Alert: Highly Effective New Biter Strategy :(

[infiniterecursion]

Fellow survivors,
I regret to inform you that the biters have shifted tactics.

Now we all know the primary strategy employed by the biters: Group up and suicide/sprint into our massive laser walls. Shockingly this has not yet proven effective for them.
Today we have observed a new strategy: Stand still and make babies! Yes, you read that right. This knew strategy has rendered our defenses absolutely useless and seriously jeopardizes our chance of escaping this wretched planet. Any advice would be much appreciated.

In all seriousness though:
So, my frame rate dropped to 5 or 6 fps last night, that was fun
I dug into it though and arrived at a surprising cause:
- it happened when i was laying solar panels, so I tried getting rid of them - no change in fps
- all the advice online was that belts & inserts are cpu intensive. I don't have many belts in this base, but I turned most of them off anyway. Actually got my power usage down below 1MW, still no change in fps
- turned off all the pipes and most of the robots, no change in fps

Eventually I noticed that there was a lot of red outside my base. Going to investigate, the biters looked like they were just hanging out, chillin, havin a grand old time. And making _lots_ of babies. (No wonder they weren't attacking) Haven't seen biter density like that before.

I tried kill_all_units() a couple of times, but this had no effect really, possibly actually even made my fps worse
I eventually ran a command to remove all of the worms and spawners and voila. My fps instantly jumped from 5 -> 30 fps again!
Yea, surprisingly it wasn't the 20k inserters or the 100k solar panels or the who knows how many accumulators or the 5k drills or the 100k robots or 10k furnaces and assemblers. Oh nay nay. All that insanity was fine. It was the spawners

Running 0.13.17 and bob's mod on a somewhat new & OC'd desktop. Biter settings were left at the default values, and I don't have RSO mod on for this map.

I know my base is a bit excessive, and so performance problems are to be expected, but filing anyway because it seems like viewtopic.php?f=41&t=2183 might not actually be resolved and because I haven't seen any mention of spawners causing slowness online, so perhaps this is new or unknown?

Oh shoot, I'm running out of iron. Gotta go.
Smelt on my friends.

[TruePikachu]

Can you upload your mod dir and savegame so a dev can look at it?

[infiniterecursion]

Yea, definitely! Is there a way to scrub my email from the save-file first? Otherwise is there someone I should just direct-message with a link to it?

[British_Petroleum]

100k robots?! were they the level 4 bobs robots? My pc really struggles with only 10k bots working.

[Klonan]

Yea, definitely! Is there a way to scrub my email from the save-file first? Otherwise is there someone I should just direct-message with a link to it?

Your save file shouldn't contain your email

[CmdrKeen]

turn off the bob's enemies mod and try again.

[golfmiketango]

I've seen this in a non-Bob's campaign (99%+ evolution). They tend to pile up behind lakes. They are just standing there. But if I go to kill them they wake up. I have seen as low as 1ups clearing these bases. I started building a map-scale laser-turret grid as they were simply spawning faster than I could clear them manually.

[infiniterecursion]

So sorry for the long delay, got a little distracted.

Your save file shouldn't contain your email

It definitely does : ( `grep 'email' savename/*.dat` returns multiple results. I think this was a feature in 0.13, probably something related to now I have to login with my email so it's in the save file?



I did a little more investigation, and I think I fat fingered the kill-all command the first time. kill_all_units() did indeed work, so it had nothing to do with spawners, apologies for any confusion.

The biters do still just chill out though
Here's the save file / mods if you are still curious: https://www.dropbox.com/s/uxsypsudkgq7v ... y.rar?dl=0
I did some guess & check and `/c game.player.teleport({650,400})` will teleport you into a big group: https://www.dropbox.com/s/lwnc6w13gjv9h ... e.png?dl=0
HTH, and much appreciated if are able to investigate and even find any fixes!! Love this game

turn off the bob's enemies mod and try again.

Yea, I'll probably do that on my next base. Just stick with the normal biters but up the evolution factor a bit

100k robots?! were they the level 4 bobs robots? My pc really struggles with only 10k bots working.

Yea, I can't run this on my laptop I wanted to try a robots-only base, with belts only really used to load trains and the early game.

[Oxyd]

Well, you simply have a lot of biters – that's going to take a lot of resources.

I'm not completely sure what you're trying to report here, but I've made some changes to the AI that should help with the performance in these cases. So fixed in 0.14.1.