so I guess everyone is having poor FPS regardless of GPU?

Same as Lucky Jack, I have a GTX 670 and get great frame rates. 

I have a GTX-570 running 1900x1080 window and getting 55-60

It runs fine on my 760 gtx. You should ensure that the game is using your high-performance card. There is a GPU notifaction icon you can turn on to ensure that it is actually using it. Be sure that you individual .exe is not set to use the intel HD card. You should update your intel HD drivers in case they are out of date as this may cause some problems.

Ensure you are running no other programs when you run GalCiv3, try to run as few things as possible.

Try running the game immediately after you reboot your computer.

Try running the program in lower resolutions. Try running the program in full screen with your laptops recommended resolution.

Ensure that your computer is in a cool place and is relatively cool, sometimes your computer will slow down its performance to ensure that the computer won't overheat.

Run the game with the laptop plugged in. There are other power settings that may override your settings. In other words, your nVidia card will not be running if you are running on battery power and you have the settings not set for High Performance, but battery saver.

These are my best suggestions beyond updating drivers in your computer in general.

Also, you should send a support ticket to Stardock to see if they can help resolve your issues.

There are a lot of tests you can perform to see if some of your hardware is actually working. I.e. test the ram for errors, test the hard drive for errors, benchmark the video card to ensure that it is working. Note that these hardware tests will take a LOT of time and you should try the above before messing with testing the hardware.

I have this problem as well. Went around with support for a while. They don't seem to know what the problem is, and are assuming that it will get fixed when they optimize everything.

In the meantime, try using your integrated chipset to play the game. For me, this tripled my framerate, into the playable range. 

Quick update.  Support responded, they said that this is a know issue with certain integrated graphics/discrete graphic card setups and they are working with AMD and Nvidia to resolve. Looking around it is clear that more than just a few have had the problem.

I know they will fix it, my goal was to be sure they knew they had a problem.

Otherwrise, play on!

More couldn't hurt. I looking to get more as I too have 8 gig.

I've not been keeping track. But right now I think they are keeping ram usage pretty low. I don't think we will be using more than 4 gig at the moment. Higher ram requirements will be necessary for late game huge maps, but they haven't really release that yet. Mind you this is all speculation. The start of the game is using a little more than 2 gig. Maybe others have been keeping more track of this.

There'll be eight major races (Terrans, Drengin, Altarians, Iridium, Krynn, Yor, Iconians, Thalan), plus an indefinite amount of minor races. More will be added via expansions and DLC (like a major race version of the Snathi).

I've seen memory usage around 3.5Gb-4Gb. Memory usage in task manager on the last dev stream showed it was at about 3.2Gb when it locked up.

This topic was also mentioned in the last dev livestream.

https://forums.galciv3.com/454038

So what are your thoughts about the AI so far? I was rather disappointed with Twilight of the Arnor. I felt the AI had degraded since the previous version, the name of which I forget at the moment.