For me the speed hasn't changed much between Alpha 15 and 18. I'm playing mostly 1vs1 with max. 150 civ. The biggest problems are rendering -> patches -> render terrain base -> unlogged and rendering -> models -> rendering bucketed submissions (Windows Visa, Core2Duo, x3100, lowest graphics settings within GUI, needed to disable glsl because it can't compile the shaders) - so rendering is the biggest problem for me ;-) Edit: Under Ubuntu (14.04, 64 bit, same computer, glsl enabled) It looks different: here te problem is render -> render submissions -> clear buffer Even if the gamestat is a few 100 kB (which sounds rather big to me to be honest, perhaps it could be may more effective with a binary encoding - yes, there is a binary form of JSON) It could be worth to transfer only the differences What are the biggest problems in path planing now? To be honest, it's surprised me that this should be the bottleneck - even on big maps and many (>1000) civs) Some random ideas for optimisation (don't know if they are already used ): * If a civ runs this way (source->target point) for several (>1?) times, assume it is free -> no recalculation of the path. If there is a new obstacle then recalculate once when the obstacle is (almost) hit * I hope that it not recalculated every 50 ms or so? * Stick to "static" pathplaning, only recalculate if there new obstacles occuring which are on the path * First try to find local cirvumventions on obstacles and not recalculate the whole path * Formations: As already being said: Do the global pathplaning only for one person (master) in the formation, the other do only a local "follow the master" algorithm. This gobal pathplaning could even estimate the width of the formations (as already being said) * Formations: If formations are crossing each other, but shouldn't interact (by e.g. attacking) try to keep the masters a bit apart so the "follow the master" algorithm doesn't need to calculate circumventions very dynamically