While playing the game even on Normal map with 5 civs I often get freezes for several seconds. It usually happens when I scroll map and screen freezes so I can see empty space in place where I scroll too even though there are supposed to be planets or ships there.
Then it goes away and the game continues as normal. AI turn calculations are fast, FPS are high, I just have this issue every several minutes.
Laptop Acer Aspire V3, Intel Core i7 4702MQ, 8 Gb, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760M 2 Gb.