Screen Shot Saturday - Spiny Devil

MikeSlugDisco

Community Manager
Staff member
Community Manager
The fearsome spiny devil cricket (Panacanthus varius) faces off against a leafcutter colony. Covered in defensive spines, this monster may well be guarding some of the choicest leaves for the harvest - which means it must be confronted.

In Empires of the Undergrowth, the spiny devil's spines will mean that any creature that does damage to it will suffer some damage in return, whether or not it is actually being attacked by the cricket. It also has an area of effect bleed attack which will continue damaging the target for a time after.

 
Last edited:

Rayalot72

Maximum difficulty
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
Is the bleed going to be diversified from venom? It seems as if poison ignores any form of armor, but it would be nice if there were some DoT options that could be mitigated via physical resist.
 

Serafine

Queen
Backer
Beta Tester
Ecosystem Beta Tester
Raptorofwar said:
I assume, as usual, that the answer is rufa.
The answer is always rufa if available. Seriously, those things need a balancing pass at some point.
 

Buffalo981

Queen
Extremely Helpful Person
I think the rufa are meant to be as powerful as they are. They should be more powerful than fusca, and they are also real life predators of fusca ants. I'm guessing the leaf cutter ants would be able to tear apart a rufa colony the same way a rufa colony can tear apart a fusca colony. I'm not saying there is a huge balance difference, though, I'm sure in multiplayer, for example, a more skilled fusca player could beat someone playing as rufa.
 
Buffalo981 said:
I think the rufa are meant to be as powerful as they are. They should be more powerful than fusca, and they are also real life predators of fusca ants. I'm guessing the leaf cutter ants would be able to tear apart a rufa colony the same way a rufa colony can tear apart a fusca colony. I'm not saying there is a huge balance difference, though, I'm sure in multiplayer, for example, a more skilled fusca player could beat someone playing as rufa.

Skilled? I am not sure when gamers are takling about skills you sure can have some but is experience a skill? and with the ants it is a numbers game far most. Or do you mean a player is more skilles when he can build ants faster in bigger numbers than others?

I don't want to sound like an ass I am just curious.
 

Serafine

Queen
Backer
Beta Tester
Ecosystem Beta Tester
Buffalo981 said:
I think the rufa are meant to be as powerful as they are. They should be more powerful than fusca, and they are also real life predators of fusca ants.
If we're going for realism here we should also get a mobile F. fusca queen because those things actually run faster than their workers. That's basically the fusca survival strategy - they use their superior speed to bully smaller ants (they steal food from ants like Lasius niger, sometimes even waiting close to their nest entrance to pounce on returning workers) and to leg it if they get attacked by someone stronger (when they get raided everyone, including the queens, will just run out of the nest carrying brood to safety).

But then this is a game, so there should be some remotely decent balance. And I'm fairly sure that with the ludicrous damage they do the rufas will tier apart leafcutters as well if they can hold them off with cheap workers for long enough - it basically depends on whether the Atta soldiers have an AOE attack or not.

Buffalo981 said:
I'm sure in multiplayer, for example, a more skilled fusca player could beat someone playing as rufa.
We haven't seen any trace of multiplayer so far, so there's not really a point in assuming stuff.
For strategies in multiplayer to work maps would have to be huge (even bigger than the current Freeplay maps) otherwise it's just going to be a massive grindy war of attrition (like Supreme Commander 2 when playing without aircraft and nukes).

Also don't forget the massive advantage rufas have in territory expansion because their acid attacks entirely ignore any armor (good luck killing a blob of large hermit crabs with fusca soldiers).
 
Top