Yeah the game is really making my i5 4670k break a sweat. Fortunately for me it still runs well because the CPU can take it. I expect SD will be able to optimize it. I am not familiar with Alpha testing, it is my first time but I think it might be normal at this point.

I'm seeing anywhere from 15% up to 50%, mostly around 30%, on an Intel I7-4930MX 3GHz.  Only 2 of the cores seem to be consistently over 50% at any one time.  Maybe that's because I'm only playing against one AI at the moment.

My I7-4770 (3.4Ghz) is all over the scale in all cores and threads (9% to 77%), with most of the processing in Core 0 thread 0.

I really hadn't expected it to be balanced, either at this point or when finished, but eventually I expect StarDock will put in some effort into spreading the load out some, to the extent the OS provides the functions to do so.

I would love to see Stardock touch all of my cores, too.

Show off. 

We have a ton performance of optimizations still in the pipe, so performance should only get better form here on out, hopefully Much better.

I think it is good to mention here that the decision of which core or thread gets which task really ultimately belongs to the OS. I think there are some things that the SD devs can do to influence those decisions, but the control they have is not total.

In short: I would never expect the load imposed by any game on any system to be totally balanced across all cores/threads.

At this poitn its hard to say why the game uses so much CPU cycles. It's likely just some optimization that's required. Which is probably why we're limited to 'small' maps for now until those optimizations are in place.

Maybe they're mining bitcoins from us for April Fools? (ok not really!)

In theory yes.

But that doesn't explain why the cpu usage it through the roof on the main menu

Main menu? I missed that. So in looking at the screen for the main menu for anything happening, I see a light that scans across the letters "Galactic Civilizations" about once every 5 seconds and taking about 1 second to scan across the letters. I also see some light near the top and behind the "III" that are pulsing. To that, add the background music. Now, can that really cause so much processing?

One thing StarDock is partially smart about is that when you change which window has the focus (like just now when I switched the window I was busy with from GC3 to my browser) they stop what can be stopped (with the GC3 main menu, I guess the only thing that can be stopped is the music). However, I don't see much change in the use of the processors when that happens.

EDIT: And the cloud cover on the planet moves -- much more processing needed. Also, quite neat.

I am also cool. The reason may be in that my Radeon is not used and all video goes through my Intel.

40% load for me across all cores.

It's pretty high, but then again, I don't run anything but the game when I play, so it's more-or-less irrelevant to me. Hope it gets fixed for you guys though.