Alternative SP missions / MP game modes

[Serafine]

A few ideas for alternative missions so they're not all the same (because that may end up boring quickly):


- Nuptial flight:
Your objective in this mission is to produce flying males and females (males are cheap to raise and give few points, virgin queens are very costly and give a lot of victory points - their nesting hexes are placed like normal worker hatcheries but they will only give birth to one alate and then disappear).
The queen must survive but you do not have to kill any enemies - in fact unnecessary confrontations are bad because they are a waste of resources.

- Relocation:
You need to relocate your colony to a new nesting site. To achieve this you must scout the surface for a suitable nest, remove all obstacles in the way, fend off all competition and move your queen to the new nest (she's kinda slow and vulnerable, especially while on the surface).
The queen must survive but you do not have to kill any enemies - in fact unnecessary confrontations are bad because they are a waste of resources.

- Harvesting
In this mission your objective is to stock up a certain amount of food. Food bits are scattered all over the map (with some huge ones like a dead rat or a bag of fries), you need to find them, fend off all competition and gather the required amount of food.
The queen must survive but you do not have to kill all enemies - in fact unnecessary confrontations are bad because they are a waste of resources.

- Survival
Resources are scarce in the game mode and every few minutes there's an awful random global event happening - vibrations causing tunnels to collapse, kids incinerating workers on the surface with magnifying glasses or birds picking them off, an exterminator spraying poisonous gas into the nest entrances, moles invading the tunnels, thief ants trying to steal food and brood etc. - these events get worse the longer the mission goes on.
You must survive longer than all other colonies (you loose when your queen dies). Last queen standing wins.


These would also make very interesting multiplayer modes.

 

[JohnSlugDisco]

Some interesting ideas. We have some missions planned along these lines. One thing we haven’t explored the idea of much is nuptial flights and you have some interesting thoughts here.

Perhaps whist the males and females are developing they constantly drain resources so you need to keep food income high to do it.

We do have ideas on how we would do relocation missions, it would essentially involve a create a colony phase and then a traveling phase, so once you relocate you need to have a full escort prepared to keep the queen and workers carrying brood alive in transit.

We have a harvesting mission planned very like the one you describe, only there is a timer so you must do it fast else something happens that causes you to fail.

I like the idea of random events occurring and I think things like magnifying glass could be great fun for special mission (ones that take place outside of the story).

Thanks for your thoughts, some nice ideas here!

 

[Serafine]

For the harvesting mission in multiplayer mode you could make it so that players have to raise and feed repletes and only resources stored in repletes count towards the mission objective (repletes can store much more resources than food tiles can).

The twist here is that repletes can be captured and dragged way by other players to be included into their stock (honey pod ants actually do this in the wild). That could prevent a single player from dominating a match early and make matches close and intense with raiding (but not killing) another colony being an option to gain an advantage.

We have a harvesting mission planned very like the one you describe, only there is a timer so you must do it fast else something happens that causes you to fail.

This would also work with nuptial flight - kill the enemy colony before it produces more than X alates (like 50 or 100).

It wouldn't have a hard timer because you could (and probably would have to) slow down the enemy colony's alate production by harassing them (killing workers/soldiers they then have to replace) and cutting them off from their food resources (aphid farms, etc.) but essentially it would be the same.