Lucky Jack,

Expect your usage to climb significantly.

My current game:

• Fullscreen 1920x1080;
• Immense Galaxy - fully explored;
• All races are in - playing as the Terrans;
• Near the end of the game - turn 191;
• Ships in game 633 (of which 281 are mine);
• Starbases in game 287 (261 mine);
• Colonies 538 (496 mine);
• Base memory use (before loading GalCiv3): 2.58GB;
• Total memory in use with this game loaded and after played a number of turns: 9.06GB
  (Painful for people with only 8GB or less installed).

If it was a direct memory issue then I doubt I would be experiencing the hangs at around turn 340+ as I have 32 GB's of RAM.  Immense galaxy as well though I don't know the exact statistics of ships and planets.  I do know everything is explored and all planets except for two are colonized.

Gal Civ 3 at the menu at startup is using ~1.6 GB's.

After loading a turn 380 Hang save, the memory usage moved up to 4.35 GB's of memory for GalCiv3.

FWIW, my CTD at the start of turn on an Immense map (yes I've submitted a ticket) is more or less occurring around that point of memory usage as well.  And I've got even more memory than you do on my system. . Might be a coincidence though, since others are easily past that point with no issues.

Currently running a Gigantic game on the side and it's  pushing 3.6 GB or so at the mo.  Might be interesting  to see what happens as I play that game out.

Based upon how they programmed it... at the start of the game all of the planets are known... the only thing that should be adding memory are the modules/ships/starbases that you add... and honestly from a  memory perspective... immense with 1000  ships and star bases should impact cpu more than memory...  all of the data should be stored in arrays... maybe I am being blind here... But if your save file is not that large then the memory it would take to run the game should be somewhat correlated to it.  unless they are compressing the files on save?

jhanglyn,

the saves are zipped. Unfortunately they do not properly initialize the zip header;

Brad gave an example of the source code, where it showed that they use iteration sets to access various objects (like the planets, etc...). When you are using (multiple) iteration sets to access the underlying data your memory demand will grow exponentially, even when the actual memory for the raw data storage for your base objects (planets, ships, starbases, etc...) grows linear. Program speed at the cost of using more memory.

kuch128

I have no idea what you are doing wrong.

But i get my game "speed" by micromanaging everything, my play speed is very slow: those 191 turns took me - according to the game - 32 hours, but sometimes i leave the game open when doing something else, so the actual game play time should be lower.

I manage and upgrade all my colonies by hand. The first thing i do when colonizing a planet is to set the production wheel to the needs of that planet and disable the auto upgrading of said planet. I almost never queue up more than four buildings, unless i am certain that buildings earlier in the queue will not impact the construction speed of later improvements in the queue (like filling an entire planet with culture buildings).

I use massive amounts of star bases for their bonuses, but i only construct the modules that i actually need. This means that on the bulk of my star bases there are no defense and no approval modules (unless needed to keep planets at 100% approval) installed. The research modules are only on the star bases that cover my very few planets that actually generate research. The manufacturing modules are everywhere and maxed out. If i have a surplus of constructors then the commercial modules are build, but most of the time i initially only build them on the star bases around my financial (and trade) planet - which is quite often not my home planet.

I have loads of custom purpose ship design and custom ship classes, each for a specific need. On the larger map sizes i use multiple scout and survey ships. I have entire scout and survey ship classes up to and including the Large hull versions, and i am already planning to design them for the Huge hulls for maps larger than immense. Also i have colonizers in various version and sizes, from cheap slow ones to expensive fast one, cheap slow ones with no range to expensive one with maxed out range. Expand early and get what you can! Also the cheaper a constructor you have the more cost efficient building star base modules will be.

I do not buy techs from the other races unless it is a tech that i want and need anyway, because every tech you have slows the research of all others. I do not trade away techs that i consider useful to the other races, not matter what they would give for it, but useless techs they can have - to slow their research pace. If you trade a tech away, do not trade that tech to just one adversary but trade it to all of them. For if you don't, the AI that received your tech will definitely trade it away to the others.

On Godlike level every AI gets a tech about every 3 turns, and they trade them to everyone. Therefor you must prioritize research. Try to research a new tech at least every 3 turns - less is better. After the initial turns i get the bulk of my research from the research project. A research, commercial, or approval building is a rare thing for me.

Excess wealth is not needed, better to spend production on manufacturing and research. Like research, the bulk of my income is generated by the wealth project.

Until i am going to need them for conquest my military is just strong enough to not appear as an easy target.

The new tech age system is really hurting my play style, but i simply will not cheese my way through them by buying all the techs from the AI. And i don't mind that most of the AIs are militarily technologically more advanced than me, because i can simply build a state of the art big hulled ship on every shipyard on every turn. And if the war starts i will redirect my efforts to war techs.

But the main reason i can afford to have a weak military is ideology: 

• I choose Pragmatic Neutral at turn 81, so 100 turns of peace, resulting in total number of battles fought by me: 0;
• I went for Malevolent Undaunted, resulting in number of planets lost due to influence: 0, and i can take planets deep in their territory and culture flip their colonies;
• Total result: winning a conquest victory is possible without fighting a single battle or invading a single planet.

And yes, on the immense map you can take all the ideologies and have points left to spare.

I'm getting about 56% of physical memory being used (with 16GB RAM) on "Gigantic" map size well into game with hundreds of colonies and ships present. With no other progs running in the Taskbar.

I don't know how ppl with only 8GB will fare...