no retreat option and slow turns

There are some optimizations that will be happening likely next week.  If you have LOTS of factions and LOTS of pirates you will experience a longer than normal (15seconds) between turns. Mounting on an SSD will do nothing but help the load screens at launch of the game. The game is optimized for multiple cores and threads. The more threads you have the Faster the game will be. 

Some options to help are to reduce Pirates to None or Rare. Limit for now the number of AI majors to less than 20. Both of these should help reduce the number of seconds you are taking between turns. 

Battles are all or nothing. No retreat. This has always been the case with the Gal Civ Series. Once you engage you either win or lose the entire fleet. There is no retreat option nor will there be as the game is not necessarily a combat game but rather an empire building game. 

i do remember that, when sending a ship exploring/survey, you could choose a 'stay out of trouble' option. I miss that.

the processor is an AMD fx8350, it has eight cores. I think it should be enough. Is it possible to see if the game is using all the eight cores?

You can open the windows task manager by pressing ALT+CTRL+DEL and choosing Windows Task Manager.  Then go to the Performance tab and it should have it split to 8 little graphs.

There is something going on with AMD FX processors and long first turn/  and then later turn times as well, however, stardock is looking in to this issue as this is separate from the pirate issue...

I would suggest creating a support ticket and including a saved game.

https://esupport.stardock.com/index.php?/default_import/Knowledgebase/Article/View/496/161/general-galactic-civilizations-iii-troubleshooting#supporttool

these posts also may be helpful

https://forums.galciv3.com/465401/page/2/#3550397

https://forums.galciv3.com/465246/page/2/#3549586

aaah ok, thanks. I will create a ticket

I tried something, just out of curiosity, and discovered that the time between turns can be greatly affected by the number of factions you have playing in the game. I picked up the mod Bamford posted that increases the number of major factions available by 6 and started a game with them all on an insane galaxy. It increased the time for end of turn processing by about four times. An end of turn time for 7 opponent factions took about 5-10 seconds on my machine, but with 50 opponenets, it took between 20 and 30 seconds. And this was just during the first 20 turns.

ok, but that means that the game cannot be played on a normal computer? I purchased the pc last summer and it should be able to last at least three years,

Although i mus say that, using resource monitor, it seams that the game only uses 1 core(although resource monitor is somewhat basic in providing information)

A "normal" computer can play on the "normal" settings.  You can't play on the super-duper settings.

For GC3, that means that a computer that meets the Recommended setup

https://forums.galciv3.com/461330/page/1/

Should be able to play on the mid-sized maps with a dozen opponents, but not the Insane Map with several dozen.

GC3 is multithreaded, so if you seem to be seeing it solely single-threaded, then I suggest you open a support ticket to get to the bottom of why your machine isn't using all the available cores.

Also, as of right now, as this is a TURN-based game, the time it takes to process a turn is LINEARLY affected by the number of factions.  The ultimate arbitrator of turn time is the number of faction plus the number of items each faction must process (planets, ships, etc.).  I suspect there may be some future optimizations to be had on larger maps where factions don't always need to be processed in lockstep (e.g. if two factions are widely spaced apart, it's much more likely that they can have their turns resolved in parallel).