Ideas for a new Freeplay map?

JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
So with the leafcutter update released we are bug fixing and and improving small aspects of that this week. Hopefully next week we can start to look at freeplay.

Initially we will be adding the leafcutters to freeplay, new ubers, new landmarks, tiered enemies (enemies get stat boosts later on rather than spawning more of them) and a new map.

I am undecided about how to do the new map and totally interested in community suggestions. Do you have any thoughts what could make a nice new freeplay map? (Jungle terrain obviously) We want to hear them!
 

Talon

Queen
I liked the flood in Towhead. Maybe Rain could make the same effect, so lower levels are flooded.

Like in Frontlines, from time to time Army Ants could block a path, so you have to decide if you push them back or wait until they finished their hunt in your region and turn to another.

By speaking about Towhead. I testet it yesterday with the new creatures. The adult Whip Spider was able to invade the nest. The adult and the "teenager" should be to huge to do that.

I hope for other Colonys you can fight in the new mode, but I'm sure this will not happen that soon.

What I noticed too (is not only relevant for freeplay) if you destroy one tile, you get back some seeds. Unfortunately the Leafcutters don't gather it. They should be able to harvest seeds or the backbuild tiles should become leafs.

I hope the new Map (and the old ones) are playable with Leafcutters and Ereptor (and the other two Ant-Species).
 

Mr_Ced

Colony
How about a map with a sort of river running through it? The river could have various different levels as the days go on, restricting or opening up certain areas of the map. This would allow for "starvation" points in the game, or block the enemy from coming towards your nest.
 

Talon

Queen
Like in Frontlines, from time to time Army Ants could block a path, so you have to decide if you push them back or wait until they finished their hunt in your region and turn to another.
By thinking about that. First the Army Ants should send out Scouts to your Nest. If you can kill them all, the Army Ants will hunt somewhere on the map, if not their way goes straight to your nest. Somewhere you have the option to push them back to get good food behind their path. If you don't kill the scouts you must push back the army.
 

Daniel7Sly123

Ants are perfect!
Im thinking and the biggest proble is how you will get food if you already collect all the plants in the map.

Maybe could have a tree in the border of the map and that tree could give infinite leaves but that tree could have a smal army-ant nest and the player need to defeat the army-ant nest to start collecting leaves and could appear someting in the tree (example: at night could spawn creatures with the objective of do not allow the player to collect leaves at night)

Or the leaves would need to regrowth over time.

Or some creature drop leaves.


¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 

Rayalot72

Maximum difficulty
Beta Tester
Extremely Helpful Person
In some days could rain and that could regrowth the plants of the map and make our ants wall more slower or something like that.

I like this style of regrowth. That way, resources are limited and infinite at the same time, like a perpetually resetting 3.1. There should definitely still be landmark options though, and turning off the map's mechanics should activate an alternative regrowth (like every X amount of time a random plant gets replenished, probably with a much lower chance for this to be a large plant).

It would be nice if we had a freeplay map that had more distinguished "wild" areas, in contrast with "calm" areas around nests. These would be regions where creatures are more likely to appear, and would separate the nests and sections of the map (sort of like how the dunes has the northern plateau, western lane, eastern valley, and southern field as separators, while nests are located in the less expansive northwestern field, northeastern field, southeastern valley, and southwestern plateau).
 
The more you think about it the trickier it is. Because leaf cutters can't harvest bugs the risk/reward of large fights/fights with ubers can really be problematic when trying to top your resources up after a large fight especially depending on how you've organised the map. Considering you can only lose resources fighting. Any chance to incorporate ubers with leaves stuck to their body that drop food or other larger creatures to assist in the bigger fights? Depending on how you organise resources on the map it might not be required but it could be a way of balancing out heavy losses to large ubers if you are struggling to set up resource renewal but also throw bugs our way. Completely random... instead of rivers use falling sticks (big ones) to randomly block paths to lower tiers of the map and use the water rising effect like in Towhead to clear them each day so the pathing is constantly shifting on lower tiers and less predictable like a single river point.
 

JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
I liked the flood in Towhead. Maybe Rain could make the same effect, so lower levels are flooded.
I would love to get rain in (makes perfect sense being a rainforest and all) though I am not sure how realistic that is in the time frame. I will ask our art man about it.
Like in Frontlines, from time to time Army Ants could block a path, so you have to decide if you push them back or wait until they finished their hunt in your region and turn to another.
Not a bad idea, I would need to think about how that could work. I always wanted to get events into freeplay (so like army ant attack, mole crickets, beach tiger beetle larvae infestation) though these could be time consuming.
By speaking about Towhead. I tested it yesterday with the new creatures. The adult Whip Spider was able to invade the nest. The adult and the "teenager" should be to huge to do that.
Yes they can (well the middle sized one can, I don't think I added the huge one into freeplay yet). I haven't done much freeplay testing in a while so I need to put some thought into weather they should be able to invade.
 

JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
How about a map with a sort of river running through it? The river could have various different levels as the days go on, restricting or opening up certain areas of the map. This would allow for "starvation" points in the game, or block the enemy from coming towards your nest.
Nice idea there. The way water is currently get up though it would need some thought (as currently if you had a marker the other side of the river, the ants would just walk through the river and die)
 

JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
First the Army Ants should send out Scouts to your Nest.
This may be too tricky to set up for freeplay maps. The scouts in the game follow set routes and have set escape points trying to come up with a system that can do that on multiple maps and save and load may be beyond the scope of what I have time to implement
 

JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
Or the leaves would need to regrowth over time.
The plan at the moment is to build the leaf collection into the current landmark system. So there will be a couple types of leaf landmark (small plants and big ones) that with crop up and disappear around the map and always when the player is not looking at them. These landmarks will spawn if you have leafcutter colony selected as your colony and there will be as many of them if not more as the other landmarks in total. Additionally I want to put a lot of leaves on top of your nest to get the player off the ground.
 

JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
In some days could rain and that could regrowth the plants of the map and make our ants wall more slower or something like that.
Some nice ideas for rain with the plant regrowth and slows. If we go down this road I shall see what we can get in!
 

JohnSlugDisco

Administrator
Staff member
Developer of EotU
The more you think about it the trickier it is. Because leaf cutters can't harvest bugs the risk/reward of large fights/fights with ubers can really be problematic when trying to top your resources up after a large fight especially depending on how you've organised the map.
It is a tricky one. Leafcutters really do not want to fight like other ant species. I think generally in freeplay they will feel better than others because of this (you cannot just hide in your nest you actively need to forage) however you are right ubers will just feel like a pain in the neck.

Just spit-balling here but what if we included an experience system into freeplay that allowed you to unlock species abilities and improvements. Could make it so only the harder creatures provide any so it is worth hunting them?
 
It is a tricky one. Leafcutters really do not want to fight like other ant species. I think generally in freeplay they will feel better than others because of this (you cannot just hide in your nest you actively need to forage) however you are right ubers will just feel like a pain in the neck.

Just spit-balling here but what if we included an experience system into freeplay that allowed you to unlock species abilities and improvements. Could make it so only the harder creatures provide any so it is worth hunting them?
Sounds like a good system. My suggestion was based on providing a reward for the risk of fighting a bug that would chew through your resources and that's definitely one way to do it. It's actually a better way in my opinion because it adds an immediate benefit but also plays more in to the long game with abilities potentially stacking versus a small boost in resources to replenish what was lost.
 
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