Keep in mind, I had compressed save information on for this test, which supposedly makes it faster to load/save, and bought nothing besides the full stack of 1000 miner contracts.
MacBook Pro, 4GB memory, 2.4GHz Dual Core Intel. Running the game in Steam because I can.
Is it possible to see just having large quantities of miners in the fleet hq is as bad as having the buttload of miners already out and mining?
Because I believe it is a possible source of crash inducing fun
So to answer your question, I started a new game with my version, which is one behind the latest, and bought THE WHOLE MINERS and took them to HQ and put them in and saved. Perfectly normal saving speed, which is to say, nearly instantly. Waited for one to come out, saving took about a second. After 15 had emerged (although most had been destroyed), things slowed down to three seconds. At 20, it slowed down to 10. At 25: 15.
At this point, I removed the contracts and waited for a few minutes while the miners were horribly *** by pirates. When starting a new game, your planet is close to the Hegemony station which happens to be close to the pirates, who love miners. Although things sped up to about 7 seconds, there were no miners left alive.
Naturally, the only course of action was to ramp it up a bit. After 35 more, it took 30 seconds. I opened it up and let loose 50. Naturally they weren't all spawned at once, and there were no more than 15 out at a time, but it didn't take any longer to save than before.
It seems that miners alone can't slow it down to crashing, but they do have a
much stronger effect. I could dominate the whole solar system with fleets everywhere, fighting all of the factions at once and only slow down saving to 5 seconds, 7 tops without compressed save info. While 15 miners take it to nearly six times that with compression. Along the way, I nearly 2GB of RAM and topped out at about 60% CPU usage by the game.
Interestingly enough, after switching back to uncompressed save files and saving to make it convert back, loading brought the game to a complete standstill. I'm still waiting after several minutes. Strangely, saving didn't take more than a few seconds longer uncompressed, so I don't know why loading completely murders it.
Update: Hey! It's been an hour, and still no movement. Loading after a good number of miners without save compression just doesn't happen.