Introversion

For the love of God PLEASE give ant nests time limits.

I say make them work like in darwinia. Make the ants nests incubator-like structures, and if you kill all of the ants, they make good decorations.

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.

I'd like to see some additional ant AI changes along with that - nests sending packs of ants to gather souls or attack multiwinians elsewhere on the same landmass, so they don't remain an entirely local problem.

It would also be great to have nests spawn queens on reaching a certain number of stored souls, who could fly anywhere on the map and start new nests. This would make using ants more unpredictable and likely to backfire on the player who originally placed the nest - uncontrolled, ants could quickly spread across the map and threaten everyone.

To combat lag, perhaps ants that aren't out on foraging missions should remain inside the nest if there are no souls/enemies within range?


Alternatively, all ant nests could share a global worker pool, so if you place a particularly successful nest, the next one placed will be that much stronger - and it could be in your own back yard. This could also lead to some interesting strategies like placing ant nests in magical forests in order to support offensive ant nests at enemy spawnpoints.

I like ants. They spice up the action. They are like an extra player that everyone has to worry about. The farther from you are from them and close to the enemy the better.

Unit13 wrote:I like ants. They spice up the action. They are like an extra player that everyone has to worry about. The farther from you are from them and close to the enemy the better.

Is there any particular reason you bumped this thread?

xander