Increasing game-speed tends to bring with it a decreased framerate.

Quickstart was a feature introduced with Entrenchment, so Diplomacy has it, but Vanilla Sins does not.

Hmm.

I guess, but the game doesn't really lag when the camera is static in x8.  It just makes it harder and slower to zoom in and out. 

Low FPS cause the game to studder like a slide show.

The reason it does this is b/c you are changing the camera reference so the computer has to recalculate everything b/c your changing your reference to all the meshes, icons, textures, weaponfire, explosions, etc etc etc.

Running the game on 8x causes me alot of problems. I minidump more often doing that than I ever had with anything else. Even more so if you got large fleets/large trade routes ingame. Why are you running the game at 8x? Too slow for you? lol