Not exactly looking for a non-Dev response other than perhaps confirmation that this is happening to other people.
What's been happening to us (me and a few other playing together most nights for the last week) is late in a game, usually 3-4 Hours in against Hard Advent computers, they will have built one of the AI's typical "Spam" fleets where they've got something like 10-20 Iconus Guardian cruisers. As soon as a player fleet enters combat with this fleet, they set off pretty much all of the Guardians' Repulsion ability. That turn then takes anywhere from 30 seconds to 2 minutes to compute only to take just as long for the next one. I was running the server and there's no way that this is some how a performance issue related to my machine. Or rather, technically it is, but shouldn't be.
After this happened the first time, we saved, I quit and restarted the game, we reloaded and had the same thing happen ~10-15 seconds in. So, me because it made sense and the others for the hell of it, all 3 of us rebooted, reloaded the save file, same problem. So we cut our loses: We were going to win anyway, and started a new game on a different map. 3hours into THAT game (and now getting to about 3 in the morning), two of our fleets clashed with another of these Guardian Spam fleets and bam, we locked in again. Fortunately, or not so fortunately? They saw 8 enemy capital ships and promptly fled and the game recovered relatively quickly, so we pressed on. 15 minutes later my own Advent fleet collided with this same enemy fleet and bam, it hung hard. My friends ended up calling it a night and going to bed but I had time and decided to see if once I killed a few of the Guardians if the lag would subside - it did. Since that night, we've stopped setting our computer opponents to random and started forcing them to be either Vasari or TEC. At first we assumed this would be a major, reported known issue and just figured we'd wait for a patch but in looking around on the boards here it doesn't look like it is.
Hang Description: The hangs were rather odd. Sometimes input would hang - mouse and UI unresponse, other times the UI would remain responsive while the game stood in place. The ping for the other two players was all over the place. Usually the UI responsive hangs would show a ping as high as 8000ms for the players so we assumed it was the connections catching up to whatever massive event had just happened. I run on two monitors, so after I rebooted and we tried again, I opened Task Manager and Resource Monitor on the second monitor and kept them up. During the hangs, the game would lock to 50% CPU Usage (or locking up 1 core entirely) and ram usage never really broke 1.45GB or so. One thing we tried before quitting the first game was I forced the game to run only on the second core using Task Manager's CPU affinity controls. This helped some and we were able to continue on for a bit but eventually enough fleets came together at once that it just died.
System Specs (dxdiag available on Dev request): Core 2 Duo E6400, Geforce 8800GTX @ 1920x1200, 4GB of Ram, Vista 32bit (so only 3GB visible), game running from a seperate, 7200RPM drive from the Windows Install and the Page File.
Other computers involved: Pentium 4 w/ 2GB of ram, Opteron 165 w/ 2GB of ram
Network connections involved:
Server: 100mbps down, 2mbps up (gotta love .edu)
Player 1: 8mbps down, 512kbps up Comcast Cable, average ping: 40
Player 2: 8mbps down, 512kbps up Comcast Cable, average ping: 40
Repro: It's 100% consistent when loading 2 save files I have hung on to. Please set me know either through a reply or forum PM if you'd like the save files and the maps we were running.
Anijo
