Help Lag

[You Live]

Can anyone help me? the game starts lagging badly, and it slows down, becoming unplayable. Does anyone know how to set up the game properly? thank you

[The Grand Mugwump]

You could try to reduce the amount of programs running in the background. If there are other things competing for the processor or memory, it can cause a lot of lag. I've also had lag when the AI hives get really big.

[You Live]

I've tried everything, I have a good computer.
Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10850K CPU @ 3.60GHz
Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ram32 gb
But I can't figure out if the game is the problem, or I need to reduce something from my computer

[The Grand Mugwump]

Check the power settings if you're using Windows. Windows, by default, will limit the power which goes to the hardware on it, which can dramatically lower its performance.

[OndeTv]

Originally posted by The Grand Mugwump:

Check the power settings if you're using Windows. Windows, by default, will limit the power which goes to the hardware on it, which can dramatically lower its performance.

I am having the same. Funny thing though, is that CPU isn't capped, ram isn't capped, GPU isn't capped when it happens.

Also the narrator speech does not stutter when the game has these sudden periods of 10 all the way down to 1 fps. The music occasionally plays double when it happens though.

In other words, it's something happening internally in the game itself, since the game has plenty of resources available.

A few other things worth mentioning:
- it can happen with lower than 100 ants, but on the other hand it can also run smoothly with more than 600 ants.
- it seems to happen most frequently on "cold blood", especially during just before or during toad incursion
- on "cold blood", small groups (up to 38) seem to have less likelyhood of making the bug happen
- similarly on "cold blood", large groups (150-300) seem to have a high likelyhood of making the bug happen
- it also happened a lot on the (real) final experiment
- when it happens, recources (cpu, gpu and ram) can show less than 50% utilization across the board
- the longer the game has been running (in general), the more likely it seems for the bug to occur

- one or more pathing bugs may be the trigger of the bug, as i have observed ants "overshooting" their target paths during the slideshow that this bug makes the game. The "overshooting" seems to affect both player "controlled" ants and game controlled entities.

- a side effect of the bug can occasionally prevent attacking an enemy colony, as the game seems to fail to recognize ants entering the enemy colony, which in turn makes player ants pile up in the entrance holes and having a very hard time pathing out again.

Example of ants stuck in colony entrance (although in this case, it is an enemy ant making them all go stuck):
https://i.imgur.com/jQy6Oky.png


Edit:
- and no, i have no power limit settings active throttling. If the game wanted to use 100% of everything, it could (and some other games will).

[AntBZK]

Originally posted by OndeTv:

I am having the same. Funny thing though, is that CPU isn't capped, ram isn't capped, GPU isn't capped when it happens.

Also the narrator speech does not stutter when the game has these sudden periods of 10 all the way down to 1 fps. The music occasionally plays double when it happens though.

In other words, it's something happening internally in the game itself, since the game has plenty of resources available.

This is enough to diagnose. This issue is common for me. It's the opposite of what you are thinking. It's the units getting stuck in nest entrance that creates the lag.
Nest entrance is a two-way spawner that despawns units in one map and spawns units in another. Units repond to command at a constant rate so when you put too many units into one marker and force them to despawn all at once, the path-finding algorithm overworks and lags the game. This is why they don't allow more AI colonies on one map.
Solution: Use multiple pheromone groups and avoid making all your units get in or out of the nest at the same time. In case they don't respond, you can delete your units and rebuild later.

[OndeTv]

Makes sense. However, that is a horrible bug in a game that revolves around high unit count, and the solution is also pretty shaky.

The screenshot i posted actually had about 10 small groups divided into all pheromone groups. Yet, eventually i gave it up as i could not get them un-stuck even shuffling them around in the groups.

Deleting and remaking groups isn't really an option either, as first of all it is a huge waste of resources, and secondly takes forever, since the worker ants will also take forever deleting the nest tiles.

This bug needs to be squashed, literally and figuratively, yesterday.