Factorio Forums

Hi

I have some artillery shooting all the biter nest around a new wall I am making.

My problem is with the 1000s of biters that just sit there and don't come attack/die on the wall. Any idea how to bait them all in? They don't even bother to move if I manually target a group.

They are well outside my pollution range and I have lvl 6 range on my artillery.





My game was fine last night but today it is laggy so I am assuming it is due to the above.

I don't have experience of late game death world, but how long have you waited? It might be a similar problem as when trying to build lots at the same time, like there's a cap on alien move orders. It might clear itself if you just wait a long time.

Cellfire wrote:My problem is with the 1000s of biters that just sit there and don't come attack/die on the wall. Any idea how to bait them all in? They don't even bother to move if I manually target a group.

Do they react if you go there? I had once (maybe 0.14) a problem with Bob's mods. I had very narrow area in long lake (kilometers in both directions) and thousands (insane mass, maybe even 10000) of biters coalesced on opposite shore. They somehow passivated and behaved much like biters on peaceful settings. If I shot them few ten on nearest attacked but others did not care. I began to fear that game will crash and used command "/c game.forces["enemy"].kill_all_units()" to solve a situation. It kills all biters but leave nests.

Biter pathing sort of gives up for extremely long or awkward paths. This isn't so much a bug as it is a fact of life for pathing engines. Biter pathing is very expensive on the CPU and difficult to optimize. The pathing failure is likely a performance cutoff to make sure it doesn't cripple the game too hard.

It would be nice if biters had better ways to path long distance. Burrowing is a simple idea that solves pathing in a very CPU friendly way. It would be great if devs added in something like biter burrowing at extremely high evolution (85%+) where it is needed most.

bobucles wrote:Biter pathing sort of gives up for extremely long or awkward paths. This isn't so much a bug as it is a fact of life for pathing engines. Biter pathing is very expensive on the CPU and difficult to optimize. The pathing failure is likely a performance cutoff to make sure it doesn't cripple the game too hard.

It would be nice if biters had better ways to path long distance. Burrowing is a simple idea that solves pathing in a very CPU friendly way. It would be great if devs added in something like biter burrowing at extremely high evolution (85%+) where it is needed most.

What if, for long distances, they did something like "go to the surrounding chuck with the highest pollution value", and then continued that until they either got to something that was something they'd like to attack or ran into a dead end (in which case they would increase the radius or something)?

Post the save please, can someone reproduce this in the experimental branch?

bobucles wrote:It would be nice if biters had better ways to path long distance. Burrowing is a simple idea that solves pathing in a very CPU friendly way. It would be great if devs added in something like biter burrowing at extremely high evolution (85%+) where it is needed most.

I disagree. It is quite annoying and tedious to enclose the base with defense lines now. It is very hard to see how it would give more interesting gaming experience if player should spam turrets everywhere in addition to that against burrowing (or flying, which is other common suggestion) biters. Material or energy costs are insignificant in that phase of the game and few assemblers could easily product thousands of turrets and bots would maintain them. There would not be any interesting strategic choices, just put turrets so that whole built area is covered. In my opinion it is so marginal extreme endgame problem that command is valid way to solve it. Or maybe some kind of super neutron bomb with radius of a kilometer which kills all biters but leave nests, if command is too brutal for most players who play as far.

In my opinion it is quite natural solution that biter can not path kilometers. Maybe they could make CPU cheap random walk instead of freezing if they can not find a path. And disappear if they go out of known map. Maybe also limited lifetime would help to solve the problem. Then there would not be insane masses of passive biters concentrated on some places.

I was running around with nukes trying to clean some up and burn trees to trigger pollution attacks. Gave up on this as game feel so slow and left it run while I watched TV for about 4 hours in hope it would fix itself. They have no moved from what I can tell. If anything there is now even more as the artillery have still been shooting.


World link = https://drive.google.com/open?id=1iKqnw ... j5yTSsmYZf
let me know if link doesn't work

Hannu wrote:

Cellfire wrote:My problem is with the 1000s of biters that just sit there and don't come attack/die on the wall. Any idea how to bait them all in? They don't even bother to move if I manually target a group.

Do they react if you go there? I had once (maybe 0.14) a problem with Bob's mods. I had very narrow area in long lake (kilometers in both directions) and thousands (insane mass, maybe even 10000) of biters coalesced on opposite shore. They somehow passivated and behaved much like biters on peaceful settings. If I shot them few ten on nearest attacked but others did not care. I began to fear that game will crash and used command "/c game.forces["enemy"].kill_all_units()" to solve a situation. It kills all biters but leave nests.

They do react to me if I get really close.

Thanks Hannu that command instantly removed all the lag.

I disagree. It is quite annoying and tedious to enclose the base with defense lines now. It is very hard to see how it would give more interesting gaming experience if player should spam turrets everywhere in addition to that against burrowing (or flying, which is other common suggestion) biters

So unburrow them before they reach your turrets. The idea is to reduce pathing CPU demand, you don't have to change much else in the game beyond that.

It's also possible that the performance hit is not solely caused by the biters. When you started shooting the artillery, any new areas uncovered were likely not generated previously. The act of shooting the artillery could have significantly expanded the number of generated chunks and size of the map and by default the number of enemy entities tracked.

Artillery can't autofire into terrain that isn't generated because there's nothing to target. Arty can creep into the fog of war by frog leaping from one dead nest to the next.

Manual targeting can force terrain generation if you attack super deep into the unexplored turf. This can be a very severe demand with a large arty train and lots of range increases.

Jap2.0 wrote:

bobucles wrote:Biter pathing sort of gives up for extremely long or awkward paths. This isn't so much a bug as it is a fact of life for pathing engines. Biter pathing is very expensive on the CPU and difficult to optimize. The pathing failure is likely a performance cutoff to make sure it doesn't cripple the game too hard.

It would be nice if biters had better ways to path long distance. Burrowing is a simple idea that solves pathing in a very CPU friendly way. It would be great if devs added in something like biter burrowing at extremely high evolution (85%+) where it is needed most.

What if, for long distances, they did something like "go to the surrounding chuck with the highest pollution value", and then continued that until they either got to something that was something they'd like to attack or ran into a dead end (in which case they would increase the radius or something)?

It would be better if the path finding would simply include the cost of destroying obstacles. So instead of trying to find a way 10000 m around the border wall the cost of going through the wall would become cheaper. Having aliens "go to the surrounding chuck with the highest pollution value" would also be a way to keep path finding limited to short paths. But maybe then aliens would get into loops where they constantly go from one hunk to the other and back because pollution fluctuates.

It would be better if the path finding would simply include the cost of destroying obstacles.

Most pathfinding engines can do this in some capacity. They have to understand the cost of walking across flat terrain after all, or they wouldn't be able to path at all. A pathing brain can definitely handle the implied discounts of walking across roads and the implied expense of breaking through walls.

mrvn wrote:

Jap2.0 wrote:

bobucles wrote:Biter pathing sort of gives up for extremely long or awkward paths. This isn't so much a bug as it is a fact of life for pathing engines. Biter pathing is very expensive on the CPU and difficult to optimize. The pathing failure is likely a performance cutoff to make sure it doesn't cripple the game too hard.

It would be nice if biters had better ways to path long distance. Burrowing is a simple idea that solves pathing in a very CPU friendly way. It would be great if devs added in something like biter burrowing at extremely high evolution (85%+) where it is needed most.

What if, for long distances, they did something like "go to the surrounding chuck with the highest pollution value", and then continued that until they either got to something that was something they'd like to attack or ran into a dead end (in which case they would increase the radius or something)?

It would be better if the path finding would simply include the cost of destroying obstacles. So instead of trying to find a way 10000 m around the border wall the cost of going through the wall would become cheaper. Having aliens "go to the surrounding chuck with the highest pollution value" would also be a way to keep path finding limited to short paths. But maybe then aliens would get into loops where they constantly go from one hunk to the other and back because pollution fluctuates.

Yeah, that's another possible significant improvement. They're supposed to be the enemy, not try to nicely walk through your front door.

Jap2.0 wrote:

mrvn wrote:

Jap2.0 wrote:

bobucles wrote:Biter pathing sort of gives up for extremely long or awkward paths. This isn't so much a bug as it is a fact of life for pathing engines. Biter pathing is very expensive on the CPU and difficult to optimize. The pathing failure is likely a performance cutoff to make sure it doesn't cripple the game too hard.

It would be nice if biters had better ways to path long distance. Burrowing is a simple idea that solves pathing in a very CPU friendly way. It would be great if devs added in something like biter burrowing at extremely high evolution (85%+) where it is needed most.

What if, for long distances, they did something like "go to the surrounding chuck with the highest pollution value", and then continued that until they either got to something that was something they'd like to attack or ran into a dead end (in which case they would increase the radius or something)?

It would be better if the path finding would simply include the cost of destroying obstacles. So instead of trying to find a way 10000 m around the border wall the cost of going through the wall would become cheaper. Having aliens "go to the surrounding chuck with the highest pollution value" would also be a way to keep path finding limited to short paths. But maybe then aliens would get into loops where they constantly go from one hunk to the other and back because pollution fluctuates.

Yeah, that's another possible significant improvement. They're supposed to be the enemy, not try to nicely walk through your front door.

And if you teach aliens to dog-paddle you can even eliminate the problem of pathing around large bodies of water.

An alternative to making aliens able to swim (at least through shallow) water would be to make them build bridges by dying. A desperate alien could jump into the water, drown and leave a pretty corpse. The next alien could then walk on the corpse and get a bit further. The corpse could be temporary or water could be landfilled if enough aliens jump into the water.

mrvn wrote:

Jap2.0 wrote:

mrvn wrote:

Jap2.0 wrote:

bobucles wrote:Biter pathing sort of gives up for extremely long or awkward paths. This isn't so much a bug as it is a fact of life for pathing engines. Biter pathing is very expensive on the CPU and difficult to optimize. The pathing failure is likely a performance cutoff to make sure it doesn't cripple the game too hard.

It would be nice if biters had better ways to path long distance. Burrowing is a simple idea that solves pathing in a very CPU friendly way. It would be great if devs added in something like biter burrowing at extremely high evolution (85%+) where it is needed most.

What if, for long distances, they did something like "go to the surrounding chuck with the highest pollution value", and then continued that until they either got to something that was something they'd like to attack or ran into a dead end (in which case they would increase the radius or something)?

It would be better if the path finding would simply include the cost of destroying obstacles. So instead of trying to find a way 10000 m around the border wall the cost of going through the wall would become cheaper. Having aliens "go to the surrounding chuck with the highest pollution value" would also be a way to keep path finding limited to short paths. But maybe then aliens would get into loops where they constantly go from one hunk to the other and back because pollution fluctuates.

Yeah, that's another possible significant improvement. They're supposed to be the enemy, not try to nicely walk through your front door.

And if you teach aliens to dog-paddle you can even eliminate the problem of pathing around large bodies of water.

An alternative to making aliens able to swim (at least through shallow) water would be to make them build bridges by dying. A desperate alien could jump into the water, drown and leave a pretty corpse. The next alien could then walk on the corpse and get a bit further. The corpse could be temporary or water could be landfilled if enough aliens jump into the water.

If that's implemented, I'm imagining that someone's going to try to do an island spawn without stone and get to land that way .

Loewchen wrote:Post the save please, can someone reproduce this in the experimental branch?

(save file is ~300mb, so I cant upload it to the forum, I hope this will do)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1k5yC5V ... 5WmuY/view

I believe we are experiencing the same problem... I assumed it was due to us using 4k arty wagons hidden behind 30k tiles of solar / accus... its been about 8 hours now running at 7 UPS or so; unit groups have gone down... from 25500 to 25101 on live atm. I understand they're scared, but they're going to a better place.

mrvn wrote:

Jap2.0 wrote:

mrvn wrote:

Jap2.0 wrote:

bobucles wrote:Biter pathing sort of gives up for extremely long or awkward paths. This isn't so much a bug as it is a fact of life for pathing engines. Biter pathing is very expensive on the CPU and difficult to optimize. The pathing failure is likely a performance cutoff to make sure it doesn't cripple the game too hard.

It would be nice if biters had better ways to path long distance. Burrowing is a simple idea that solves pathing in a very CPU friendly way. It would be great if devs added in something like biter burrowing at extremely high evolution (85%+) where it is needed most.

What if, for long distances, they did something like "go to the surrounding chuck with the highest pollution value", and then continued that until they either got to something that was something they'd like to attack or ran into a dead end (in which case they would increase the radius or something)?

It would be better if the path finding would simply include the cost of destroying obstacles. So instead of trying to find a way 10000 m around the border wall the cost of going through the wall would become cheaper. Having aliens "go to the surrounding chuck with the highest pollution value" would also be a way to keep path finding limited to short paths. But maybe then aliens would get into loops where they constantly go from one hunk to the other and back because pollution fluctuates.

Yeah, that's another possible significant improvement. They're supposed to be the enemy, not try to nicely walk through your front door.

And if you teach aliens to dog-paddle you can even eliminate the problem of pathing around large bodies of water.

An alternative to making aliens able to swim (at least through shallow) water would be to make them build bridges by dying. A desperate alien could jump into the water, drown and leave a pretty corpse. The next alien could then walk on the corpse and get a bit further. The corpse could be temporary or water could be landfilled if enough aliens jump into the water.

That just means I now have to laser wall my water, instead of using it as a natural obstacle to reduce the time spent copy-pasting huge lines of lasers.

Also, I'd need to shift my 24 core reactor four squares down to accommodate a line of lasers to defend the water inputs. More specifically, I need to build a backup reactor capable of maintaining my factory, along with it's fairly extensive laser walls, during the time that the main reactor moves.

Kryptos wrote: That just means I now have to laser wall my water, instead of using it as a natural obstacle to reduce the time spent copy-pasting huge lines of lasers.

Also, I'd need to shift my 24 core reactor four squares down to accommodate a line of lasers to defend the water inputs. More specifically, I need to build a backup reactor capable of maintaining my factory, along with it's fairly extensive laser walls, during the time that the main reactor moves.

Only if you landfill the ocean till there is only a small trench left. Costs would be something like 1000 tiles walking around it vs. crossing one water tile by dying. Or 100 vs dog paddle.

As for your nuclear reactor... Even if the aliens landfill the water hole your water pump will keep working. And iirc they fixed it so that the water pump could be rebuild when destroyed.