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Right now, the majority of lag in MC2 is not because of rendering operations or save file compression, but rather because the current system MC2 uses to calculate resource gains iterates through all of your buildings every single tick. This is to allow buildings to have resource status bars.

However, all of this could be circumvented by combining the average resource gains per tick into a table of net change, so all the engine would need to do each tick would be to add the numbers of the table to your resources. It's roughly O(n) vs O(1) time for the current system vs. approximate resource changes.

If the majority consensus on this poll is yes, MC2 will switch over to an approximated resource system in the next few updates. Please vote!

Just like to let everyone know that I support this change as it would probably reduce the game's server processing time by 90% per tick or more, depending on the size of the colony. As @spamdude said though, it would eliminate the production status bars that show up when a building is selected or moused-over. That is the tradeoff. It would no longer be possible to see when a building "turns over" for production, as the game would no longer be keeping track of that information, and would instead be handling production rates statistically.

Because of that, I will not make this change if there is an outrage about it, but if the consensus here is that people will not miss the production status bars, then I will switch over to a statistical model.