Please take a look at this I've put quite some work into it (ingame economy)

[Serafine]

This is a fully-fledged ingame economy concept for EotU (including the required UI elements) fixing several issues with food gathering, economy deadlocks, engagement deadlocks, slave-taker ant mechanics and generally making the colony look much more alive and closer to a real ant colony.

Please forgive my lackluster paint skills but I though this was the best way to get the concept across.

Edit: Updated to 1.1
- Added handling of hostile food tiles (food can be stolen)
- Added fungus chambers
- Added explanation of how simple the system actually is (only really requires 2 buttons, the rest is QoL additions)

Known issues (get fixed in 1.2):
- Clarification required: Fungus garden tiles cannot process fungus bits! (no food generating perpetuum mobile)


Full-sized image (it's HUGE): https://i.imgur.com/iEh3EJI.jpg

 

[Lazifer]

The idea is good, but i think a little bit to complicate (with all the buttons). If we can do this more simple it will be a great thing

 

[Serafine]

Um... effectively you only need 2 buttons, "send food to" (which obviously would get a hotkey) and the bars where you can set the percentage sent/stored. I don't think it can be made any easier.
(Okay, you also need alt+f because the food chain display shouldn't be visible all the time, that would be annoying.)

All other buttons are simply "quality of life" options (link chambers, turn chamber off, receive food from chamber, lock chamber percentage) that you do not need to bother with but as their name suggests make life much easier (same goes for the display of destination chambers in the bottom menu, it's not required but it makes handling the whole thing MUCH easier - imagine you had to look at every connected chamber to see their current food status, that would be a pain in the ass and make finding a bottleneck in the chain almost impossible).

And I forgot to mention the obvious: You can steal food from enemy food tiles (food on food tiles is effectively just food lying around).


Fungus chambers would also work like food chambers, except that they multiply every food you put on them - the food placed there gets completely locked and after a set time like 30 seconds the fungus garden will blossom and the double amount of food can be harvested from it or be sent where ever it is required/set to (it is advised though to not set fungus chamber to store anything as that would obviously block the fungus tiles from being used to process food items).

Oh, and FUNGUS TILES CANNOT PROCESS FUNGUS BITS (no food-generating perpetuum mobile).

 

[SableDragon]

I do enjoy the idea of a food distribution system. The workers not actively foraging have always seemed too bored in my opinion, just milling around in the general vicinity of the queen. Digging is functionally instant and they don't have to take removed dirt outside, which is understandable. Nor do they have to repair chambers or anything of that nature. Feeding larvae and the queen is something I've always wanted to see, a little trail streaming in with forage, another series of trails leading from a stockpile to brood chambers. I too feel it could do a lot for making the nest seem more alive, and giving you something to watch in your down time i.e when you've excavated all you can/care to or you're waiting for your numbers to get where you want them.

The distribution percentage system seems like it could be a pain to code though, but I understand the need for it. Ant's would get stuck trying to fill a pile as other ants are constantly pulling from it. However, the work needed to implement this would have to be taking into consideration. I'm certain you're aware it's not simple as adding buttons, just to get the ants functioning as they are currently took months of tweaking and tinkering, as cool as it would be I wonder what kind of time frame setback we'd be looking at, and how much work would have to be thrown away. Yes, I know, rather a better game take longer to come out than a lesser one faster. Or, just because a long time is spent on a mistake doesn't mean it can't be fixed. But audience interest, satisfaction and their bottom line have all got to be considered and balance.

Not to tear you down because I agree with you, the deadlocks and the worker idling detract from my enjoyment somewhat significantly. But realistically, this would be a substantial amount of coding and re-coding to be done. I hope for improvements down the line somewhere. But I'm more than happy to work with "Good" over "Great" in the meantime.

 

[Serafine]

Actually I think the rules would be rather simple and much along the lines of how foraging currently works (the workers will dump food on the tile/chamber closest to the set destination and when that one is full they will carry it to the next closest chamber).
It's basically a modification of the current foraging system.

The only thing that needs to be prevented is that workers get deadlocked between two food tiles (closest food tile is full so they move towards the next, then closest food tile gets free space, so they move towards it but before they reach it it's full again, so they move towards the next, then closest food tile has free space again... - you get the idea) but there's ways around this:
- An "I don't care mechanic" where the worker simply walks to the closest food tile (or the one that was set as destination) set a and dumps the food in front of it. This could however lead to ridiculous food-piling at the end of a chain and I wouldn't recommend it.
- A simple cooldown where the worker will move towards the food tile it has decided to and can only change tiles every 20 seconds. Should work but probably makes the whole thing a bit inefficient.
- A pre-allocation of space where every food bit that is on the way to a chamber already occupies the required space so no other food bit can be placed instead of it (this ONLY applies to supply chains and NOT to regular foraging which will still work as it does now). That of course means that food bits will only ever be transported to a chamber in a supply chain if the chamber actually has free space which would also pretty much automatically lead to the optimal distribution of (groupless) workers along the supply chain.
This is the most elegant solution and the one that should work best.

The largest chunk of programming is probably to connect the larval stages with the food intake but there's already similar systems in place (food getting deposited on the food tiles and eggs getting placed on brood tiles is mostly the same as larvae getting fed except that in the last case the food disappears, the tiles get upgrades when you invest food into them and the workers grow when their tiles get upgraded by spending food), so they don't have to re-invent the wheel and can modify already developed and tested systems.