Since the recent addition of the swarm trails, I've had to turn effects detail completely off to stand a fighting chance. I'm not exagerating when I saw one volley of swarms lags me into submission. The trouble is, this makes flares, Cap-ship fire, hard to see, and consequently harder to dodge. I have to choose between being swarmed, flared, or hyper gaussed. My computer's pretty old, not sure if I meet system requirements or not, but I have heard others complaining about the lag swarms bring.

So, a fifth setting on the Effects Detail that would show everything it currently does on "Low", minus the swarms would be splendid, or just a single toggle like "Swarm Trails on/off". Maybe I'm the only one with this issue, and if so then I suppose it's just time to get a new compy. But if not, if Chaos Swarm Lag Launchers have been ticking you off since those pretty new trails were introduced, show your support here!

Um... didn't they already do this? I swear they did this already.

Hmm, the game runs fine while 3 or 4 vollies of swarms are on screen, and thats on my oldest system, which has a MX seires GFX card 64meg @ medium detail 1024x768! The system has 512Mb ram and a 1 gig P3 cpu. If your system is older than that, then it is indeed below minimum spec, and if its a mac, do a LeberDoze.

How about a special "all graphic intenseive effects low" button?

That would be swarm trails, big yellow balls, and capship explosions.

It would be nice to have specific options for most effects like, missles/rockets, laser/energy, ion storms, explosions, warping, and etc.

What I imagine is a Effects Settings menu with the above listed with settings from "Lowest" to "Highest" for each effect. With that you can go through each one and set what you want to be low in quality so you don't lagout and set what you want to see in high quality adding to the experience.

edit: And with the lowest setting shouldn't be so low that it doesn't show. Say for example swarms. On the lowest setting you might have line trails of the swarms instead of a complex cloud trail that even makes my computer chug when en mass.

edit2: Oh and if you want to skip that whole menu idea then I would suggest looking over the lowest setting on effects and redsigning what they look like. Lets say a VERY primitive looking energy weapon such as the neutron. You're on the lowest setting and you fire a shot, instead of seeing no effect you see a short 1 color shade (green) bolt of energy fly out and impacts without any effect. Missles/rockets trails could be reduced to just 1 color shade (white) lines that fade like the cloud trail and impact with very minimal explosion detail (explosion details on lowest can be transparent orange balls that are the avergae diameter of normal explosions).

I've used to be below minimu with two of my last four computers (both old G4s). And yeah, at least in my currently owned G4, swarms are killer. Then again, I'm below minimum specs. At that point, I accept it as "Fly at your own risk, Guild Software doesn't guarantee playability of Vendetta". Now that I have a Core 2 DUo laptop, I don't have to worry about that.

Pcs are cheap anyway :)