Thanks Kantok.  Yeah, I turned off AA. It's still just slow as molasses.  Scrolling is slow, animations are slow.  It's almost unplayable, actually, it is unplayable.  Didn't have a problem with the previous build except for some crashes and that was only on the third or fourth game, but before then I hadn't had any problems.  It might not have been the fastest but it was still very playable.  I've been messing around with settings and can't really figure it out.  I've turned off particle effects, turned off AA, turned off anything that I thought might be causing it to run so slow.  I also turned down a lot of the settings like contrast and whatnot.

Yeah, I have tried turning down or off just about everything including outlines.  Doesn't seem to help.  I am pretty certain my graphics drivers are up to date too.  I just updated  them about two weeks ago. I kind of wonder if going back to the previous version might help. 

By the way, Brad, is there a way to go back to default settings in the options menu? 

Thanks Sean, yeah, it's one of the first things I tried.  However, I think I may re-download the game and then re-install.  I copied the game file from an external hard drive because I had to do a reformat a couple of weeks ago.  Maybe something got corrupted in the process. 

I am having similar issues. It seems like the problems begin during tactical battles then spread into the main game. I don't see high resource usage and its not taxing my video card, but I am seeing the RAM usage spike.

Intel quad core

8 gigs ram

GTX 460 video card

win 7

Usually it starts by everything in a tactical battles suddenly going into slow motion. Its not a factor of the number of units either, I've had it happen with 8+ units per side and with my sovereign and a hero vs one spider unit.

Make sure you delete all user files and the cache files, which may not be deleted on uninstall.

I rolled back to the original drivers and it works great; the newest drivers all seemed incompatible with the game or were buggy as hell in general with my computer.  I downloaded and tried at least 6 or 7 driver versions from the newest going back (there are almost 30 or 40 of them *ugh*).  None of them worked so I just decided to start off from the older versions.  Hopefully this helps anyone else with the same type of system. 

I edited this to take out the "solved" part since it wasn't and give a link to the other thread with same issues for .91 just in case the devs miss it.  The other one has all the information that I can give, debug, diaxdiag, last crash zip file, etc.   

dgerards, yeah, it does kind of feel like a memory leak, though I dunno if that is what it is.  I should also add that I have gone through most if not all the settings in my graphic card control panel  and set them as low/high as I could for maximum performance, I've also turned off all extra processes that run in the background like anti-virus, and, um, well, done everything else I know to do.  I am out of ideas. 

[091]

8 FPS here, right after starting new game. Menu and character /faction generator is smooth. I'm on 301.24 beta nvidia drivers. I did update from 0.86 version. Will try to clear all files and redownload full 0.91. Disabling outlines and AA doesn't help.

Win 7 PRO x64, Q9650 (3.0 GHz), 8GB RAM, GTX 560Ti, ASUS COMMANDO, SB X-FI

EDIT: I think it's solved. ~60FPS after redownloading. But that could be other issue and maybe just restaring computer would help.

Hey Mhantra and Flymar, if you are able to get some significant play time without lag could you please, please let me know?  I may try uninstalling and installing again

Update from me too, I didn't reinstall the game or anything but switched off anti-aliasing (which I had tried before already) and the outlines (which I hadn't tried yet), I left the other graphical options enabled. I've played for over 2 hours, had a couple of large army battles and it seems to running ok now.

Played about 1.5-2 hours. No lag gain. 60+FPS with close ups. 25 just before transition to cloth. Session ended in tactical crash (Sov vs Sov city battle - focus on my sov was lost and I clicked 'daggers' skill).

[AAx4, HD res, no outlines, high groundcover, shadows]

I'd recommend restarting computer after installing game

Thanks for the replies guys. 

I fixed the issue.  Turns out it was a clogged graphics card fan. I just cleaned my computer 3 months ago too, which is why I was shocked when I cleaned out my card's fan.  The stuff that I blew out of it looked like the crap you find in a clothes dryer screen.  Thank God for CPUID hardware monitor.  I thought I was seeing things when I saw 106 degrees Celsius at idle.  Man, I am pissed... at dust. I quickly loaded the game up and got through about 20 or so seasons to test it out and seemed to run fine, even with outlines and the other stuff enabled.  So, cool beans.  I suppose the only positive (other than a now functioning card) is that I don't have to worry about updating my drivers.