Chris wrote:We are strongly considering nerfing the ants nests. Right now they spawn ants indefinately and require quite a lot of explosives to destroy, which means they often remain for the whole game, and Darwinians are terrible at dealing with them.
We've made an experimental change whereby ants nests take damage when they are "empty" of ants, ie all ants are outside or dead. Ants nests left on their own gradually accumulate darwinians and souls and grow their population. Ants nests that are attacked directly suffer heavy population losses and eventually run short of ants, then they start "dying off". So you can focus your Darwinians on an ant infestation and destroy it if you wish to. This makes the ants nests more like the Egg powerup - it can be a big problem if allowed to grow and spread, but it can be dealt with if done quickly.
Thoughts?
That sounds great. It solves the problem of requiring a random element to destroy the ants nest. It would need to be very finely tuned so that you need to order the multiwinians to form up on the nest to take the ants down, otherwise they would take it out autonomouly, and this would make it next-to-useless. I have seen many games turn the most over-powerful unit to a completely useless (and therefore unused) unit, or vise-versa, because they rushed the balance testing.