Factorio Forums

When tons of artillery is fired, unit groups increase into the thousands. The biters sit there until they can have a turn with the pathfinder to attack. The number of active entities grows, UPS drops, and in MP eventually the FPS drops to unplayable on mediocre hardware. Can the biters waiting to have their turn somehow be deactivated if they are not going to attack for some time? The only workaround I have found is to kill all active units on the enemy force. I don't like doing this because I really do enjoy the aspect of killing the biters out of the pollution cloud but when hours are required for all the biters to finally attack, performance crippled in the meantime, it's not manageable to automate expansion.

It is obvious that you are frustrated, but your frustration is making your post not very clear.

I think you are saying:

- If the pollution cloud reaches the biters, they are activated.
- Once activated they cause a huge UPS hit.
- The UPS hit goes away once you destroy those nests and kill their biters.

If that is what you are saying, the obvious solution that I can think of (other than the devs modying the game, which I don't see happening for this) is to prevent the cloud from reaching those nests.

To keep the cloud from expanding you can do some things:
- Build smaller and use efficiency modules.
- Use a mod that helps you reduce pollution. For example the Air Filters mod by Schorty is good for that.
- You can also adjust New Game settings:
--- Increasing the starting area size option will give you more room to build by putting the nests farther away.
--- There is a setting (dispersion maybe?) that controls how fast and how far the cloud expands.

Using one or more of the things above should help you avoid the UPS hit in mediocre hardware.

BTW, you can also destroy nests in a much more localized fashion by using a tank and a bunch of personal lasers in your mk2 armor. That should irritate fewer enemies at a time. Artillery is not the only way.

Koub wrote: Thu Jun 06, 2019 5:37 am [Koub] Moved to Gameplay help

Looks more like a bug report to me (i think it was in interface requests before?).
"Artillery spam > causes pathfinder overload > causes performance problems."

eradicator wrote: Thu Jun 06, 2019 10:02 am

Koub wrote: Thu Jun 06, 2019 5:37 am [Koub] Moved to Gameplay help

Looks more like a bug report to me (i think it was in interface requests before?).
"Artillery spam > causes pathfinder overload > causes performance problems."

Not really a bug, a design choice that assumes that you have good hardware. I won't say it is the best of choices... but it is what they chose. Whether it was intentional or not... is anybody's guess.

zOldBulldog wrote: Thu Jun 06, 2019 10:34 am Not really a bug, a design choice that assumes that you have good hardware.

Your magic knowledge of @darklich14's hardware is impressive.

eradicator wrote: Thu Jun 06, 2019 10:52 am

zOldBulldog wrote: Thu Jun 06, 2019 10:34 am Not really a bug, a design choice that assumes that you have good hardware.

Your magic knowledge of @darklich14's hardware is impressive.

I think it's a generic "you have" like in "the player has"

eradicator wrote: Thu Jun 06, 2019 10:52 am

zOldBulldog wrote: Thu Jun 06, 2019 10:34 am Not really a bug, a design choice that assumes that you have good hardware.

Your magic knowledge of @darklich14's hardware is impressive.

It only takes a little attention while reading his post to notice the phrase "FPS drops to unplayable on mediocre hardware".

It might also be better to try to help him solve his problem than to derail the thread with a comment totally unrelated to the topic.