I have a pretty nice Dell with 8 gig of RAM. I bought it in February for this game in particular, lmao. The wife actually understood. Anyway, I've had no issues, but I haven't cleared 160 turns on any Insane map yet. No issues, just wanted a different game. 

Question: Should I expect problems with an Insane map down the road? I play 25-41 factions, max planets at 300 with different combinations. Any ideas?

Yeah, expect pretty ugly performance after several hours of play. I'd recommend to save & exit and restart & load the game after every 2-3 hours of play or so.

Otherwise the game engine will start thrashing your main memory up until the point where it consumes more than 8 GB of RAM, starting to use the Virtual Memory on your Hard Disk too, after which point your computer will start to lag like hell and the game becoming totally unplayable and unstable because it seems like some of the game mechanics/UI stuff is working fine only on low latency timings and with the extremely high latency Virtual Memory UI bugs, getting stuck and/or crashes become much, much more common.

As I wrote above this is only partly true. I had 8 GB up until a week ago. This becomes a huge problem already on Gigantic maps with only the default factions being active. There seems to be something like a creepy-crawly memory leak because the game starts thrashing RAM after about 2-3 hours like crazy, using typically 3-4 GB (and more) more than it actually needs.

I figured that out after I put an additional 4 GB into my machine for a total of 12 GB now. While at first the game ran much more smoothely, but I always kept an eye on the task manager in the background and noticed that eventually at some point the game will increase RAM usage about 1-2% every 10-15 minutes. Once my system reaches 90% of RAM usage I basically restart the game and then it's back to usually only 6 GB.

I have seen other people reporting/having this issue too so I guess the memory management of the game seems to have a bug somewhere.

True. It's not like the memory leak is causing a direct crash or something. It's more like the "running out of physical memory"/"working on Virtual RAM" that eventually leads to system wide instability causing Windows to slow down to a crawl which takes 10 minutes to recover from once you killed the game, if the game doesn't crash by itself anyways because it seems like it can't handle its own awesomeness anymore at that point.

But yes, basically it's do-able on 8 GB, but I would not recommend anything beyond Gigantic Maps because sometimes I found that with huge savegame files with far advanced progress that the game already works on Virtual RAM directly after loading, exceeding the 8 GB of physical RAM and no way to prevent that even before any memory leaks further degrading performance become noticeable.

So if one wants to have some room to breath I'd recommend to have at least 12 GB in the computer, otherwise even periodically restarting the game to get rid of the memory leak won't help improving system performance.

Gigantic Maps and beyond are definitely not designed for machines having only 8 GB of RAM, the "actual" System Requirements are played down by a lot, but as I watched the latest Devstream they said anyways that they might increase the written system requirements because they don't display the truth.

as long as it is a opt in you can opt out when it goes live you`ll have to update. I`m not sure how you can stay at 1.01 and still play steam seem to force you to update. As Far As I Know.

Echillion what do you want exactly???

All I wanted was the base amounts for stars and habitable planets to remain the same as 1.0 or 1.01 so I could play up to 100 opponents on a insane map without us all only having 5-6 planets with only 1 shipyard each. ( I have 16GB ram and did test it during the beta's and 1.0 so it runs fine) I've been waiting for the game to be more stable before I started a proper insane sized map as I didn't want to have to constantly redesign my ships like Rand Johnson had to during the beta releases. Hopefully we wont be stuck with this nerf but if we are I'll have to learn how to mod the files.

Quoting RavenX,

reply 159

I tried 1.03 today but left the modded files from this thread in the mods folder and they over-wrote the 1.03 generation. Still getting maps with 1000 plus planets . Luckily the mod folder seems to be untouched by updates so far.

any thing in your mod folders she not be touch by an update. but that does not mean that they`ll show or work after ward I`ve had to update my mapsizedefs a few times!

LOL don`t Run to me ATM my mods are broke after update!

Be glad to help when I can!!

that goes for every one!!

Quoting BuckGodot,

reply 165

Can anyone confirm that this fix is still working as of 1.0.3 opt-in?  I've seen some reports of some mods breaking and I wanted to see if this one still works.  I'd check myself, but I've been taking a bit of a break from GC III this week.

form what I seen the custom races made with the editor are working. Any made like made form the factiondefs and put in the mod folder are not working. the game seem to be skipping the mods again!

yeah it should work OK the Dev`s are working on this as I write this!! they`ll fix it soon!

Thanks.  Guess I'll have to boot into Windows and see what is going on.

EDIT::: After checking the Mods Broke master thread, looks like this has already been fixed.  Potentially at least.  So I'll check it out later after things settle down a bit.

It`s probably a bad time to be making Mods while Patches are coming this fast.

It's been pretty much a neverending stream of patches since the beginning of April. I've just learned to accept it.