Particle Fleet lagging on large maps despite good hardware

[boom]

When playing "Large Space Battle" by 3301, After I unpause and start playing my average fps drops from 30 to around 20 and then to 15-18 when all the ships start building. Its a problem I have on all large scale maps. Why is this happening?

Game:
Stand alone version 1.1.4 (bought directly from knucklecracker.com)
OS: windows 10 64 Bit version 1903
I play PF on my laptop

Hardware:
Intel i5-8300H
8GB Ram
GTX 1050

Note that PF is running on the 1050.

In the screenshot I attached you can see that while PF is driving the cpu quite hard (around 60% at 3.6ghz), its only using a third of the gpu which I don't understand. World of Warships pins the gpu 99% all the time.

I know I'm not thermal throttling so that's not a problem. Could I make PF use more of the system resources through a setting or command line argument? (Taskmgr shows that PF is launched with some arguments so maybe there's one to use all system resources?) 

I tried changing the full screen res from 1080p to 800x600, that did nothing so next I closed all open programs and that made a noticeable difference in average frame rate.

With the Disproportionate cpu over gpu usage I think that PF is highly single threaded and that's bottle necking the rest of my system. Not sure if my theory is true. I'm looking to the community for answers.

[Karsten75]

All games up to and including Particle Fleet are single-threaded with minimal GPU usage. So you are not wrong.

[Grabz]

Simulation games tend to be CPU heavy and PF is no exception, as said the game is single threaded so you are looking at CPU single core performance as your bottleneck for the game.

[GoodMorning]

To make the scores fair, the particle simulation needs to be thread-count independent. Given that the interaction grows O(n^2) - or perhaps O(n log n), I don't have the source code) - there's a reason for the particle-count limit.

Ships can inrease the number of simulated particles further (hull counts for the sim but not to the cap), and the Exchange has all too many maps with this.

Long story short - there's just too much work to be done. I got used to 2-3FPS for many maps.

More recent maps tend to be better, defaults were changed in an update.