Always sart your empire with about 300-500 million people. The game will not scale well with higher population since that spawn too many civilian vessels.

In my experience it is the number of ships and civilians especially that hog all the CPU power. By starting small you will avoid much of this problem.

In the next version Steve seem to optimize the civilian fleet a little more since they will build larger ships and be better at scrapping older ships so this should increase the performance quite a bit.

One thing that I experienced as a performance enhancer (about 10-15%) was to remove the hyper-threading on my CPU. So if you have that enabled then disable it in your BIOS. Hyper-threading is not of much use anyway on multi-core processors unless you run applications that can take advantage of it.

Nope.   Ive put the entire game folder into a RAMDrive and it made no difference.

Is there anything that can be done to speed up the processing of the game? Everything from opening menus and giving commands just seems to take annoyingly long, like 5 seconds just to open up the overview screen,  and a 30 day increment just took 23 seconds.   It doesn't sound very long, but when nothing is going on and I just want to get through some years it takes a while.   This is at the start of the game, no combat is going on from the NPR's.   I don't mind the turn time so much but it's just the command lag is hard to deal with.   Is there anything that can be done apart from getting a beefier cpu?