BelgarathSorcerer
Worker
I say that Freeplay had been released and decided to immediately start and load in one of my formicarium setups. My first two games were fails due to excavating the entrance too early and getting attacked by multiple large tiger beetles. My third game, however, I had learned from my mistakes and I went to the surface with enough ants to end the tiger beetles and from there it was easy pickings. I had 2 fish spawn right next to the entrance to my base and at that point, there was no competition for my colony as it rose to power. I eventually reached a point where the difficulty had progressed enough to spawn uber enemies, which were pushovers and were easily overwhelmed by my 400 lvl3 ants at that point. From there It continued to get harder, but that only meant my ants couldn't push past the perimeter that they had set up around the nest, but nothing could enter the perimeter either. I am currently letting the game continue to run and just waiting to see if there ever will be a point where the enemies will be able to take out enough ants and overwhelm the 15k food reserves that are stored.
This was the last screenshot I took before coming to write this up
My Suggestions that spawn from this game
-Optimization will be the key to the future, I have a decent computer and I was starting to lag after I hit 350ish ants, and by 700 my computer was skipping around badly.
-There is a bug once you get to 400ish ants where the ants health bars and other related creature UI will just flash on and off as the game freezes. You can see this in the screenshot above, as I had the health bars turned on, but they did not show for the screenshot.
-Uber Creatures need to have more harvest slots, as it is great that they have 3000 food, but they only have 2 harvest slots so it would take tons of time to harvest.
-Fish shouldn't spawn so often/be easily accessible. I had two fish spawn almost on top of my base which allowed massive amounts of food with little to no effort. I couldn't get my ants to leave the base as they would autopath to collect food before they could get past the fish.
-For Freeplay, there should be some upkeep cost for ants as it is so much easier to get massive amounts of food in order to allow for you to grow the colony fast. Something like ants costing .5 food/min in upkeep, ticking every second would make it much more strategical as you would have to take more risks in order to maintain a constant influx of food.
-Lower the number of small bugs that are easy sources of food, and don't have small groups of bugs that attack the base, make them strong so that they are not just another source of food, but something you have to plan and worry about. I set up 10 melee ants at the exit of my base and that was enough to repel pretty much all early game threats as they were mostly just a stream of devil coach horse larvae.
I just want to say that these are my impressions from the first 1.5 hour game of Freeplay that I was able to do. I really did enjoy it, but there are definitely going to be changes and I can't wait to see what comes of this mode.
This was the last screenshot I took before coming to write this up
My Suggestions that spawn from this game
-Optimization will be the key to the future, I have a decent computer and I was starting to lag after I hit 350ish ants, and by 700 my computer was skipping around badly.
-There is a bug once you get to 400ish ants where the ants health bars and other related creature UI will just flash on and off as the game freezes. You can see this in the screenshot above, as I had the health bars turned on, but they did not show for the screenshot.
-Uber Creatures need to have more harvest slots, as it is great that they have 3000 food, but they only have 2 harvest slots so it would take tons of time to harvest.
-Fish shouldn't spawn so often/be easily accessible. I had two fish spawn almost on top of my base which allowed massive amounts of food with little to no effort. I couldn't get my ants to leave the base as they would autopath to collect food before they could get past the fish.
-For Freeplay, there should be some upkeep cost for ants as it is so much easier to get massive amounts of food in order to allow for you to grow the colony fast. Something like ants costing .5 food/min in upkeep, ticking every second would make it much more strategical as you would have to take more risks in order to maintain a constant influx of food.
-Lower the number of small bugs that are easy sources of food, and don't have small groups of bugs that attack the base, make them strong so that they are not just another source of food, but something you have to plan and worry about. I set up 10 melee ants at the exit of my base and that was enough to repel pretty much all early game threats as they were mostly just a stream of devil coach horse larvae.
I just want to say that these are my impressions from the first 1.5 hour game of Freeplay that I was able to do. I really did enjoy it, but there are definitely going to be changes and I can't wait to see what comes of this mode.
