V0.13 Early Access Released! NEW Challenge Mode + NEW Freeplay Map!

JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
It’s time for an update! We’re calling V0.13 the “Interim Update” - it adds a several things that were missing from the game and prepares the path for the major update to come. Without further ado, here are the patch notes! The game should update automatically through Steam.

Please note, right now this is Windows only. Mac and Linux users - we’ve still got a few bugs (ha, ha) to work through for these builds. We’ve made significant progress on that but just ran out of time tonight and didn’t want to delay for everyone. We’re confident we can get stable builds out for you lovely people in short order, so keep your eyes on the news page!

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Headline Features
  • Challenge modes added to Rising Tide and Queen of the Hill
    • The new challenge mode introduces a new creature – the beach tiger beetle larva. This critter lies buried waiting for unsuspecting victims to walk near its trap, then snatches them away in the blink of an eye!
    • They will only attack if your ants are alone, and can only be damaged for a short time after attacking. Will your colony accept the losses to get the food they need, or will they rip these ambush hunters from their burrows?
  • New Freeplay map – Towhead
    • Set on a small island near the mouth of a river, Towhead offers a much more intimate experience on the surface, with higher densities of creatures
    • A map option allows a periodic flooding of the lower level. This will raise your score but at the cost of possibly losing ants and resources when the waters rise
  • Minor Improvements System for Formicarium colonies
    • Got spare Royal Jelly laying around the nest? Fear not, we have you covered! Minor improvements can be accessed by selecting any already purchased species from the tech tree and selecting the icon
    • The improvements start cheap and get more expensive the more you buy for a species. Each ant species has their own different improvements which complement various playstyles
  • What is that pesky spider’s web at the back of the lab? Could someone have a look at that for us, please?

Other Features
  • Main menu is now a list to make it clearer to new users what content is available
  • Creatures now have various sizes and some sizes can pass through others (this has been done on a visually logical level for example beach tiger beetles can walk over most none massive things, where as a hermit crab cannot)
  • Tunneling to the surface now takes multiple ants and take 5 times as much digging
  • Threat system added. Some creature’s attacks cause them to be a more desirable target for other nearby creatures (mostly in preparation for leafcutter update)
  • Battle Arena creatures have been put into tabs based on which tier of the game they first appear

Improvements / Changes
  • Creature movement has been reworked - should now have less issues, creatures should walk more centrally in corridors and should be more efficient
  • Ants now reserve space on tiles they are taking food to. If all tiles are reserved they instead take the food towards the queen (until all tiles fill- they then drop food as they do now)
  • Increased main menu loading speed
  • Multiple minor optimisations made throughout
  • Optimisation added to creatures searching for other creatures
  • Multiple game assets have been optimised
  • Beach texture improvements (normal and roughness masks)
  • Improvements to pathfinding underground (many distance checks are now tile based rather than path based)
  • All audio passed through new filters and re-recorded, female scientist audio re-recorded
  • New audio lines added in some Formicarium challenges
  • New audio lines added to Freeplay (start and uber spawning)
  • Ubers are no longer affected by food scaling and will drop full food no matter the Freeplay difficulty
  • Food size now changes slower at higher food quantities
  • Queen chamber workers now have a crown icon
  • Ants hatch first from queen tiles
  • Food spend is now taken from random rooms rather than the order they were built
  • Ants no longer drop food when attacked if combat is turned off for the group


Bug Fixes
  • Tiles can no longer be tagged for dig when the game is paused
  • Fixed a bug with food pickup that could cause food to be stored not on top of a tile
  • Fixed an issue that would sometime cause wood ants to misfire on surface tunnels
  • Stun, confuse and other status debuffs are now hidden in fog of war
  • Fixed an issue where AOE attacks could be blocked if something obscured vision
  • Fixed an issue where loaded part-built tiles would appear full built but with a job to build them
  • Various minor bug fixes
 

Rayalot72

Maximum difficulty
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
Fighting the larvae for a bit on easy, I think they could use some slight tweaks:

  • Expand their ability to count ants to a larger radius than their attack range.
  • Allow them to attack with more than one ant around, upwards of five might even work.

As of now, they're primarily a danger during the early-game or if you form long foraging trails. Even then, you can mostly just ignore them, as they take a while to kill and will practically never attack after ants start walking overhead. Even if they do attack, their kills are one-at-a-time and rare, so they might damage food stores by a maximum of 50 a day if they're lucky. If they grab workers instead of soldiers, they'll have an even more minuscule impact on the game, and it just so happens that the optimal strategies for the 2.X missions are very worker-heavy. At least, if they were more aggressive, there would be a serious reward if players actively worked to kill them at key locations.

I'll need to see how they play when there's more of them in Insane, but given that I can acquire up to 40 ants by D2, it's unlikely to be much different.
 

Rayalot72

Maximum difficulty
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
Fighting the larvae:

With testing in easy, they seem to have very high health pools. 10 rapid-fire working on them as soon as possible after an attack is only enough to get them to somewhere past half HP, so a kill requires either multiple triggers or a fast reaction with a lot of ants.

Spawn mechanics:
(will likely need corrections)

2.1
Easy:
D1: 1 on lowest level.
D2: 2 on highest level, 4 on each middle level, 1 on the lowest level.
D3: 2 on highest level, 4 on each middle level, 1 on the lowest level.

EDIT: There were way too many of them for me to count them in insane, so I'll give up on the list. Some new things to note though:

  • They spawn in groups, so you can coordinate how to get around them more easily than if they were placed everywhere individually
  • Any not killed will be around the next day (for 2.1 this is only on the highest level, flooding kills the rest).
 

Rayalot72

Maximum difficulty
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
In insane, fighting them is much more interesting than I originally gave them credit for. You're given incentive to kill ones you'll pass by multiple times, while when harvesting an area with you can ignore them but are forced to choose spots where there's only a single group of them.

2.1 is easily doable but much more constrained than previously, as harvesting multiple areas during the day is much more difficult than usual.
 

cialdo

Larva
Backer
Beta Tester
woah man 1 year ago this game just a simple underground ant simulator but now its becoming more complex and hard :D i love it
 
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