Biocenosis over extermination (and few other things)

CalenLoki

Larva
Greetings.

I've played a bit, and few things get me concerned. First is how our ants behave like humans, where the best and only option to fight enemies is to send masses of soldiers to exterminate them. It pushes the gameplay in direction so overused classical RTS style. In nature all the species live close together, and achieving absolute domination is pretty much impossible.

Thus IMO it would be much more interesting to let player provoke enemies to fight each other. For example build corridors in a way that make two invading forces fight each other. Or by placing tasty pieces between their lairs, so they start fighting over it. And finally playing stealthy way, hoping that enemies will find each other before noticing him.

Such change would also self-increase difficulty level over time, because the bigger your nest is, the more enemies focus on you rather than other species.


Some other things:
1. Workers are quite useless (except few for larvae work). Most of the work is either fighting or gathering food, so soldiers are universally better. Unless I miss something. Maybe make workers 2x cheaper to hatch?
2. There is no drawback in placing stockpiles right next to food sources, because they get teleported to building site and no other insects try to steal them. Full hauling system would fix it.
3. Digging is way too fast. It apply both to your and enemy ants. IMO game would benefit from conservation of mass physics rule: every piece of soil removed from one place need to be dumped somewhere (i.e. to the surface, or to seal some other corridor)
4. No biological matter should waste: IMO all corpses should be edible. That require a bit smaller units: Hatching 2 for worker, 4 for soldier; corpses half of that; 20 for nest tiles. That would make battle with less than 33% losses against equal opponent neutral for food storage.
5. What about upkeep? After all ants need to eat too. Easiest way would be making them die after certain amount of time. It would also require endless source of nutrients.
 

Liam

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
Hey CalenLoki,

Your initial suggestion of provoking enemies is interesting, and it has come up before. This might be difficult for us to set up properly in a lot of missions while at the same time avoiding the tactic becoming overpowered and easily exploited. We do have plans for missions where larger colonies are at war / in the way and you must avoid them.

Also, currently there is only one type of soldier ant in the colony which won't be the case in the release version. We will be allowing multiple ant species in the same colony in about 50% of the missions. Although this is not a true reflection of nature, it allows for more tactical style of play.

As for your other comments, the majority of these seem to hint towards a much more simulation-based game. This is something that we want to experiment with in the future as an alternative play mode. Currently we are walking a line between traditional RTS and simulation / management. The more in-depth the colony management aspects get, the harder it for us to script missions, maintain a certain pace and balance the opponent(s) - also the learning curve for new players goes up.

The plan to make workers more useful (beyond dinging, building and brood jobs) will be tied into efficiency ratings on food collection. At the moment, this is not implemented, but our plan is that all of the ants can collect any type of food, but at different rates. The black ants will be very good at aphid farming, the leaf cutters will be very good at cutting and carrying leaves, but the standard formica Ereptor worker (available in the multi-species levels) will be 'average' at completing any food task. They are also much cheaper to produce as they are quite useless in battle.

Upkeep is something we experimented with, but having ants die on a timer made it very difficult to get a 'feel' for the state of your colony and could be quite frustrating in many cases. This really seems like a simulation mode option to me, where you want to build up a colony and try to make it sustainable in its environment. Rather than a mission-based game with clearly defined final victory objectives.

Your point about stockpiles being placed anywhere is very relevant though. I agree that this seems too convenient. I like the idea of enemies stealing it, or lowered efficiency/higher placement cost far from the queen.

The biological matter point is good. We started with all corpses being harvestable but food counts became too large. Now we have only larger enemies drop food, though we are not done with this yet. Hatching ants will cost more long term (the plan is to have 3 tiers) and we might implement a % probability for smaller corpses to become food.

I suppose the final thing to say is, we don't want to make a traditional RTS, but we are taking elements from that genre to produce a faster-paced management/simulation game. This means cutting out some deeper management/simulation mechanics. Working on a more complex, slower paced sandbox-simulation mode is something we would really love to do though, it is right at the top of the priority list along side multiplayer as a job for post-release.

Thanks for the great feedback!
 

Brosencrantz

Larva
Backer
Beta Tester
I have nothing specific to add here except that it's really good to see these detailed responses from the team and hear your future plans - you clearly have a great handle on what makes a good game and it makes me very confident that the final product will be excellent.
 

CalenLoki

Larva
Yeah, as you noticed I'm deep into simulations right now (Rimworld). And for some reason I automatically connected insects with simulation. Maybe because of indirect unit controls?

Yet some points apply to RTS just as much: the problem of walls being made of single-use paper, thus removing whole aspect of designing your nest (because enemies can just dig right through).

Thanks for reply. I always appreciate good dev-players communication!
 

Liam

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
I have the Rimworld steam page open on my browser at the moment, it's just teasing me. I have to keep exercising restraint because I really don't have time to be sucked in, and I know I would be. John has already lost a good few hours to it, but he will survive, he is less of a sim junkie than me.

The point about the dig speed: I agree, it does need to be slowed down - that would also increase the relative usefulness of workers. As for enemies that dig into your base, I know that dungeon keeper allowed you to protect against this by fortifying walls, but I am not sure if we will need a similar ability. Tunneling enemies will be fairly rare, especially in missions that have a greater focus on the overground.

Nest design should become more important for other reasons soon, not just for considering the enemy paths to your queen. Tile upgrades will require that surrounding tiles are of the same type, encouraging you to build enclosed rooms. To complement this, ants will move more slowly on built tiles (we may also add a corridor tile for a speed boost, though this is still in discussion) - the effect being that you will want to design your base with corridors and satellite rooms as ants will still choose the shortest (not necessarily the fastest) route through your base.
 

Serafine

Queen
Backer
Beta Tester
Ecosystem Beta Tester
MartialisHeureka said:
Ants are NOT cannibals. They will not eat other ants.
Some of them do.
Thief ants (like the tiny Solenopsis fugax) steal ant eat the brood of other ants and sugar ants (Camponotus) raid, kill and eat other ants if given the chance.

CalenLoki said:
I've played a bit, and few things get me concerned. First is how our ants behave like humans, where the best and only option to fight enemies is to send masses of soldiers to exterminate them. It pushes the gameplay in direction so overused classical RTS style.
Actually that's pretty much like ants fight.
The problem is not the ants, the actual problem is that all traditional RTS games do not properly reflect like humans fight.

CalenLoki said:
In nature all the species live close together, and achieving absolute domination is pretty much impossible.
In nature all invasive species (and the genestealer ant in this game is definitely an invasive species) replace indigenous ants by either outcompeting or outright killing them.
The worst offenders in this regard are Solenopsis invicta (red improted fire ants), Pheidole megacephalia (bigheaded ants) and Linepithema humile (argentine ants) - all of them are predators (especially the first two) that hunt and eat other ants.

CalenLoki said:
Thus IMO it would be much more interesting to let player provoke enemies to fight each other. For example build corridors in a way that make two invading forces fight each other. Or by placing tasty pieces between their lairs, so they start fighting over it. And finally playing stealthy way, hoping that enemies will find each other before noticing him.
These are nice ideas but we also need a mission design that is more than "kill everything that's not your team color". I made a few suggestions for game modes that do not require you to just "kill everything".



1. Workers are quite useless (except few for larvae work). Most of the work is either fighting or gathering food, so soldiers are universally better. Unless I miss something. Maybe make workers 2x cheaper to hatch?
Workers should be able to dig faster and have more build options (like refilling tiles with earth to block passages). Also in bigger colonies you're going to need them to replace the larvae.

2. There is no drawback in placing stockpiles right next to food sources, because they get teleported to building site and no other insects try to steal them. Full hauling system would fix it.
Yep, this is indeed a bit silly. Players (and AI) should be allow to raid enemy food tiles that would mostly fix the issue.

3. Digging is way too fast. It apply both to your and enemy ants. IMO game would benefit from conservation of mass physics rule: every piece of soil removed from one place need to be dumped somewhere (i.e. to the surface, or to seal some other corridor)
I don't think waste dispoosal is needed but slower digging would benefit the game's strategic aspect a lot.

4. No biological matter should waste: IMO all corpses should be edible.
I agree but ants should only give very few resources. Aside from the queen alates (or replete forms) ants are not very nutritious at all.

5. What about upkeep? After all ants need to eat too. Easiest way would be making them die after certain amount of time. It would also require endless source of nutrients.
Ants are amazingly resourceful. Adult ants barely need any protein (they can't digest solid food anyway) and can live from surprisingly low amounts of sugary liquids. All they need is a reliable source of water.
What consumes all the tons of insects the ants drag into their nests is the brood. Compared to their appetite the adult ants barely eat anything.
 
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