Ever since my eyes fell upon this thread my gears have been turning and thinking on how I would implement the weaver ants. At least their nest. ^^
As many of you know it is a very uncommon way to have an antnest in the trees unless you live in an area that hosts weaver ants. The thing about weaver ants is, I wouldn't know how the queens start their initial nest as I cannot imagine the queen making her nest on the leaves of a tree.
I would need to do some research on this to be honest.
So if we leave out the exact details of the founding stage and we would jump straight into the game with the queen and having let's say a few extra workers than in other missions and a small nest in the crown of a mango tree, next we would need to get started with how the nest expanding would work. What I could imagine is that you would need to use resources to produce silk for the weaving and construction. I could imagine the nest having multiple levels in itself as the weaver ants will pull the leaves together and then start building levels and floors inside of those leaves.
So this could be where it gets interesting now. I imagine you would have to have construction tiles in case you want to get more branches for the nest. This would be important as those tiles would be upgradeable by 3 as the normal ants would be. Each level would add another floor with a maximum of 3-4 floors. The floors will not be different in sizes as the floors will not have any buffs etc once reached. Now how should we proceed once this branch was used to the max?
We could start with a new leave nest by making it that the construction site is one till at the very beginning of the branch. The amount of available workers would determine how fast it would be expandable and each expansion would require more minimum workers to start construction and pull the leaves together. This would be how to grow the nest bigger. This would also mean that the nest does not need to be super massiv in lenght and width but it would be like it was stacked on top of each other.
I guess that at some point the mission would just end because the goal was reached and it would not be necessary to have more than 3-5 possible expansions.
Of course this would require some work and programming now to have the leaves bend etc. ^^
For the climbing it could be that there is only one tree to climb while there are other antcolonies nearby. For example a rivaling weaver ant colony on a tree far away who tries to invade and that tree doesn't have to be reachable by the player. It could also be something similar to the leaf cutter colony where they have to prevent a colony of army ants from invading their nest.
The enemies could be praying mantis as those climb in trees and might be a good threat and food source for the colony. Maybe also add some spiders that try to inhabit the tree and want to build their nest on your tree branch or make those the enemies that are sitting on some of the to be build nests.
As a bonus fact, weaver ants that are kept by antkeepers may actually build their nest straight onto the glass of their setup.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kC0XUkY1n4I&list=PL5vZEY2A9f_gNv_WTOpsfzS6WgCuyzLqN&index=6
When I was at the antstore in Berlin I remember that the ants had build their nest against the glass panels too and that they had made triangular floors in the corners which is basically what they would have done inside of their leave nest.
Video of the start of the colony with extra info.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kwz27psu3MY
Anyway I would love to know what you guys think of this and if wanted / needed I can try to explain it better to you and what I mean.
And yes I would LOVE to see weaver ants make it into the game. One way or another.