Ran into a situation last night I hadn't seen before: a battle so big the game got clogged up and could not resolve damage, although it did not lock up or stop.

I was playing on a custom map with three stars, each of which had just five planets. One star was me (TEC). One was Advent. The last was Vasari. Both AIs set as Hard Random.

I had wiped out Advent and colonized all of their planets. I was ranked #1 in everything except Fleet, even though I was maxed out on fleet size. Vasari (haven't played them yet) must have some way to boost their max fleet size.

My main invasion fleet tried to attack the Vasari homeworld but got cut to shreds because they had so many strikecraft and I was short on flak frigates. So I made a second fleet with about 40 flak frigates. Then both of my fleets attacked their homeworld again at the same time. I had 9 cap ships, 7 of them at Level 10. I had 55 air wings and a total of about 200 ships. The Vasari had 50 cruiser carriers, lots of defenses, and a total of about 200 ships.  I'd say each fleet represented about 1100 fleet supply.

And the game couldn't handle it at all. For a solid 10 minutes I watched to see what would happen. Battle appeared to be taking place, but I did not lose a single ship. I kept monitoring the enemy fleet summary on the side of the planet icon when you zoom out, and it kept showing the numbers of fighters and bombers fluctuating--but never dropping below 20 each, and I never killed a single ship! When I would zoom in, things looked weird--only about five percent of the craft were in the grav well--the rest were all smeared out, green (me) and red (them) interspersed, in a long line outside the grav well (but from a zoomed out perspective, they were not in space or in phase lanes but just in orbit at the planet). At this point the game was also running painfully slow, despite a cold reboot, and was painfully slow at zooming.

Eventually I tired of this logjam and moved my main invasion fleet away. Then the game was able to resolve things, and the Vasari destroyed my fleet of flak frigates in about 30 seconds, before I had time to warp them out.

So then I ran my main invasion fleet around and wiped out the remaining Vasari planets, playing cat and mouse with their very huge defense fleet, which kept chasing me, and I won the game in just another 15 minutes or so.

But it was kind of frustrating. I had the power--I should have been able to smash their main fleet in the battle I had chosen.

I've been playing like crazy since the day this was released, and this is the first time I've had the game just plain clearly get overwhelmed by fleet size. So far I haven't had a single "minidump" or other lockup. I have noticed that the game gets a bit sluggish after a few hours sometimes, but a boot cures that.

Comments?

P.S. Another question: I noticed in that game last night that when zoomed in to see a grav well, the camera would always keep moving around, often apparently in a 360 degree motion, even when I did not even have my hand on the mouse.  I turned off "shake camera" in the options, but that didn't seem to make a difference.  Is the camera supposed to move, at all, ever, if you're not actively moving it yourself?