> I'd def be trying again since they've come out of alpha with this release.. a huge deal for a game that is so many years in development.

We're not calling it Alpha anymore, but we still don't consider it a polished major release. The announcement of the last Alpha, Alpha 27 had a section explaining the motivation for the change: https://play0ad.com/new-release-0-a-d-alpha-27-agni/

> Only for really huge end of game final battles with the screen packed with troops did it lag out for us, but being free and all, we'd often gather around one monitor and talk crap at each other while we waited for it to clear up.

I'm not sure when you last tried the game, but a27 notably improved performance and feedback so far suggests that r28 did as well.

That was my experience as well. My understanding is that the simulation will be bottlenecked by the slowest PC. All of my friends had pretty powerful PCs, but someone among us had a slightly weaker one in terms of single core performance, which means we all have that CPU basically then.

The huge battle toward the end of the game dropping or making the game unplayable was what killed it for us. We didn't want to spend all that time making our army and strategy only to be disappointed. At the time we went back to playing Age of Empires 2 DE.