Worker Wipeout

[Drexel]

I just had a simple suggestion. I was playing a round of Surrounded and managed to get a colony of about 500+ soldiers and 100ish workers. I wanted to see just how long the colony could survive without my micro-management and all was going well for a long while. But then one of the giant beetles managed to get toward my queen so my workers started attacking it. Well, it ended up killing all of my workers but I still had my 500 or so soldiers kill it and something like 5,000 food in the bank. Even with a strong colony like this, with 0 workers left, my hive was doomed even with a healthy queen.

Anyway, long story short... My suggestion would be to have the queen be able to lay just one worker egg, preferably the one right by her back-end, so that if for some reason all of your workers get killed, you can manage to slowly regain them eventually.

 

[MikeSlugDisco]

We have discussed this. We're not sure about it - in one respect we want the workers to be precious enough that you have to make sure you keep an eye on what they're doing. Still, plenty of time for changes to be made.

 

[Serafine]

You could do a special ability that will restock the starting area around the queen with eggs. I see the point that you have to look for your workers but seriously, this is an ant colony. Workers are completely expendable for any large colony and you shouldn't get stuck because one beetle managed to kill them all.

Maybe it would help to set the "free" workers that are not assigned any group into a none-attack mode where they just do their job and completely ignore enemies unless they are directly attacked. This would probably be a more effective defense as well as they'd restock the soldier breeding tiles instead of fighting themselves.

 

[green8751]

or you could add a way to tell some workers/ants to only perform a very specific task, however the risk is that they will not perform any other tasks, so they are extremely vulnerable, and may not even respond to being attacked, either them or your queen. whatever seems to be the most realistic and balanced option if you decide to implement it.