Ok,  so the AMD being at fault goes out the window with this one.

I'm the oppostie, at the beginning of the game (first 2-3 minutes) I get lots of lag, but then it settles down. Every once in a while it will lag for a second or two late game, but that's it.

Sins was designed to run on low spec machines. Everytime I have seen major lag from players when doing MP games, the issue is either a bottled internet connection or they are running it on high(est) settings, which their rig cannot handle.

I have this too, sometimes it resolves and other times it doesn't!

Well, it looks to me like if they didn´t give a rats ass about it...

I don't believe X3 tracks each and every ship individually when outside the planet well you're currently in. So at most it's probably tracking, what 25-50 entities (depends on how many ships you have on other planets, it probably tracks those but not the exact coordinates and positioning of other ships in that planet well) maybe? Sins is probably tracking that many entities at the start of a 6-player game, at least.

Disclaimer: I only played X3 briefly before giving up on that game after the AI decided to happily crash my spaceship into an asteroid while on autopilot when i was in the restroom, so I'm assuming quite a bit in that case.

I am having the same problems with the game slowing down to a crawl. My system surpasses all the recommended requirements by far. Plenty of ram and a fast cpu etc. I also thought it might be related to how many ships were in the game, so I just played (tried to at least) a small map, 1 AI player and myself. I only built the 16 cap ships and no others,  Did not build ant trade ports or refineries. The game ran fine for about an hour till I had captured about 15 planets (asteriods etc), then it began to slow down. By the time I had captured about 20 systems it was crawling, and bumping the game speed up to 8x made it even slower. I would think that if it was related to the number of ships the AI has to deal with, then me not building any (other than Cap Ships) and capturing more systems and destroying the AIs trade ports, his fleets, and refineries, that the game would speed up rather than slow down even more? This is a serious problem and really needs to be addressed!

DEVS you got any thing to help us out with this problem?

The cpu and ram running out of resources to process all that would be a great excuse if only my CPU actually said that it was using more than 65ish%( and that is one core most of the time haha).

Online the lag seems far more minimal.  However there seems to be a higher chance of a minidump.

I have a feeling it's linked almost 100% to the sheer number of tradeships and fighter/bombers that rises so quickly in a many player (ai and real both) game.  I've noticed when I reduced the number of tradeships/port refinerships/refinery; and fighters&Bombers/squadron to 1, that it delayed the lag on my pc considerably.  

I'll mod fighters, bombers, tradeships, and refinery ships out of my game completely and play a 150 planet 3 star map with 9 unfairs and post the results here.

P.S. Before my original mod-work, my gametime to realtime scale would be 1 to 1 for about an hour, then quickly degraded to about 1 to 5 (1 minute of gametime for every 5 minutes realtime) After reducing the number of the abovementioned ships, I delayed it to about 2.5 hours into the game.    That's what I'll be quantifying when I come back with my result... With none of those extra ships to be worked on by the CPU/ held in memory / swapped to&from the HD, how much longer does it take the game to slow to 20% speed (if it does at all)?

Im having the same Problem on 2 different machines these 2 machines will handle anything I throw at them except SOASE

Phenom II X4  940 @ 3 ghz 

HIS Radeon 4870 1 gb Factory Oced 750/4ghz

8gb Gskill @1066 @5 5 5 15

Vista Home Premium 64 Sp1

Other Machine

Intel core 2 quad Q6600 @ 2.6 ghz

Diamond Radeon 4830 1 gb

3 gb Kingston Hyper x @1066 @5 5 5 15

Windows XP Sp3

Im having the same Problem You guys are having these 2 machines will handle anything I throw at them except SOASE.I used to PlayHomeworld 2 and Neverwinter Nights alot  and these games can expierence slowdowns and stutter especially with alot going on in the game so I would turn off all un needed background running processes including AMD Cool and quiet if it was a AMD based system and that woulld fix the issue but not with this game.Im frustrated everything I have tried doesnt work.

Since we haven't had a response from the developers since this thread was initially started, I sent a PM to Blair myself.

Anyone else experiencing the "Slow down" bug. please take a moment and explain what's happening.

I would like to bring this thread to the devs attention, if I don't receive a reply from Blair Fraser, then the next step will be to start emailing IronClad & Stardock as well.

one or two rants can be written off & ignored, but the more people that vocalize their concern & experience with this bug, the more promptly I believe we can have it addressed, and correct.

If there are any other threads floating around the board that relate to this specific topic/issue, kindly copy the link & post it here so that this thread is comprehensive.

Well, that would be really nice

Soonish. When exactly is the 1.02 patch comin´ out ?