The empire tree is the issue requiring a paging file?
I hope so. Requiring a paging file when folks are running 12, 16, and 32GB of RAM is wildly counter-intuitive and damningly slow.
I do currently have a page file, being that I Have HDDs (platter drives) but it is relatively small. I suppose I could increase the size of it to see if it affects the game one way or another. But usually I have it turned off being that I have 32GB of Ram in my system.
There are motherboards out there that have up to 128GB of system RAM. A pagefile SHOULD NOT be needed with that much RAM. unless of course you use all that memory for video editing or something..
Also pagefile on SSD is a very bad idea. In other games, such as Dragonage Inquisition, if you have a pagefile on the SSD, it will repeatedly make 20GB writes to the drive seriously compromising the drive's life span.