Food Economy & Workers

[bills6693]

Hi everyone, bought the game and loving what is there of it so far!

Having played through the campaign so far, I had a little feedback and came up with an idea to both make the nest more interesting, design more important and workers more necessary.

At the moment, my experience has been that workers are often fairly unnecessary for success, and this has been reinforced by a quick read of the steam forums in which other users have also had the same experience. Since soldiers can carry food back to the base, the only requirement for workers is to build tiles and deliver eggs. Now, on levels where there is a time limit they are useful as a cheap way to get things moving and to be able to build up a huge horde that can strip food quickly (e.g. the beach level) but for running your actual colony, the starting 7 are generally more than enough - to the extent that on fully 'underground' levels it is generally easier and probably more efficient to not make any extra. Whilst workers 'can' be used as a cheap meatshield etc, that doesn't seem to make sense for their role - they should be workers, not just cheaper soldiers!

My next thought was about the colony itself. The only reason it is pretty busy around the colony is because of the way that ants will either not all go to a pheromone marker or will wonder back towards the queen periodically, which I did appreciate (as I like that you don't have total control of your ants, and that they kind of do their own thing too) but just meant lots of ants were sitting around the queen. Outer bits of your nest (e.g. hatcheries) were only active to drop off eggs and then for newly hatched ants to leave, and food storage only for depositing. Not much really happens around the place. I also found I don't really need to put much though into how I design my base, even though the basic building blocks are there (walking speed changes, upgrades).

My suggestion:
Food processing and distribution. At the moment, the ants dump some food in the colony and it becomes instantly usable anywhere in the colony. A big food dump next to the colony entrance can feed all the ants in hatcheries miles away. And the colony doesn't rely on an army of workers to get stuff to where it needs to be, leaving a soldier-focused colony with little internal activity. My suggestion would work as follows:

Raw resources (raw food) would be deposited in the colony as it currently works. From there the ants would need to break it down into something they want to eat - this could be implemented as a sort of food paste, or (my ant knowledge is not as extensive as others I know will read this so excuse me!) into sugars/starches, or grow fungus on your rotting food, or whatever else ants may do/would not be unreasonable to have in the game. Possibly some foods could be easier to process e.g. sugar from aphids, or fruit, would be faster to process than nuts or meat - though this isn't essential.

This processing would require workers to take it to a new room, and to perform a sort of processing task to continuously convert raw food there into food paste (or whatever it was). Possibly food could very slowly process in storage (to allow choices as to when to start building a 'fermentation chamber' and as the way to work it at the start of a mission/game).

This food paste would then be used by the ants in constructing tiles and hatching ants. Workers would have to carry food to the tile to do the constructing, and would get food as well as an egg when laying an egg to hatch. This could also include a 'task' element for the worker as they feed/tend the egg to allow it to then develop.

All of this would serve to:
a. Make workers more relevant. You would need an army of cheap workers to support your colony operating, making them a more important part of the game as they would be the only ones that could process food, and it would take them longer to do stuff due to the extra steps. Removes the current fact that all food is 'produced' by soldiers just as effectively as workers.

b. Add stuff happening to your colony. There would be constant movement between rooms as food is taken to be processed, and paste is taken to the queen or to hatcheries for developing eggs. Layout would be more important as there would be more movement around the base - speed tiles would be vital to make a more efficient base so less workers can do much more and support a larger colony.

There is more implementation of this idea that could be talked about but I've already written a wall of text so I'll leave it here for now, I welcome feedback/thoughts on the suggestion!

 

[Serafine]

I made a whole concept for that:

Full size: https://i.imgur.com/iEh3EJI.jpg

And one for leafcutters:

Full size: https://i.imgur.com/XWpoQ7h.jpg

 

[Kaien_Saerin]

i cant even begin to wonder how long it took your too come up with this. A+ for ideas, but game is already built in a way that its deadlocked until story is completed. Balancing will come between and during patches for new content. And after the Beta is done maybe they'll rework the whole food scheme for multiplayer. But for now it works for its intended purpose.

 

[Rayalot72]

I feel as if some of your ideas might take place in the case of leaf cutter ants, which we were told are coming next, and that make fungus gardens IRL. I'm happy with the workers as is, and I find them balanced, but your suggestion would make the game a lot more interesting.

1.2 you actually need workers for hard mode btw. You will lose quite quickly if you don't have a food collection team, and your soldiers will ideally never collect food, as they need to kill as many things as they can during the downtime between waves.

2.1 and 2.2 hard you generally need more workers to ensure you have fast enough respawns, otherwise wolf spiders and an abundance of tasks will cause a quick wipe.

 

[CruiserJintsuu1923]

Thumbs up to whoever is writing and formulating thoughts into something consumable.
Honestly, i have the same issue, just build a huge army of warrior and call it a day.
Also, I would like the base population limit only apply to warrior, and has no limit on worker.

 

[Serafine]

1.2 you actually need workers for hard mode btw. You will lose quite quickly if you don't have a food collection team, and your soldiers will ideally never collect food, as they need to kill as many things as they can during the downtime between waves.

Honestly 1.2 is kinda an exception in the game because compared to other levels it offers basically unlimited food (and it's also by far the easiest of the four levels). Also the spiders tend to kill workers as fast as they kill soldiers so especially at the start builing soldiers isn't that effective.

2.1 and 2.2 hard you generally need more workers to ensure you have fast enough respawns, otherwise wolf spiders and an abundance of tasks will cause a quick wipe.

In 2.1 and 2.2 you don't need to build soldiers at all. The Formica rufa shooters are so ridiculously overpowered that all you need is a mass of workers to stop enemies for a second so the shooters can nuke them off the face of the universe.
With the shooters having over ten times the DPS of the soldiers there is literally no reason to ever build a single soldier unless you have tons of spare ressources.

 

[Rayalot72]

In 2.1 and 2.2 you don't need to build soldiers at all. The Formica rufa shooters are so ridiculously overpowered that all you need is a mass of workers to stop enemies for a second so the shooters can nuke them off the face of the universe.
With the shooters having over ten times the DPS of the soldiers there is literally no reason to ever build a single soldier unless you have tons of spare ressources.

Are 5 workers better than 2 soldiers then? I spam lvl 1 soldiers as tanks typically. Their health pool is the only reason I buy them, while upgrading them gives me less net HP than buying new ones.

 

[bills6693]

Thanks for the positive feedback guys, and for the ideas you've already worked out Serafine.

I understand what people are saying about using workers for a meatshield for the spiders or for allowing the Rufa to do their damage, but in my mind its kind of a secondary function.

I personally think the workers primary role should be food collection and base upkeep. Now at the moment they are good food collectors as stated above, but I just feel the base upkeep thing is kind of missing for the most part, and since the food collection is also done by soldiers, at least on 'normal' difficulty as I stated above workers can generally be eschewed in favour of more soldiers.

I do understand that on higher difficulty levels the most optimal colony may be different and workers are more important for food collection and even base upkeep in the form of egg distribution but, again in my personal opinion, a game should normally be balanced around the 'normal' difficulty and at that difficulty the workers fail to serve much purpose, especially in fully underground levels.

The aim of my suggestion was really to increase the requirement for workers within the base and for base upkeep to make them both more vital for ALL levels, not just of specialist reasons on certain levels, plus to make the base busier and look more like the imagination of how an ants nest would be - crawling with ants doing stuff all over the place, not an empty burrow whilst everything happens elsewhere.

Serafine's ideas have quite a lot of similarities to mine although in many ways more complex and developed, this is good as I'm sure would also be a great way to expand the game although has I said would be more complex - I would support it myself but that is clearly in the ball park of the developer to decide how much it wants to be developed.

If the mechanics are locked in until release then fair enough although I'd be a little disappointed. What we have at the moment is excellent but I was under the vague impression that more mechanics were going to be added and I had assumed that included more base building - at the moment it is literally just 2 room types plus spawning areas (which will increase with species but all do the same thing). I assumed there was going to be more added in this side. If that's not the case then fair enough, simply more good and interesting levels will also be a great way to expand the game, I just had this assumption.

Many thanks for all the responses!