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Stellaris and Performance

Is Stellaris endgame playable?

The latest update brought another DLC as well as some performance updates. The latter has been in the crosshairs for a bit now, and the team has supposedly made quite some improvements in the way things are calculated, and how your cores are used.

But is there a difference really? What does Stellaris v. 2.8.1 change?

According to the team, they removed some checks for refugees, improved loading times at startup, changed some calculations to be done weekly instead of daily and so on. Without a doubt, these do make some sort of a difference. Read full patch notes at Paradox Forums.

A thousand pops and over

Granted, my brand new gaming laptop is now a few years old (but newer than the game), and it wasn’t top of the line anyways. Games like HoI4 and Imperator: Rome also stutter and slow down once the numbers get too high. It doesn’t run most other games super well either, but the CPU and other stats do fit the recommended requirements over at Stellaris Steam page.

And the game does still slow down when the year 2400 comes around. When I last played Stellaris, which was probably more than a year ago, the same issue happened. Whether medium or small map (there’s no point even trying huge for me) the game simply slows down once the galaxy becomes overcrowded. What was once a month is now a week, and as things progress that week will soon be a day…and given that by 2400 you’re usually waiting for the crisis to fire with everyone else defeated, there is little point to do but to start all over again.

In other words, there seem to be some small updates to performances, but for anyone with an “adequate” PC, those don’t really make a difference. The game still won’t run smooth in the endgame.

Space battles seem to lag less though, even massive ones…based on all this, I could say that I can now make it to 2500 instead of 2400 before the game becomes unplayable. In other words, I can just about finish a game on small or medium universe.

For those that can afford Huge Galaxies

If you have a proper gaming computer, the changes can and do make a difference. What we’re talking about, according to the devs, is improvements in the 10 – 15% range. If that’s the sort of delay or decrease you’re seeing, then it’s time to jump back into the wonderful universe of Stellaris, and perhaps give the new DLCs a spin.

Now, whether those DLCs are actually worth playing, or if the game has reached its zenith, is a subject for another discussion.

To sum things up, if you were previously capable fo playing on huge universes, you can now do so with considerably less lag. If your computer couldn’t run those settings earlier, they can’t do so now either.