Well, first off, I'd like to take a moment to say I love this game, even though I'll have to reinstall it, apparently.
The first thing I want to make note of is my system specs, for the record. I'm running an Intel Pentium IV 2.8 Ghz with hyper-threading. My system has expanded to 1.5 Gb of RAM (1,536 MB of it, precisely), and I'm using an NVidia GeForce 6600 with 128 onboard RAM. (I am not satisfied with this purchase, as I think I was ripped off, but c'est la vie, it's what I have to work with. I was assured by the salesperson, whom I now think was talking out of his arse, that the 6600 GT used a newer form of RAM which was, quote, "twice as fast".)
So, it's not exactly a dinosaur, though it may not by a redhot gaming rig.
My first complaint was the crippling lategame slowdown. It only happened at certain ranges, so I am inclined to believe it was primarily graphics slowdown rather than the AI and my massive empire (almost a whole system, wow) hogging up the cycles. Specifically, at a far zoom, it worked fine, at a medium zoom the slowdown was crippling - we're talking seconds per frame - and at very very close zoom, it worked fine again. Is this a known issue, is it solely related to my graphics card, or is there anything I can do to help mitigate this? (I already turned planet trails off, turned off ship trails, turned off dust clouds.)
My second curiousity is that, sometime in the late game, the sound seemed to get corrupted, presenting a lot of electronic scratching sounds and static sounds, in addition to the normal music. This was I felt a very strange thing, but restarting the game didn't correct it; indeed, the problem appeared on the menu screen! I think this is a very strange thing...
