Ants
Hey guys,
This is a different type of map than what I have seen so far. It is not made to be extremely hard but simply to be a fun game for when you have 45min ish to kill. For all of you that like Sim games, and for those of you that enjoy Sim ants, well this is your lucky day ! The map allows you to build an ant colony from the ground up, managing your harvester force, your army force, and seeking food and territory.
Quick feature list:
-Day/night cycle + Rain effects
- Gradually harder enemy ant colonies.
-Environmental dangers (Wasps, Humans walking around, water puddles, etc)
-Use of pheromones to help guide your workers towards food spots.
-Tutorial to help you through your first game.
-More?
I want to stress that it is only in beta, and that only me and a friend have played it. I am looking for your feedback on the map, as well as bug reports. If it proves popular I may make another map with the same game, but using a different environment, or perhaps make it a multiplayer game where each player would have to fight for Grass domination.
Current known issues:
-Red ant AI not always acting on cue.
Cheers, and have fun folks!
Comments
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_ForgeUser4525260 Owner
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Posted Jul 21, 2010im in eu and it worked for me O_o" also what have u planned for the future?
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Posted Jun 25, 2010-
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Posted Jun 19, 2010Just did another play thru, I found that the red ant queen's Defensive burrowed units do not spawn if you hug the south wall, May need to make the trigger larger radius.
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Posted Jun 18, 2010First off I'd like to say WOW, Extremely happy with this map. It shows a very large room for improvement, And an overall awesome idea.
In the beginning of the game it was a little confusing to get a nice balance of army building vs drone building, ultimately tho it was too easy to just pump drones, get a nice stock pile of 20+ food, then get an army count of 10-12, and kill opposite queen. The food normally is almost gone and you end up with starved ants. This although is to your benefit, since your don't want to feed the ants anymore anyway(Begin the stockpiling to kill next queen)
Through the entire game I never felt threaten enough by the other ants in play, Since the map was 100% revealed you could see an attack minutes before it arrived. then just spawn the troops you'd need to kill them. More attacking pressure would be awesome, I never felt any punishment from leaving my queen undefended 90% of the time.
I'm not sure if its intended or a glitch but I did notice that the enemy ants did not starve even though their food was too short to sustain them. The red ants when i played had several glitched workers(til i killed em) and their food was 0 for a bit, but no crazy ants.
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Posted Jun 14, 2010Yea, its one of the bug I mentioned. The red AI doesn't always act on Cue. Thanks for the report. And as far as not using Pheromones goes, if you have enough harvesters, or if you are lucky and there is a lot of food spawning, you don't always need to. Its random YES, but it also makes each game you play different :)
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Posted Jun 14, 2010I really like this game and I never use pheromones to complete the game. The wrasp kill the red ant queen so the neutral unit did my work lol. I think that my enemy never try to defend.
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Posted Jun 13, 2010There is one main consideration (at least in my mind) about terrain manipulation: abuse. And there's two types of abuse as I see it: abuse that ruins the game experience for other players and abuse that allows the player to play outside the set boundaries of the game. It's a single player game, so you wouldn't have to worry about the first type. You would have to think about how someone would abuse terrain to do something that isn't supposed to happen. Maybe they could use cliffs to redirect the human to walk over the enemy nests, or create a more narrow choke at their nest, or tear down the walls of an enemy nest to give a more direct route in. Not trying to discourage the idea, just throwing some things out there.
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Posted Jun 13, 2010Thanks ninja,
I guess I will go point by point since you had a lot of ideas !
- the Queen IS easy to kill, but it was ment to be so that you wouldn't let your nest defenceless. The same applies with wanting to leave a few Spitters in the end to counter the wasps.
-The food rate is touchy to balance, I wanted to make the player feel actively involved in the colony not only with the army, but also the harvesting. It is really important to actively hunt and guide your harvesters towards your recent kills ( I may increase their spawn rate, or increase their food drops though, I will see!) And also keep in mind that, as your territory gets bigger, you will need more workers to harvest, because a lot of the food will be far and require more travel time. So yes, you need to actively renew and grow your worker force! I have finished the map multiple times and I found that the amount of food in your reserves isn't as important as the amount of INCOME you have.( I think I had 50 ish workers at the end and my assault force was ~ 16 ish)
- Pheromone actually used to be 30 seconds, then I changed to to 45... and now 60. Its something that I have considered before and I do feel it can be somewhat annoying to reapply the scent, I will consider a change for it.
-I will also think about your suggestions. I was thinking long and hard on how to allow the terrain and nest to be modified, and its not completely out of the question, but I want to make sure its done right if I do. And adding more types of ants was also something I wanted to do, though again, I want to make it right.
Thanks for the great feedback !
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Posted Jun 12, 2010I just played again and made it to the red ant phase. I'd just like to add that the disparity between food collection and consumption is extremely noticeable at that stage. The army of sufficient seize to kill the reds drained my food coffers from 50 to 0 before they even got all the way there...
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Posted Jun 12, 2010First of, this is a highly polished and professional looking map. Nice music in the beginning, and nice little effects, such as the human stomping by.
I do have a few concerns with balance.
The queen seems too easy to kill. I had my army out securing yellow's base when grey attacked me. I saw his guys coming (it was only 1 warrior and two venom spitters), so I sent my army back to base to defend. The problem was that my army took so long to get there and the queen was so weak that I only just BARELY managed to save her with 25 hp left. I ended up having to grow a whole new army just to save her. The same thing happened with yellow's queen. I just charged in there with 3 warriors and took their queen to pieces in seconds. That's something you may want to tweak. Which leads into my next critique...
I felt the food consumption rate was a little too high, at least for the amount of food I was bringing in. If workers don't consume food, is the idea to spam a horde of workers to bring in food faster? I raised an army of about 6 warriors to attack yellow but ran out of food half way to his base and every single warrior turned on each other. I understand the concept of limiting the size of one's army- I'm just suggesting you take a look at the consumption rate vs. the collection speed of the workers.
Also, once my warriors DID start to turn on each other, my army killed itself off in under 30seconds. I didn't feel like I had any way to stop it.
The pheromone ability was interesting, but I had a little confusion. It seems a little tedious to have to reapply the scent to the same area I'm harvesting over and over. Maybe it could stay in one place until you move it somewhere else? If the rain washed it away, repeated applications to the same place would make more sense, but an arbitrary duration doesn't as much.
Other than that I have no critique. I think I'll begin to enjoy this game the more I play it. Everything I said above is constructive criticism.
I do have some fun suggestions.
I liked Exaken's idea of a nydus network of some sort. The base could only be grown inside the nest and would require food to be sustained maybe? You could set up an AI where the workers take the shortest route back to base with food, so that the workers would run their then go back through the nydus to cut the return journey. That IS analogous to ant tunnels.
Base defense of some sort? (balance it by being taking it a long time to construct with no way to build other units while it was being built)
Flyer ants? Maybe something with winged zerglings?
Terrain manipulation?
Keep up the good work!
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Posted Jun 12, 2010@ ferroquet, Thank youf or your good comments, and for finding a loophole in the tutorial, I will fix it ! As for the stats window, I think I will try to make it so that if you tap TAB, it will stay open, and if you hold it, it will dissapear after you release, thanks :)
@ Exaken, Warriors do have a higher priority due to the fact that they deal more damage. Maybe i will set them both equal to let the player decide? Yes the map is 15mb, mostly because of the custom textures and sound files included in the game. I'm not sure what B.net limit is, but it won't stop me from making cool map :) I can always share maps using internet !
Thanks again for the comments guys!
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Posted Jun 12, 2010It seems that the Warrior has a higher priority than the Venon Spitter, thus Warriors favor Venom Spitters and thus ignoring enemy Warriors.
Also the map is 15MB! That's the biggest map I've ever seen. I thought Battle.net only allow a maximum size 2MB.
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Posted Jun 11, 2010Very charming game with lots of ambience. I'm a "builder" at heart who is more comfortable with sim and civilization games than RTS, and I'm pleased to see such maps are being made. Two things:
- In the tutorial, if your harvesters harvest an egg other than the one that was initially pointed to, it doesn't recognize that you've accomplished that objective and trigger the next stage of the tutorial.
- Is it possible to make the tab key toggle the food/worker display rather than having to hold down the key? Or possibly display a compact version of that information (like the standard StarCraft supply count, which goes red when you're under) in the top right? Because it's important information, I feel compelled to keep the food/worker pane expanded all the time.
Keep up the good work - I haven't completed a game of this yet, but I'll post some more feedback when I do.
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Posted Jun 11, 2010Thanks for the feedback so far. I'm glad you guys enjoyed it. Like I mentioned, its not intended to be some hard challenging game, but rather a nice fun time killer. I am thinking about making a MP version of it, it may be fun to have 3-4 people duke it out for total grass domination !
As far as travelling, I didn't want to make it too easy to travel, frankly I was hoping to have more reason to spread your army around to defend your harvesters but so far its not been so successfull :P.
Finally, for the consumption rate, harvesters do NOT consume. Basically, having an army of 0 makes you consume 1 food per 60 sec. After that, each Soldier unit adds to the rate of 1 food / 60 sec. So to put it simply, an army of 10 soldiers will consume 1 food unit per 6 seconds.
I hope that makes sense, Please keep the feedback coming :)
EDIT: I wish there was a way to see how many time its been downloaded :(
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Posted Jun 11, 2010Realy nice map, but with such a huge map and small ants, traveling takes long. Nydus network maybe? Also, do workers consume food? Would be nice to see how much food an ant consumes. I completed it in 59min and 59sec :P
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Posted Jun 11, 2010Cool map i made it true for 47 mins. It was kinda easy thought. Maybe make it mp for beta phase 2?