If you've survived an onslaught from the Spiders it's possible that they kill a large chunk of your army and almost all of your workers. The problem then is that the workers will then prioritise re-spawning your army before re-spawning any other workers. This means that repopulating your colony will take an age.
A specific example:
Level 2.1 Hard, on around night 4 a huge amount of spiders rampage through your base. They search every corner of your dwelling so I can't see any way of hiding a group of worker ants anywhere until the spooders are dead. I had an army of 410 and 80 worker ants. After the onslaught I was left with around 50 army units and 1 worker.
This worker then began repopulating the army units until I had over 100 army units (this took around 10 minutes!). Only then did it spawn a further worker ant. (After this it seemed to swap between re-spawning army and worker units more evenly.)
I assume there is some coding to prioritise re-spawning your army up to something like 25% of it max size before concentrating on worker ants, but I think it would be far better to either prioritise repopulating the worker ants to a certain amount or repopulating evenly (1 worker then 1 army for example) otherwise it's almost impossible to recover before the next wave of attacks. This way the time taken to repopulate your entire colony would be significantly reduced.
A specific example:
Level 2.1 Hard, on around night 4 a huge amount of spiders rampage through your base. They search every corner of your dwelling so I can't see any way of hiding a group of worker ants anywhere until the spooders are dead. I had an army of 410 and 80 worker ants. After the onslaught I was left with around 50 army units and 1 worker.
This worker then began repopulating the army units until I had over 100 army units (this took around 10 minutes!). Only then did it spawn a further worker ant. (After this it seemed to swap between re-spawning army and worker units more evenly.)
I assume there is some coding to prioritise re-spawning your army up to something like 25% of it max size before concentrating on worker ants, but I think it would be far better to either prioritise repopulating the worker ants to a certain amount or repopulating evenly (1 worker then 1 army for example) otherwise it's almost impossible to recover before the next wave of attacks. This way the time taken to repopulate your entire colony would be significantly reduced.