I think its time this game had a performance patch, on larger towns of 12-18 people the simulation starts slowing down, additionally there is a frame rate drop on the world map when zoomed out too much.
A-17 my friend. Tynan is already debating if its to be a bugfix/performance patch or if he should wait longer to add content. He made a post with a poll if you want to go vote
What kind of system do you have?
I've had large bases on the larger maps, with 20+ people, and with mods with very little change in performance from the beginning. I was just thinking yesterday that I was impressed the game was still running really smoothly. There are moments where it'll chug for a second or two but they are rare.
We are in alpha, doing that isn't very useful at this stage. While some improvements are important (so that it can be played at all), don't expect final performance just yet. :P
Isn't the idea that this game is in perpetual alpha? But either way, it's not good game design to just keep adding features and then sort out the performance later. You want to add a feature, evaluate it, optimize it, move onto the next feature. Otherwise you end up with a giant mess of a game with tons of bugs that are very hard to fix.
My computer is 7 years old and I get no frame drop on max sized maps with 15 people and 2 colonies...
My stuttering doesn't happen for every colony either. But my past two have had issues once I went over 10+ pawns. But this is why the game probably needs to be optimized. There doesn't seem to be parity across users.