 all the way up to $3966.99.  Somehow, I doubt that any of those items under $100-200 would be solving any performance issues.  Second, pretty much ALL of those choices would also involve getting a different motherboard than the one I currently have.  So that would be another cost consideration.  Third, whereas I might feel comfortable swapping out video cards, changing out something as delicate as a CPU is beyond my fumble-fingered geriatric dexterity -- which means that I'd end up paying a tech to do the job.  (Not to mention how irritable they get when a customer brings in his bargain basement components and expect them to do all the technical work.)  Fourth, I believe the case is that when changing motherboards or CPUs, even if all of my current programs remain on the hard drive, it becomes necessary to re-initialize the 40-60 programs that I use on a regular basis.  That is a royal pain-in-the-posterior procedure that takes several days to complete and I would just as soon avoid doing if at all possible.  Taking all of those things together and changing CPUs is pointedly NOT a "simple" procedure.  Nor is it "cheap".  (In particular since I am surviving on my savings until full retirement age in three more years, having been unemployed -- and unemployable because of health + age reasons -- since 2009.)  But I suppose if "money is no object" were the case, your suggestion would have merit.

But don't you think consumers should have the right to know just what is required to run everything the product has to offer?  After all, they are paying for the complete package.  "Here, you can buy this four-passenger vehicle for _____.  But we're not going to tell you that the driver can't have any additional passengers unless he also buys these other additional features.  Not until after he's purchased the vehicle that is."  And as far as I am concerned, "Recommended" does mean "In order to take advantage of everything this game has to offer, these are the requirements you must fulfill."  At least that has been the industry standard for as long as I remember; I seem to have missed the memo as to when that policy changed.

It's been said before, and bares repeating, your CPU does not meet the recommended specs. The Q8200 is not anywhere near as powerful as an i5, even if it is listed as having the same clock speed.

Well, now says that the CPU needs to be substantially better --

INTEL CPU: Core i5-655K 3.2GHz AMD CPU: Phenom II X4 900e Nvidia GPU: GeForce GTX 460 AMD GPU: Radeon HD 5830 RAM: 6 GB OS: Win 7 64 Direct X: DX 11 HDD Space: 5 GB

But when I first got the game when it was released, what they were listing was:

While the specs of the Q8200 is actually higher than what was Recommended originally.  (2.33 GHz over 2.3 GHz required, and 4 Mb of L2 cache over the Recommended 3 Mb.)

If you have had occasion to look at Recommended specs on the website, the requirements have been creeping upward as soon as customers started to complain about performance issues.  But what they are showing as "Recommended" is still substantially less than what is actually required to have full, unimpeded performance:

PC SYSTEM RECOMMENDED SPECS:

INTEL CPU: Core i5-655K 3.2GHz AMD CPU: Phenom II X4 900e Nvidia GPU: GeForce GTX 460 AMD GPU: Radeon HD 5830 RAM: 6 GB OS: Win 7 64 Direct X: DX 11 HDD Space: 5 GB

 Even there, it is ONLY the CPU which is now deficient.

The talks about the CPU being a limiting factor are completely pointless anyways. All it would cause is that each turn would take like an eternity to be completed, but nothing more.

The REAL problem is the RAM. If you have less than or exactly 8 GB then the fastest CPU in the world won't help you overcome the performance hit you take due to Windows starting to swap contents of the RAM to the harddisk. The CPU can't do anything about that at all.

I know that, because I've got an Core i7 860 Quad with 2.8 GHz. While it is not the fastest CPU on the market it should perform more than adequately. Still I suffered a major performance issue and it was related to the system memory, because at first I only had 8 GB. Once I upgraded to 12 GB the issue was gone for good.

So... Bottom line: Even if 8 GB sounds like much it is just NOT nearly enough for anything bigger than a medium map. If you want huge maps, put at least 12 GB or better yet 16 GB for insane maps into your computer.

Then even an outdated Q8200 will do fine, at least if the motherboard supports that much memory. Yeah, the turns will take a bit longer they would on a newer CPU, but at least your computer will stop dragging/lagging and won't suffer any instabilities caused from the lack of physical memory anymore. The dragging/lagging comes from the CPU having to work on the page file which is just slow.

If your motherboard/CPU is incapable of dealing with more than 8 GB (which is common even for the earliest 64-bit CPUs and motherboards because their memory controllers weren't as sophisticated as they are now. This especially applies for legacy DDR2 based memory controllers, but also entry-level DDR3 ones) then you are screwed, because that means you can get an entirely new computer because there's NOTHING else you can do to get rid of that performance problem other than not playing huge maps.

And as far as the official system requirements go they are simply wrong and should be updated. Minimum: 8GB, Recommended: 12GB, Optimum: 16GB. That's it.

And that's precisely where I'm stuck at.  I had to spring for both a new motherboard and video card last December (they both fried at about the same time), which forced me to economize on both.  The best motherboard I could afford was the MSI 7592 which limits me to 8 Gb of DDR2 RAM.  At the time that didn't seem to be any kind of limitation, because the combination was handling everything I threw at it.  As I've said repeatedly, it wasn't until late May with the release of GC3 that I first encountered any kind of substandard performance.

If GC3 is representative of the current hardware minimum requirements, I truly am screwed.  Looks like I'll be doing nostalgia gaming (GOG titles, etc.) for the foreseeable future.