Redmoth27 said:
Mike studying a colony can help with the ant behavior in the game.
Nah, not really.
You don't want your ants to be too realistic, that would be infuriating.
Just look at my Camponotus - they are absolutely terrible at teamwork. If there's three workers on a dead fly every one of them is pulling into a different direction. They get the job done in the end but it takes forever. Also while often a single worker just grabs a food item and drags it straight into the nest, it doesn't happen too rarely that a worker grabs an item, drags it an inch and then walks a away - a minute later another worker finds the item, drags it another inch only to walk away as well, and so on (until they finally got it into the nest).
And quite often they spend several minutes removing the wings and legs of dead flies or spiders before they drag them anywhere. Players would be driven insane if the EotU ants expressed such behavior.
Admittedly my Lasius are far more effective at teamwork but even they are far from being as efficient as you'd want them to be in a computer game.
What I think could be improved is the way brood gets handled - it would be pretty cool if workers would have to get food from storage areas and feed the larvae 2-3 times before they actually pupate. That would also solve the kinda silly situation where you just place some food storage tiles under a food pile and can then collect said food and dish out new ants within seconds.
You'd then have the choice between collecting close to the food source and workers having to move longer distances when feeding the larvae or transporting the food back to food tiles near the brood so brood can be reared more efficiently.
Of course that would also require an interface part that allows you to order ants to transport food from one food storage area to another (it would work in a "group selection" like the chambers, basically select one food "chamber", press a button that says "transfer food to..." and then select another food "chamber" - if these orders could be set up permanently (and ideally even percentage-based, like >transport 25% of the incoming food to "chamber" 1, 25% to "chamber" 2, 25% to "chamber" 3 and keep 25% of the incoming food stored in the chamber<) it could even allow you to form transport chains across your nest to optimize food distribution.
This could be a really cool feature that adds some economical complexity to the game and actually gives players a reason to build semi-realistic looking nests. It would also give the "groupless" worker ants something to do beside replacing eggs and looking pretty (and obviously it would vastly increase the amount of ants required to maintain the nest which I consider a good thing and also a realistic one - in most ant colonies only 10-30 % of the workers are actually outside, the rest is managing the nest, although I think a 50/50 quota would be perfectly okay for gameplay purposes).
This also would help giving the player a feeling of actual achievement for creating something, for getting this complex ant hive machinery up and running - a tiny bit of a Factorio/Settlers/Citybuilder feeling but with much much simpler mechanics. Because let's face it the economical aspect in EotU is reaaaaally underdeveloped.
Oh and it would make the formicarium mode SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING and so much prettier to look at (and for formicarium mode you can simply slow down larvae development and make them need like 200 feedings instead of 2-3 like in the missions).
(Actually I'm gonna think this through and then make a larger topic about it, this really has potential...)
