African Driver Ants

Buffalo981

Queen
Extremely Helpful Person
You guys said you wanted an increase in complexity as the formicarium tiers progressed, and I can see that happening with fire ants and their bridges in formicarium tier 4. Liam on the steam discussions said it was likely African Driver ants would be the fifth formicarium tier.

In real life, a queen African Driver Ant (or almost any army ant species) has two stages, the egg laying stage and the migratory stage (this is why she looks so strange). She will consume food and will lay a bunch of eggs, and then she will stop laying and enter the migratory stage. Her workers will protect her and the brood as the whole colony migrates to a new location by creating a mobile "fortress" around them with their own bodies.

Perhaps this could be implemented by making it so the nest is not necessarily underground but inside one of these "fortresses". The player could build chambers inside of it. I think these horde mechanics would definitely increase the complexity of the game, but also it would be an amazing finale to the campaign. Of course, this would also be the most difficult and time-consuming species to implement if you guys do something like this.
 
I would think that instead of changing the nest gameplay for a single species they might do one or multiple "migration" levels where you have to defend a slowly moving queen with a predetermined number of soldiers, perhaps adding in the newly scientifically discovered ant triage ability to heal wounded soldiers or even a slavemaker mechanic as a way of keeping your numbers up. Just my 2 cents.
 
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