Howdy.

First, here's my rig:

Win XP
Athlon 64 FX-60 2.6Ghz dual core
3GB RAM
Raptor 10k rpm HD
nVidia 7800 GTX

It's a couple of years past it's best, but from what i'd heard on the grapevine, SINS runs on all sorts of old machines, and I figured that my setup was at least ballsy enough to run the game on modest settings.

And it is; if I play small and medium maps, with just one star system, things are fine.  There's a little slowdown when things are getting really mental but all in all it's still very playable.

BUT ... if I step up to larger maps - say with 50 planets across a few star systems - after a few hours of playing, when I've got a few large fleets threatening my borders and a couple of large fleets myself defending them, everything just starts to slow down really quite badly.  Zooming in and out of the map to keep an eye on what's going on becomes a very choppy affair, and once I get into big battles with hundreds of ships fighting it out, well, it gets pretty unplayable.  The interface stops responding instantly and I have to click-wait to select things, and like I say the frame rate gets really choppy.

Is my system just too limited to play the bigger maps?  I've got all the graphics turned down to low.  I figured I had plenty of overhead in my system to play a game like Sins.  My guess is that, with the game engine having to keep track of everything that's going on in the star systems I can't see, my system is just starting to chug.

Does anyone have any idea if I should be able to play the large maps with my system, or if perhaps I could if I optimise the game in some way?

Many thanks!