Long Pauses after several Hours - Diplomacy

Um, no its not. Concentrating on frigates is actually a much better thing for the AI (and most players) to do. Capitalships are only useful if you can either get them to high levels or use their abilities for maximum effect. The AI is not very good at either, so using frigates is the better option as they have better stats per fleet supply and cost. So even if your idea reduces lag (I'm not sure if it would), it comes at the price of easier AI.

Also you should check if your problem occurs in single player. That's a much better test as it could just be your connection that's having problems.

You can trust me whan I say it is not a connection issue.  this crap even happens on a local lan connection. with a gigabit switch.  if it has connection issues with a direct gigabit switch then this game blows hard.,  No, this is the AI and it making hundreds of stupid frigates.  the AI over uses them.

Just as the post above you said, a frigate-heavy and capship-light fleet is better than the opposite. The problem is not so much with the AI's ship-building priorities so much as with your idea of what a good fleet should be. 50 supply worth of capital ships is not necessarily the same firepower as 50 supply worth of frigates.

While the more objects there are (like frigates), the slower the game runs, that alone shouldn't cause the game to freeze for minutes at a time (even if there are hundreds of them).

I have noticed peculiar pauses of a similar type in long AI games, but they rarely last more than 45 seconds.

If you have a lot of strikecraft (75+ squads), ordering them to do anything (or having them auto-attack) often causes the game to freeze up for a second or two when they re-target... but I have no idea what might cause minutes of nonresponsiveness.

haha... ya, lets tell the ai to be purposefully more stupid than it already is.

All I can say is that it exist and its a major problem, has been for some time now even with the older patches.

Agreed, I have this problem really bad with Diplomacy but Entrenchment doesn't do it.

It seems like (or emulates) a bug with the efficiency of the game engine in later game stages.

I tried playing two games in Diplomacy and had horrible frame rate loss to the point of it slowing exactly as the user about said (1 to 1/2 hours in or so). Then I started a game of Entrenchment with no problems out of the norm.....6+ hours and still fine. I then tried starting another Diplomacy game and the issue was still there.

...and now I'm done wasting hours, but I had to see for myself.

While I understand Diplomacy added new features, one would not think that it could bog down Entrenchment so much unless there's a game engine issue (or just some efficiency bug that needs to be fixed).

After combining this experience with what others have said on the forms (there's other people around complaining about it) I have to agree that Diplomacy still has some issues that need to be worked out. The playability between the two is too drastic to be unnoticeable. That expansion doesn't represent that bell curve present in other RTS games that come with more unit types\numbers added over time(or so it seems). The frames simply drop down to about one\second in a matter of a few minutes time (from the start of really noticeable choppiness).

Using an older machine:

Windows XP Pro - 4 gigs memory - AMD 2x core processor OC'ed to 3.9ghz - ATI Radeon HD 4850 (I gig oncard)

drivers updated and runs several other games like a champ (or as well as expected on a machine like this)

This is why I'm convinced its a code issue...other users with better computers then mine are having the same issue.

Testing this out to see if we can reproduce. If the OP could please send in a dxdiag for the system(s) being used and a single-player game save file (zipped) where this is occurring to [email protected], that would be great.

I'm convinced it's a video card issue.

I had the exact same thing happen to me, and when I ran a diagnostics, my video card was overtaxed and was busy resetting itself during the pauses.

If it is Video, then its NVidia, I have all the latest drivers installed too.  I have had two differant Videos cards from NVidia, the one currently is a GTX 470 I originally had a GTX 270.  this has been going on with the game for a very long time, several patches from IC and several differant drivers over the past two years.

Ive always releated this pausing due to the mass amount of ships, but again, this issues seems to only happen after about 2.5 to 3 hours into a game.  I have played Single player games to and gotten the same results.

I have to add, that I did notice  right before the game pauses if you are giving commands or doing an upgrade to a Capship that the mouse acts very laggy and seems to hard to click on the icon. this I have noticed happening several times before the pauses hit.  Sometimes even during the lag when you click the mouse it would jump to another icon when giving that command.

Yarlen, I will send you that DXInfo shortly, thanks for ask and looking in to the issue.  Great game, love it as do my friends, but the pausing just drives you crazy when it happens.

Email has been sent, thanks Yarlen.