REALLY choppy game play

Are you running 1.05? I know there were issues, eventually all the AI routines and ability calculations start bogging the system down. There were some optimizations for this in 1.05, and I think 1.1 will have some more.

Does the same thing persist if you save the choppy game and reload it?

happens to me too. my system is pretty close to yours. some things that have helped me besides the obvious of playing smaller maps is to reduce the fleet size. This will cut back on the number of ships the AI is using. Fewer ships = fewer calculations.

Welcome to the world of 4X games. Back in the day, CivII/III would bog down my computer with 3 GHz, 512MB RAM, and a 64 MB graphics card not because my computer didn't pwn the requirements 4-8 times over, but because of the sheer number of calculations that must occur late in the game. Every 4X game I've ever had has been the same way. The more stuff there is going on, the longer it would take turns to calculate. Unfortunately, there isn't really a solution that I've been able to find. Even a dual-core overclocked processor and hardcore gaming hardware won't keep you from choppiness in this genre.
SoaSE seems a little different, though. I have noticed no lag even late game on maps with upwards of 80 planets; my only slowdowns occurred when fleets of 200+ ships were fighting, and these were mild. Of course, this could be due to my system:
2x 512MB NVIDIA Geforce 8800M GTX in SLI
4GB RAM
2.5 Ghz Core 2 Duo

It's even worse for Sins. In true 4x games the AI has essentially an incredibly long time to decide what to do during the player turn. A 5 second peek at the research screen is more than enough time it needs. But in Sins everything is real-time, so the AI constantly has to work for it, so to speak.

In one of the early interviews, Blair (the IC lead) actually said that the AI is the main CPU hog, and that they actually had trouble with it and had to leave some stuff out of the AI until they figure out how to put it in and not choke the cpu

Yep, It's 1.05. I played with the settings and found out that by settings the effects to high, not highest, the game allows for decent play without TOO much choppiness. Thats with 1440x900. It's as choppy as setting the effects to lowest and the resolution to 1280x768.

Setting all the effects to highest, it becomes unbearable. That's with 1440x900. I don't understand why at 1280x768, lowest effects, the game play is as choppy as 1440x900 with high effects.

Hummm....Starting to seems like I need a better video card then, seeing that BHunterseal doesn't seem to have too much problem running the game. Darn.

I think your problem is 1) The video card. Kinda old now actually and 2) Vista

However as said you can have the highest end game machine in the land and a 4x game will slow down late game just due to the high number of calculations going on. My PC smokes the specs for Civ 4 (2..3 yrs old now?) and late game in Civ 4 and things slow down, especially if there are a lot of wars going on.

Exactly. And that's true for any 4X game on any computer, period. My computer, previously mentioned, shreds the requirements for Civ II. By over 500x. (8MB RAM vs. 4 GB RAM, no video card required vs. 2x512 MB GeForce8800GTX, 33 Mhz. vs. 2.5 Ghz dual-core)
And playing on massive maps against 8 opponents on the highest difficulty setting still causes slowdowns late-game. Don't blame yourself, blame the genre.

Hunter, if you managed to get this game running decent on large maps, 9x hard AIs, late game, I'd like to know what your secret is. Mine is chugin' at less than 60 planets and a little over 3 hours in. I have all of the detail at lowest level and turned off all effects and it still chugs. I'm not even talking about watching battles, just trying to scroll the map zoomed out and it chugs. My system specs are similar to yours, cept your video cards are better:

3.00Ghz Core 2 Duo
4 GB if ram
XP OS
1x NVidia 8600 GT

I run this game at 1680x1050, all settings maxed, except for Anti Aliasing. I have a nvidia GEforce 8600 GT, 1.5 gb of ram, andsome bs processor that i dotn even know the name of, but tis 2.20 ghz. In every game thats come out in the last year or two, its the antialiasing that gets me.
I can run, for instance, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl at maxed settings, no antialiasing, and get an average of 30-40 FPS. With antialiasing maxed i get 25-35 FPS, but the screen stutters. Horribly, unplayably. Even if I set everything to low but antialiasing high, it still stutters.

I don't know what I was getting at in this rant, except for this: Try turning your anti aliasing down. It helps a LOT.

Yeah, antialiasing is a performance-killer. You could try not using it at all, or using it on a lower setting. Going from none to 2x or so makes a big visual difference with a moderate performance hit, but upping your AA settings further give less and less of a visual boost while creating more and more of a slowdown.

@kublikhan: I have a few secrets. First, I have 2x8800 GTX cards, which makes a huge difference with the SLI performance boost. I'm also an XP stripper: I rip out all of the stupid features it comes with, so I only have a couple services and programs running at start-up. I have made so many performance tweaks that I could never remember or list them all. Here are a few that make a big difference:

1. Make sure the game's antialiasing isn't competing with your driver's for GPU time. That is, set AA to Application Setting in your driver menue. Turn of transparency antialiasing as well; I have not noticed any sort of difference this makes in terms of graphics quality, but it sure gives a nice FPS boost.

2. Get the latest drivers for everything, from BIOS to video card to sound card.

3. Don't have any other programs running. I've gone into Windows and made so many changes that I can't mention them all here, but there are ways of ensuring that NOTHING competes with your games for CPU time or RAM usage.

4. I have dual-channel RAM, do you? Also I have a gaming high-speed harddrive.

5. Make performance adjustments in your GeForce driver menu as needed.

All of these things will help. I've never noticed slow performance in Sins even against 8 Hard AI's on huge random maps with all settings from super-resolution to AA to all effects.

AA is off(at least in the game settings). 0 other apps running. Dual Channel Ram, OS HD is an ultra high performance I-Ram drive, game itself installed on a raptor HD. My video driver was about 6 months old. I tried upgrading to the latest version but it did not help. I suppose I could check to see if there are any updates for the sound and motherboard drivers. I'll try tweaking the settings in the NVidia driver as well, perhaps I have the settings in the driver too high. Thanks for the tips.

I had a similar problem, but I thought it was because I had over 200 Trade and Refinery ships going from planet to planet, combined with getting 126 Credits; 20 Metal; 20 Crystal / second.
Also You cannot have 8GB RAM, The most a PC will reconize is 4GB.

Cooley did you solve your slow down problem?

BTW, you can have over 4GB of ram if you have a 64bit platform, which his post says he does. 8GB seems excessive to me though, I would think 4GB should be more than enough.

No, I wasnt able to fix it, I was thinking of buying some pc opmization software. And 4 GB for me is enough, but I did not know you could have 8GB.