The server is averaging about 12ms for robotarmy currently, next highest mod is construction bots (klonans mod) eating 0.5ms on average. We have about 4 'groups' of 100 each of droids, however they seem to be each near an individual group based on their death messages so I'm wondering if that is contributing to the huge usage. They all come out of a set of 2 droid assemblers that are side by side (faster deploying reason).

Scale it back to 100 droids and only one squad and see what it looks like then. Is your server powerful?

Here's a test I just did with 550 droids in as large as reasonable squads I could make

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1714083173

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1714083228

as you can see, the tick time for robot army on the left side statistics is fairly low - but all squads are basically already tasked and not much is happening. There was one or two spikes of 30ms during some calculation (pathing request maybe?) but its running pretty smooth in this quick test.

I wonder if your squads of 4 x 100 are just too big, try for squads of ~50, and also if they are stuck or whatever, could be cycling through AI attempts to fix the squad or find new enemies for the squad and it's not able to get out of the loop, wasting CPU %.

Or your server CPU is weak as piss, which wouldn't help anything of course.

Will try to check tonight if I get time though it might not be until tomorrow.

A really weird thing is that we keep getting a Squad Death message for almost every droid that dies, which is what makes me thing that they are somehow not staying a single squad when one of the other players gives them a movement command.

What happens is they bunch up as a squad and then go out on their own, occasionally one of the militaristic players selects them with the robotarmy command tool and orders them to attack a certain area, and at times when he does that then from that point forward whenever they start dying there is a squad death message for each and every one of them. It's a bit odd...

The server is quite strong, 4.2ghz, 6 native cores, 16gigs ram, SSD, etc..., but not all the players systems are strong, and as the game runs in lockstep...

if the squads have split up into lots of teeny tiny single-unit squads, that's a problem for sure. They do that when the squad fails to get somewhere, it can 'disband' and return to nearest assembler to regroup and form a new squad or join an existing one.

Did your players place down a "droid settings module" and change the hunt squad size to only 1? that would cause a swarm of single or maybe two-droid squads to rush out and if they die a lot, it can be annoying with all the messages

if the squads have split up into lots of teeny tiny single-unit squads, that's a problem for sure. They do that when the squad fails to get somewhere, it can 'disband' and return to nearest assembler to regroup and form a new squad or join an existing one.

We do get quite a few messages about pathing fails. To our north is a very large ocean with a number of islands covered in biters, all other directions are land.

Did your players place down a "droid settings module" and change the hunt squad size to only 1? that would cause a swarm of single or maybe two-droid squads to rush out and if they die a lot, it can be annoying with all the messages

We have it set to squad size either 100 or 200 depending, with a retreat set to 10