i have this set to display in the bug reports forum, im sure it will only post in the general forums and have to be moved by a moderator.... anyways, beta 3 has a couple of problems with it, and one of these most likely has many factors involved.

problem 1: the relations degrading due to military strength needs tweaking. before, the AI would suicide because its ships were increadibly weak compared to mine, but they had > numbers so their overall military rating was higher, making them believe they had the upper hand. Now, relations dont degrade at all based on your military strength. In my current game (just testing things out), its year 3-4 and i dont have a single military ship other than my massive transport fleet that i will later use to conquer the galaxy with. I am friendly with all the AI's, and havent had to do ANYTHING to keep my relations up with them. I wasnt threatened once, it basically gives me a free pass in the game to build up without doing anything militarily or having to gift techs to keep relations up. This causes a problem not related to me as well, in that the AI wont declare war on each other any more. There hasnt been a single shot fired yet in my game, planets have only changed sides due to culture bombing.

This needs some serious tweaking, as before the AI would commit suicide attacking a foe with stronger ships but who had a lower military rating (the drengin and arcean especially loved to do this, happened every game). Now, the AI doesnt declare war on anyone, nothing happens in the game at all.

Problem 2: On larger galaxies the game starts to slow down/stutter. Part of this has to do with the ridiculous number of planets now (why was this changed? really, 500 planets is not that different from 300... honest!). Aside from the fact that this prolongs the already worst aspect of the game (planet rush), it causes problems with computing power as well. My comp is 3.2 ghz and has 2 gigs of ram, along with a Radeon 9800 xt, and it cant handle it. Each turn is now taking ~5 minutes to complete.

I do believe there is more to this than simply exponentially increasing the number of planets - again why this was done i have no idea, it only makes the game less fun- the AI has to be doing something different, such as queueing/looping commands that is requiring it to do something several hundred times instead of once or twice. Prior to beta 3, my average turn late game on gigantic with abundant planets took ~2-3 seconds. Now it takes 5 minutes... something has gone wrong somewhere in the code, because a change this drastic cannot be attributed directly to the number of planets. I tried testing on a smaller galaxy, and even there i had stuttering issues, on a small map with only 2 opponenets, the turns were taking ~30 seconds, where as before this would have been near instantanious. I cant give more specifics into the problem, because i simply dont know what is causing it, i can only tell you the facts that i have:

Pre beta 3- turns take ~2-3 seconds
Post- Turns take 5 minutes.

Galciv2 is pretty much unplayable at this point, as 5 minutes per turn doesnt cut it when you need around 500 turns or more to complete a single game.