Thanks for responding Heegz. Like I've said before, even with my outdated machine, it's not that every single turn takes forever to go by. In fact, most turns where no ships are moving take only a few seconds to pass in a mature galaxy. In one way I am suggesting an improvement to the way ships move for the player.
Yes, I prefer the zoomed out tactical view as opposed to the 3D view, not only for performance reason, but also because I can see much more of what's going on more clearly.
Also to reiterate, this problem does not occur with the AI's ships. On a particular AI player's turn, their dozens, if not hundreds of ships move simultaneously and smoothly, and each AI players' turn is very very short, in the order of ~1-3 seconds. Compared to when my ships move, in the order of 15-20 seconds for each ship, which also happens while it is still my turn and I am able to change their paths.
Perhaps an option such as "disable viewing of autopilot moves at turn end" or some such deal. Or some sort of general "quick move" option.
The game plays very well on my machine, despite my high resolution, somewhat small amount of RAM, and 2 year old video card. Once I went to 1600x1200 a few years ago I have never gone back. It's just too sweet, even if there are a few slowdowns on games.
To give you a comparison, I also play WoW at 1600x1200 and only get the video lag in largly populated areas, which is common among many other players. Other than that, there are no problems.
I'll do a defrag tonight and see if it helps, but I do them fairly frequently, every other week or so. I haven't done it since I installed GalCiv2, so I'll give it a whirl and give some feedback.
I also have 3 hard drives. My OS is installed on one with basic programs, games are stored on a second hard drive, and I have a third one for storage. These are separate hard drives, not partitions of one. I'll move my page file to my "storage" drive, as it's currently on my OS drive (however that drive is much newer and faster than my storage drive), and see how that goes as well.
