Anyone at all?

Insane maps are not optimized.

Devs are aware of the issue but other things take priority now, like expansion. My guess more optimizations will arrive when expansion comes out.

From my experience on insane maps there is a cap of roundly 300 planets u can have where performance drops, around 300 starbases when performance gets down and about 500 to 1000 ships(random) when performance drops.

As i have similar systems as yours and have checked the game using about 20% cpu and ram, the main cultprit is game engine. The official response(on stream) was that Paul mentioned: They had to limit these factors so overall gameplay dsnt get affected as going above these numbers appeals to the shorter side of community. Most people dont have high end pcs and the decision was made to optimize for averge stats as every optimization takes a lot of time and a lot of resources. Thus the game engine can handle large numbers but for now there are limiters in place and also it isnt optimized for insane.

Hope that answers your question. Just keep waiting- one day....

I have an I5 3570K 4 core overclocked to 4.2, 16 gigs so DDR3 and a GTX 970 (4gigs onboard). I have zero issues at all. I only play on insane..

Is the second largest map size (can't remember the name) optimized yet?

Just some clarification on my part.

There are no issues if you play the game on insane as normal. But we all have our own playstyle and my personal- i do use some money boosts as i just do not  have all day to play this game, besides we play for fun and our single player game is solely our own. Though if u get the lucky 68888.... money relic(still in game) u get unlimited money.

So in regards to that you can say the game engine is being stressed to max as starbases always have max current upgrades, ships have the latest techs and planets are more or less optimized(by hand and governors).

So when you stress out it like that the game becomes unstable. There is a delay on starbases reaching certain number(confirmed on Dev stream), as on normal gameplay its unlikely you can max out all starbases. The planets have a delay placing buildings and ships start to move from smooth to frame by frame(sluggish).

I have some early posts about insane map performance so its a known issue and as far as I know, I'm not the only one experiencing that. Even without cheats or trainers there are plenty of people including myself who are experiencing some kind of problems. I have yet to test the game on SSD, but on raid 1, i have gotten to the point where the game starts crashing and ultimately becomes unresponsive.

That is when going past 300 starbases, 300 planets and 1000 ships.(my personal observations). This only happens on the 2 largest maps, all other maps and variations work completely normal- altered or normal- any setting- works fine.

So yeah-

normal game ok, you really cant go wrong playing normally, altered no.