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.
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.