[0.17.79] [Rampant & deathworld] Biters suddenly stopped, no more attack waves

[spectral]

Hi all,

I am having a problem with my deathworld/rampant game. For the entirety of my game so far the biters have been attacking constantly, across the full map, which is exactly what I was going for with this run. I would constantly be getting alerts from every single outpost, including random biters tearing down train tracks and power lines. It was GREAT!

Unfortunately something seems to have suddenly changed, and now the biters don't attack any outpost, basically ever. If I head over to a biter group they will come to life and attack, but other then that they are completely silent. If I zoom in on a visible spawner at an outpost with radar, I can see all the biters are completely frozen. I have read that that is normal, but they are also not forming any attack groups at all. I think this happened after my last outpost expansion, maybe because my active map is much larger now? Unfortunately this has basically ruined my run, I was about to start building protected rail lines, but I am so sad that this is no longer necessary at all.

I have tried increasing Rampant's difficulty scaling to 100, I have tried tweaking expansion rates using map settings console commands, nothing gets them to start attacking again.

Is there anything I can do to debug this? Thanks so much for any help you can provide. Save game attached.

- spectral

[Honktown]

I have no perspective on what exactly would cause that problem, but there might be a solution:

/c if game.forces[2].ai_controllable == false then game.forces[2].ai_controllable = true end

It sounds like the AI turned off. I don't know if rampant turns it off and does other things, and rampant breaking was the cause.

Page in question:
https://lua-api.factorio.com/latest/LuaForce.html

ai_controllable :: boolean [Read-Write]
Enables some higher-level AI behaviour for this force. When set to true, biters belonging to this force will automatically expand into new territories, build new spawners, and form unit groups. By default, this value is true for the enemy force and false for all others.

Note: Setting this to false does not turn off biters' AI. They will still move around and attack players who come close.
Note: It is necessary for a force to be AI controllable in order to be able to create unit groups or build bases from scripts.

[jape3]

No idea about the solution, but I basically ran into the same issue with rampant.. a shame since the rampant attack waves were really good at finding weak spots in my defences

[spectral]

Hi, thanks for the replies!

It turns out this does appear to be a problem with Rampant. Rampant by default disables enemy AI, and replaces it with its own. It actually provides this toggle via the mod settings. I turned off "Disable enemy AI" (which appears to map directly to the lua variable Honktown listed), and attack waves started forming again. It is a shame as the Rampant formed waves did seem to be more deadly.

To compensate a bit I hacked together a tiny mod to increase all pollution rates by a configurable number. Increasing all emissions by 10x has led back to the type of experience I was going for, where all outposts are constantly threatened and I need to constantly reinforce them!

[Veden]

This save doesn't have Rampant installed.

Do you have one before you removed the mod when the biters stopped attacking?

[spectral]

Yes, my mistake. This was 1 save after, when I was trying to tweak the mod settings to get it working. Rampant save is attached.

[Veden]

If you try the latest version, this should be fixed.

Please let me know if it happens again.

[Honktown]

Hi, thanks for the replies!

It turns out this does appear to be a problem with Rampant. Rampant by default disables enemy AI, and replaces it with its own. It actually provides this toggle via the mod settings. I turned off "Disable enemy AI" (which appears to map directly to the lua variable Honktown listed), and attack waves started forming again. It is a shame as the Rampant formed waves did seem to be more deadly.

To compensate a bit I hacked together a tiny mod to increase all pollution rates by a configurable number. Increasing all emissions by 10x has led back to the type of experience I was going for, where all outposts are constantly threatened and I need to constantly reinforce them!

I wanted to comment: turning up the pollution can be bad, because when enemies start nesting in huge groups UPS will plummet. Tried it once with Choke on Smoke. Not as bad as massive artillery range with maxed difficulty settings.

I will say @veden as a modder and player I appreciate your responsiveness! And skill in actually finding and fixing the problem lol