ok im going to sound a bit stupid here but how do i get them working ive replaced the factions folder in gfx with yours but i dont see any new factions did i put it in the wrong place?

ok tried it in my ducuments/mygames/galciv3/factions and still no good

ok not sure what was wrong reverified local files then downloaded your factions into the mygames/blahblahblah file and it worked testing now

It's not the AMD processor..

I've got a A10 APU and I ran a 80 major civ test game last weekend with no issues at all.   Unless they majorly changed coding or there is a significant difference between their FX chips and their A10 chips (which they claim there is not)  then....  yeah

tested once 

7:28  -   first ai turn

0:36  -   my second turn

0:23 - second ai turn

trying a new game with more timing

insane -size

53 opponents + abundant minors + abundant pirates

challenging - difficulty

all victory conditions

0:29  map generation ---- this is fast

0:57 my first turn 

7:56    ai's first turn---- is it initializing the ai at this point? would this be faster if it was done at map generation before all the map stuff has been loaded (does this even make sense)

0:34 my second turn

0:33 ai's second turn     much better

0:18 my third turn

0:25 ai's third turn

11:17 elapsed game time

testing a few other things

yeah, androshalforc this is exactly what I'm seeing a long first turn 5-10 minutes after that it works fine  Thanks buddy for testing to see if you were seeing the same thing.

ok third map same settings as above except i removed minors and pirates

forgot to time map generation

0:42 my turn 

7:48 ais turn

0:20 my turn

0:14 ais turn

i screwed up my timings because i had a colonize event and idle ships when i hit turn ( this should really be changed to "move ships" rather then "turn")

as long as this is limited to first turn im not horribly put out by this its annoying but its not game breaking (although how bad will it get at 100 races (game just released its an hour early)

i wonder if this has something to do with fog of war? before i rebuilt my machine it would stutter whenever i tried to explore im moving along fine now but i wonder if all those ai trying to see all their immediate space at the same time is taxing the system too much

The main thing I continue to wonder about is why is it doing this on AMD FX processors but not on Intel or according the the guy above not AMD A10

I'm running a 8320 8 core AMD processor with a AMD R9 285 card though like the previous poster I've not (nor can I be bothered) to create 50 odd IA races, though I'm only running 8gb ram so I'd not want to try it on a insane map as I fear its going to be insanely slow, though I imagine the processor use will be due to the AI thinking for those 50+ races opposed to the map size which only tends to draw heavily on ram as its revealed.

you may download the races I saved and posted above.  With that being said Stardock had me go through the following steps with no luck to this point.

Disable cloud sharing.

Uninstall game.

Rename the GalCivIII folder located in the My Documents\My Games folder.

Reinstall the game.

Try again...  (To do this I created 18 quick generic races with no description but with random traits I just quickly selected.)

Game still had a long first turn that didn't help....  Thanks Stardock for trying keep up the good work