whats the point of biotech (and game) when...

[Mr. Ben Ben]

Your performance gets tanked when you have around 20+ units. Whether they be colonists or mechs. I thought these mechs were suppose to improve my gameplay experience, not hinder it?

[boytype]

Mechinators like to live in colonies with 5 or less people in them, as shown by the [Reclusive] trait that they get. This was probably done to address the lag issue when you have a large human colony + mechs.

The 20+ colonist lag wall does not remove the cool aspects of either children OR mechinators. Having kids adds a new way to get colonists instead of kidnapping and brainwashing people, buying slaves, or rescuing random strangers and giving them fill access to all of your resources.

You can get performance mods to help address these issues, specifically the lag caused by idle mechs;
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2885792215

Then there are these other mods that also assist with performance of large colonies (and yes, 20+ units is still a large colony);
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2664723367
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2038874626
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2479389928

[Garatgh Deloi]

Originally posted by boytype:

Mechinators like to live in colonies with 5 or less people in them, as shown by the [Reclusive] trait that they get. This was probably done to address the lag issue when you have a large human colony + mechs.

To clarify: Mechanitors being reclusive is only a thing for your starting pawn if you start with the Mechanitor scenario. You can easily get a Mechanitor without that trait doing any other scenario (since you always have a ancient mech wreck with a transponder on your starting map).

[Narrowmind]

I wondered about that. So if you do get the tech midgame from the wreck, you don't have to deal with the recluse trait.

[Garatgh Deloi]

Originally posted by Ratlegion:

I wondered about that. So if you do get the tech midgame from the wreck, you don't have to deal with the recluse trait.

You don't really need to wait for mid game. You can easily get a Mechanitor from the wreck the first or second game day (If you do it early enough its usually just 1 random mid tier mechanoid, like a scyther or scorcher, that needs to be killed, when its just 1 many of the Mechs can easily be kited or ganged up on).

That said, getting more then a single Mech (That you get when becoming a Mechanitor) running will take a tad longer then with the scenario (need to research the tech and you don't start with all the resources like the Mechanitor scenario does).

[N4pfkuchen!]

Originally posted by Praetorian:

Your performance gets tanked when you have around 20+ units. Whether they be colonists or mechs. I thought these mechs were suppose to improve my gameplay experience, not hinder it?

If you talk about performance, maybe you should provide some info about your hardware...

[Païtiti]

I sometimes play on an old laptop without any good graphic card and the game still runs in late game. You might need to look over your modlist. Having hundreds of useless mods kills the game. Then those performance mods that have been posted above really help. I usually also use dev mode ultra speed mod because it can speed up time enourmously especially during sleeping hours.

[The Coal Man]

I've got 25+ mechs and about 15 colonists (4 of which are children) and I haven't ran into a lag wall yet. Things get a little jerky/slow if I add a bunch of people for a quest but having a ton of lifters and cleaners running around doesn't seem to impact performance at all unless I issue an order to them all at once. If I do that it does cause it to stutter.

They use up about as much AI as animals roaming wild or running around hauling and those don't seem to influence the game at all. I wouldn't worry about using them as basic labor.

I'm playing on mid level gaming laptop thats several years old so I wouldn't really expect my experience to be far from the average performance experience.

[The Yeen Queen]

YOUR performance gets tanked. I don't even have a powerful rig and mine does just fine. I don't know what to tell ya, man.

[AlienWired]

I love my solitude.....

[Steelfleece]

May want to check your mods list. Something might be slowing the game down more than expected. I even had appreciable performance with a dozen colonists and a bunch of animals on a fricking Athlon X2 5000+, which is in a rig that's now old enough that it isn't really interested in playing Fortnite anymore. Currently using an i7-4790k, which is newer and in what was a very high performance rig back when the least liked Star Wars movies were the prequels. I haven't tried for stupidly huge colonies in a while, but I have had some silly big raids and even then, with like 250 mods, performance hasn't really tanked much.