Specs needed for Insane map?

i7 laptop with gen 3 cpu, 16 ram and Radeon 7910.

It will slow down after a while but never bad.

I play All games as insane with at least 10 majors and 5 minors. Usually Insane with 49 total.

I have an I5 3570k over clocked to about 4.2 ghz. I was using 8 gigs of ram but had a bit too much lag. When I upgraded both my video card (from 2gigs to 4 gigs) and my ram from 8 gigs to 16g, I have found play just find. My turn times after 250+ turns is about 15 to 20 seconds depending on Zoom level I have at that time. 

I only play on Insane maps and I play with NO less than 30 majors and abundant Minors. 

I see.. my specs is

Intel R Core TM i7-2600 CPU @3.40GHz (8 CPUs), ~3.4GHz
8192MB Ram.

What's my bottleneck that needs to be fixed to play on insane map smoothly? The ram alone?

The PC i'm playing on was originally bought to play only PSO2 alone, but .. we all know how that turned out. Never came to usa.

I suspect it is the RAM alone.  I have an i7, 8G RAM, and NVIDIA graphics with 4G, and I lag on immense like you do.

i recently upgraded my ram from 8 to 16 gig's and have no lag. I7 processor with geforce 630/w 4gigs. so upgrading your memory should be your best bet. 

My desktop has an Intel i7 4790k 4.0GHz CPU, 32GB of RAM and a Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 4GB GPU and I don't get any lag on insane maps. But my laptop has an Intel i5 3317U 1.7GHz CPU, 8GB of RAM and a Nividia GeForce GT 620M 1GB GPU and even though it is below the minimum specs it runs all map sizes up to Gigantic fine. Anything higher and it starts to lag.

I can tell you from feedback I've received from support...  Needed for Max Players on Insane Map...

16 GB RAM (plus)

Better than an AMD FX 9370 8 core CPU

Better than an R9 270x GPU 2GB.

Why?  This game will run just fine with 20-30 sec or faster turn times to begin the game.  After around 200 turns (may be shorter than that depending on galaxy settings).  When you meet more races and gain the exploration treaty with all factions, your turn time will jump to 3-5 minutes with these system spec.  According to support this is normal game is working as intended and you need to be understanding of your game settings with your system.

The good thing with this is that once you start to kill off several of the factions, I'm around 85 now and the turn times have dropped back down to between 30 seconds to a minute.

Mass annihilation simply for the sake of shorter turn times, have you no shame? 

Seriously, that is interesting information.  It helps me understand my much more modest rig and what I can expect and do with it.  I had already done the 16 gig of ram, and that made a bunch of difference.  The rest would require a rework from the motherboard on up. 

To me, it shows that Stardock has made the software as flexible as possible about its workload along with other software tricks I wouldn't ever recognize.  The performance issues are demonstrably a big priority and consideration.  This is good, because what they have done with the extreme sizes and faction counts is an ambitious effort and will strain all current day rigs under the right settings.   They have future-proofed the game in an interesting way.  I have high hopes that future optimization passes will have incremental but appreciable efficiency buffs.  There is a lot of thought hidden under all the space battles and planet screens.  It gives me a certain level of anticipation for someday when I get a full built rig for my birthday or something.

Right, time to kill off all the factions