As the scuzzers build the brig, the game suddenly goes from 60FPS to ~10, with an unplayable amount of tearing and other visual distortions.

I have an nVidia GeForce GTX 550 Ti and an i7-2600 CPU. I have messed with Startopia's affinity to make it single core. I have messed with every in-game graphical setting I can find. Nothing helps. Does anyone have any idea what is going on?

Hey, thanks for posting this. I just started playing this week and got to the "Galactic Rehab" mission, where you first get access to the brig. Every time my droids finished a brig, my game was basically locking up - but I was building a huge brig. Just tried building a much smaller one and it worked fine. Maybe it's something to do with the lightning effect that fires off when the brig is completed. Either way, your post was a big help to me. Thanks again!

I'm having this problem as well. I'll try the smaller brigs and see if that helps. Thanks for posting this!