For the record lower end systems shouldnt have too much trouble running sins on max settings as long as you keep your galaxy maps small (20-40 planets max).

My machine is an AMD sempron 3100+ (1.8 gig) with 2 gigs of ram, and a Gforce 6600gt (256 meg) vid card. All pretty much 3+ year old technology. At the beginning of all games i played i had a very smooth framerate. Around mid game i would see some lag due to the amount of units on the map (well over 100), but nothing game stopping. By the time of the end game is when it would start getting really laggy. This is with a 100+ ship fleet, and the AI's/Pirate units. I also take into account that all of my worlds are fortified, and i have trade ports, and refineries on most of them as well. Along with all the ships they spawn.

While the end game is laggy (5 fps laggy) it is still very much playable. This is on a single star 40 planet system with 4 AI, with pirates. A 20 planet system the end game is not near as laggy for reasons that are self explanatory. You have 1/2 the planetary units on the map. These are the results with my system. Your mileage may vary depending on what type of system you run, and what hardware you have.

I guess after reading the other reports I shoud have included more information. When I let it run for 11 hours I had 14 planets ( an entire star system ) fully fortified and over 300 ships. Everything on every planet was maxed out with 5 fighter bays and max turrets as well as fully developed logistics and planetary improvements. On every asteroid and planet that would support it I had 2 broadcast centers and sometimes 4 so the culture should have bled through to the next star system but it didnt.

I am running a homebuilt PC with a 2.5ghz dual core AMD processor, 2 7800GTX Vid cards in SLI, 2 gigs of high end RAM, X-Fi Plat Sound card all plugged into an ASUS A8N-SLI Delux MoBo. Everything is overclocked way past spec but super phi and rime 95 stable on a 48 hour run. Temps are 38 idle and 48 under full load. I exerianced no artifacts during game play.

I thought I would reinterate that there realy should be, especialy in multilayer, an option to set ship speed. It should be smething like, Slow (current speed), Normal ( 25% faster), Fast (50% Faster than currently), Very Fast (75% Faster), Uber (100% Faster). This would allow better or more experianced players to battle it out in multiplayer. Nothing kills a good game in multi player mode like games that take over 2 hours to play a match. It is okay how it is for single player because you can save and come back to it and play but that is not the case in multi player. I have played some realy great games with multi layer options but when I went online to play there were hardly any peole to play with because that aspect of the game was killed by how long it takes to finish a match. When you do actualy find a group to play with you amost never get to actualy finish a game because you or the other players have to go long before the match is finished.

The build times feel about right and there should be little or no adjustment though you could make this a seperate adjustable speed option. I wouldnt combine ship and build speed into one speed setting because this would effectivy make it instant build for a reasonable ship speed.