I convinced my buddy to purchase ES2 in the recent sale and we were having a blast playing our first coop campaign together. At first the game played smoothely, but by around turn 40 whenever we ended our turn we would have to wait for about 30 seconds to a minute for the turn actually to end. At first we ignored this inconvenience, but by around turn 70 the wait time had increased from 30 seconds to about 5 to 10 minutes.

And not just ending turns takes several minutes. Space battles, leveling heroes, queing construction on systems, everything takes several minutes to register in game. While the game is behaving slow I can quickly open and close all the menus related to heroes, space battles, invasions, system management ect without delay; but when I push any button to actually make a decision the button will flash and make its chime like normal, but nothing will happen. If me and my buddy wait long enough, all the actions will eventually go through, but doing any new actions creates another long wait. So fighting say a space battle over a planet and then invading that planet takes more than ten minutes.

I've done some research on google and havent found anything on this kind of a delay. I've tried disabling antivirus, allowing ES2 through firewall, and prioritizing the ES2 process in task manager. None of these seem to have an effect on the delay. Me and my buddy played a few games together on the first ten turns to experiment, and we have had inconsistent results. Some games ending turn only takes 3 seconds to go into the next turn, other times from turn 1 we experience a 30 second delay.

At this point we don't want to start a game and end up abandoning it by the mid game, so does anyone know why these delays occur and what a potential fix or work around is?

Some important info about our coop session.

-My friend is playing in the United States while I am playing from the Middle East. I understand that online sessions should use the host to process the A.I.s actions so I don't see why our distance would create this massive of a delay.

-We played with a large map with 9 AI factions, many minor factions, no pirates

-I own all the DLC but my friend is host and he only has the base game

-I've played several solo games between our coop sessions and encountered no slow down even after 200+ turns. I've played vanilla ES2, Vaulters, and Supremacy without problems

Thanks for your time!

Checking back in. Anyone have any clue on this one?

Things like battles will pause the game for a few moments while being calculated, but should not cause this, I would assume it's something like being on Wifi (& thus packet loss) or slow internet speed causing this, AS the game checks everyone's sync with each other at the end of the turn, and packet loss can greatly increase the time this takes..

I would suggest both being on wired (ethernet) internet connection and being on the same steam download server (it's a steam Client Setting)