You can play fine without internet.

I play with the overlay and will un-check it just to see. My internet was completely down yesterday and steam will ask if you want to go in 'offline' mode. 

I did not know you needed steam to play and have not tried to close steam while the game is running. 

Forgive me for saying so, but you sound something like a "Bigger is better" elitist.  But then, it IS something of a truism that "If you can buy it, it already is obsolete."  That's seems to always have been the case going all the way back to the '80s.  But as I see it, if a PC rig is inadequate, it would NEVER be able to run a hardware intensive game at "normal" speed.  Yet, with my archaic setup, I have been able to run the game for as much as 5+ hours at a time, with not the slightest hint of lagging.  Other times...

I'd really like to know where you shop for hardware.  "... a sub-$200 budget model even when it was released in 2012"?  I purchased it on sale at Best Buy at Xmas 2014 for $243.  The cheapest online price I could find at that time had it listed at >$200.  In 2014.  

It may be that revealing the map and increased number of colonies do go hand-in-hand.  When the lagging started (if there was lagging at all) was when I had @15 colonies and had uncovered @15% of the Insane galaxy hex.  (It may be worth mentioned that in setup, I tried for "Abundant" for both systems and planet count.).  But now that I've turned off the Steam overlay, despite having revealed >85% of the entire map and colonized @100 planets, I have only occasional lagging.  (@30seconds or less once every 10 minutes or so.)

 17 terabytes?  It's hard to imagine 95+% of players having anywhere near that kind of computational ability.  Anything above ONE terabyte is just now starting to become commonplace.  (>10% of consumers)  And that's for the hard drive.  Last year (last time I had my PC upgraded) 8 Gb of RAM was considered "more than adequate".  16 Gb is this year's "must have more than to have a high end machine" guideline.  32 Gb is what "bleeding edge" top performers for a Personal Computer would be.  Heck right now, the going rate for 32 Gb DDR3 is >$200, just for the RAM of the system.  That kind of pricing would put the cost of the rest of the system at >$1000 ... for a rig that WILL be inadequate in less than 3 years.  That kind of pricing would be out of the reach of nearly everyone that isn't at least Upper Middle Class.  (A shrinking percentage of the population.)

Except I think mine was the Zotac model.  However, the link you posted for my card said 89.99 pounds = $142.91.  The "good" price now is $138.69, but that's for just 1 Gb of VRAM, but mine has 4 Gb.  And last December, Amazon.com was listing that 1 Gb version for $212.  From @$210 to @$140 in six months is actually about how fast hardware prices drop -- which is why so so many players are using "last year's hardware" instead of buying the current "latest and greatest".  [And then being told six months later, "Your system really is outdated and and underpowered for the current generation of games."]   How many players do you think have access to the kind of deals you get from "my regular suppliers"?  Your price is probably tied into the volume discount you get from being a regular commercial buyer for your job.  The rest of us mere mortals can only dream about ever getting those kinds of discounts. 

 Actually, I was striving for "adequate".  Older, yes, but well within the spec parameters for what Stardock was describing in the "Recommended specs".

I believe that I started this game some time before the 1.1 patch was released.  That would mean that the number of planets would remain the same as to the program, the map is already mapped out and pre-determined, even for those (few) areas I haven't uncovered yet.

All that aside, given the woeful inadequacies of my hardware, how would it even be possible to get several hours of late gameplay at a stretch with no lagging at all?  The stuff that should overload 8 Gb of RAM still remains.  Yet the lagging comes and goes... and now when it comes (if it comes at all), it's for a MUCH shorter duration, and the recurrences come further apart than they did before.  This suggests to me that there is something else in effect than just "your hardware is outdated and inadequate".  That is, something entirely outside of my rig.  As far as Steam interference, according to the Comcast speed test, I'm getting 90 Mb/sec Internet speeds.  [Hard to get speeds much faster than that without having a dedicated T1 line.]  Anyway, given the problems I have, I have to conclude that either A) nearly EVERYONE playing GC3 has enormously more up-to-date systems than I, or B ) they just aren't bothering to complain.  (Probably because they just set the game aside and went off to play games that weren't nearly so demanding.)

In fairness, I personally would have said this had someone even entertained the notion of buying a Core 2 CPU in 2013, let alone 2014.

Given your rather dated CPU, odds are this is the case. Even being beaten or matched by a number of low end i3 CPUs, it isn't even comparable to CPUs found in budget tier PCs that are in the 300-400 USD range.

Stardock please update the minimum RAM to 8 gigs and recommended ram to 12 gigs of ram for this game. Similar people playing on insane maps with 6 or 8 gigs of ram perphaps on a laptop give the game bad reviews.

Gray out excessive maps if less than 12 gigs of ram, gray out insane maps if less than 16 gigs of ram. Or give players a warning that they might get poor performance due to low ram.

I never play on maps larger than huge because I have 8 gigs of ram.

17 TB is the theoretical limit, not something I'm suggesting you should aim for And it's actually exbibytes. Which are so big that even the present-day supercomputers running the LHC at CERN don't have that much. But yes, in theory, Gal Civ 3 can generate and use a map that big. It probably isn't capable of addressing that many registers (Windows certainly isn't), but in theory, if you mod the game, then you can certainly push mere galaxy creation way beyond 32GB.

Brad has mentioned that he feels Stardock's 'recommend specs' are kind of low atm. Also, 'recommended specs' means 'can play fine on a medium map', rather than 'comfortably capable of playing the game on the largest possible settings with all the features turned to maximum'. Sorry, but that's just how it is.

Well, couple of things:

a) A T1 line is a bit of a blast from the past - it's a 1.5mb/s copper twisted-pair cable. Your internet is considerably better than that - and probably has been since about 2005

b ) There's a third option that you've missed - that nearly everyone playing GC3 will never play on maps larger than Large. Seriously, it's like 90% of players, according to SD's (admittedly rather bad) measurements.

But isn't that like saying, "This car model has LOTS of safety features.  But they only work if you keep the car below the speed limit"?  Even if the car is advertised of being capable to doing better than twice the speed limit.  Meaning that they created a program that has this potential of doing things like Insane-sized maps.  HOWEVER, to fulfill that potential -- which they describe in the manual -- requires hardware that far exceeds the "Recommended specs" -- but they did NOT mention in the manual just how much more RAM would be required.  In Recommended specs it calls for 6 Gb of RAM.  Having 8Gb of RAM is 33% more than Recommended, which most people would be thinking "That much more should fulfill the 'more' requirement."  But now, here, we're being told "more" = "16 Gb at least, but 32 Gb would be better" -- which is 5 times the Recommended amount listed.

Overall, it kind of feels like a Bait-'n'-Switch.

At least with the graphic specs, a game's full content can be accessed by setting the Graphics to Low settings.  But for cache memory, there's no way to "dial it down" to at least get smooth gameplay.  For a company to deliberately set Recommended specs to a number that isn't anywhere near what is actually required to get full performance, that IS deliberate bait-'n'-switch.  As you suggest, they are saying whatever is needed to make the sale.  Otherwise known as "deceptive Marketing".  

I heartily agree with your idea of game publishers posting a "Optimal" category for system specs.  But I doubt that they will do so because if consumers saw just how wide the gap was between Minimum and Optimal, Sales would plummet.  ["If I would have to buy a whole new PC just to get everything I'm paying for, why bother?  I'll just go play something else."]

I think we should also remember that many games include some 'future-proofing'; that is, they have various features which are intended for hardware that isn't even on the market yet. If you want the recommended specs to mean 'can run literally every god damned thing in the game on maximum possible settings', many of those games would need to ask for literal supercomputer configs. Above and beyond that, many people who really could play the game quite happily on lower settings would skip it in the belief that it's too much for their machine to handle.

This really is just a case of a user with somewhat dated (though not quite obsolete just yet) hardware discovering that his machine can only play the very highest-end settings if he tolerates some slowdown... it's kinda hard to believe we've nearly hit 3 pages discussing something so blindingly obvious.

Quoting DARCA1213,

reply 42

Look! Look! LOOK! https://pcpartpicker.com/parts/cpu/ you can get good CPUs right now for cheap. They are so cheap right now you can buy three processors and use two of them to rub together till they make a fun little squeaky sound.   

 ....

Seems to be a problem for everyone eventually, but it's nothing a few dollars can't fix$   

"Few dollars"?  First, that's quite the price range, just for a CPU: $24.98 all the way up to $3966.99.  Somehow, I doubt that any of those items under $100-200 would be solving any performance issues.  Second, pretty much ALL of those choices would also involve getting a different motherboard than the one I currently have.  So that would be another cost consideration.  Third, whereas I might feel comfortable swapping out video cards, changing out something as delicate as a CPU is beyond my fumble-fingered geriatric dexterity -- which means that I'd end up paying a tech to do the job.  (Not to mention how irritable they get when a customer brings in his bargain basement components and expect them to do all the technical work.)  Fourth, I believe the case is that when changing motherboards or CPUs, even if all of my current programs remain on the hard drive, it becomes necessary to re-initialize the 40-60 programs that I use on a regular basis.  That is a royal pain-in-the-posterior procedure that takes several days to complete and I would just as soon avoid doing if at all possible.  Taking all of those things together and changing CPUs is pointedly NOT a "simple" procedure.  Nor is it "cheap".  (In particular since I am surviving on my savings until full retirement age in three more years, having been unemployed -- and unemployable because of health + age reasons -- since 2009.)  But I suppose if "money is no object" were the case, your suggestion would have merit.

But don't you think consumers should have the right to know just what is required to run everything the product has to offer?  After all, they are paying for the complete package.  "Here, you can buy this four-passenger vehicle for _____.  But we're not going to tell you that the driver can't have any additional passengers unless he also buys these other additional features.  Not until after he's purchased the vehicle that is."  And as far as I am concerned, "Recommended" does mean "In order to take advantage of everything this game has to offer, these are the requirements you must fulfill."  At least that has been the industry standard for as long as I remember; I seem to have missed the memo as to when that policy changed.

Well, now says that the CPU needs to be substantially better --

INTEL CPU: Core i5-655K 3.2GHz AMD CPU: Phenom II X4 900e Nvidia GPU: GeForce GTX 460 AMD GPU: Radeon HD 5830 RAM: 6 GB OS: Win 7 64 Direct X: DX 11 HDD Space: 5 GB

But when I first got the game when it was released, what they were listing was:

While the specs of the Q8200 is actually higher than what was Recommended originally.  (2.33 GHz over 2.3 GHz required, and 4 Mb of L2 cache over the Recommended 3 Mb.)

If you have had occasion to look at Recommended specs on the website, the requirements have been creeping upward as soon as customers started to complain about performance issues.  But what they are showing as "Recommended" is still substantially less than what is actually required to have full, unimpeded performance:

PC SYSTEM RECOMMENDED SPECS:

INTEL CPU: Core i5-655K 3.2GHz AMD CPU: Phenom II X4 900e Nvidia GPU: GeForce GTX 460 AMD GPU: Radeon HD 5830 RAM: 6 GB OS: Win 7 64 Direct X: DX 11 HDD Space: 5 GB

 Even there, it is ONLY the CPU which is now deficient.

The talks about the CPU being a limiting factor are completely pointless anyways. All it would cause is that each turn would take like an eternity to be completed, but nothing more.

The REAL problem is the RAM. If you have less than or exactly 8 GB then the fastest CPU in the world won't help you overcome the performance hit you take due to Windows starting to swap contents of the RAM to the harddisk. The CPU can't do anything about that at all.

I know that, because I've got an Core i7 860 Quad with 2.8 GHz. While it is not the fastest CPU on the market it should perform more than adequately. Still I suffered a major performance issue and it was related to the system memory, because at first I only had 8 GB. Once I upgraded to 12 GB the issue was gone for good.

So... Bottom line: Even if 8 GB sounds like much it is just NOT nearly enough for anything bigger than a medium map. If you want huge maps, put at least 12 GB or better yet 16 GB for insane maps into your computer.

Then even an outdated Q8200 will do fine, at least if the motherboard supports that much memory. Yeah, the turns will take a bit longer they would on a newer CPU, but at least your computer will stop dragging/lagging and won't suffer any instabilities caused from the lack of physical memory anymore. The dragging/lagging comes from the CPU having to work on the page file which is just slow.

If your motherboard/CPU is incapable of dealing with more than 8 GB (which is common even for the earliest 64-bit CPUs and motherboards because their memory controllers weren't as sophisticated as they are now. This especially applies for legacy DDR2 based memory controllers, but also entry-level DDR3 ones) then you are screwed, because that means you can get an entirely new computer because there's NOTHING else you can do to get rid of that performance problem other than not playing huge maps.

And as far as the official system requirements go they are simply wrong and should be updated. Minimum: 8GB, Recommended: 12GB, Optimum: 16GB. That's it.