What Is This, An Empire For Ants? by Jaco van Hemert
The Ant-peror Queen has decreed conquest, and the Imperial Ant army will answer her call. Do not let the Ant-pire fall to ruin. Glory to the Ant-pire!
Expand your supercolony
Move your ant colonies to locations across the continent to establish new footholds, from where your numbers can grow.
Conquer other ant colonies
Send your colonies to occupied locations to battle with your enemies and overwhelm them, taking the territory for the glory of the Ant-pire.
Outsmart your enemies
Our enemies each have particular strengths and behaviours. Study them closely and counter their tactics with superior Imperial strategy.
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Instructions
- Click on an ant colony to select it (you control the glorious Imperial Ant-pire).
- Move ants from a selected colony to another location by clicking on the location marker and choosing how many to send.
- To change the game speed, click on the speed control buttons, or press 1, 2, 3, and 4 on the top of the keyboard. Note that pause is unavailable on normal difficulty, and pause and slowdown is unavailable on hard and insane difficulties.
Tips
- Those who hesitate are lost. Move quickly and decisively, and take travel distance into account. Hesitating too long will give our enemies time to bring about our downfall. Alternatively, use the speed controls to pause or slow down the game speed in easy and normal difficulties.
- Know thy enemy. Each enemy has a different ability, shown on the sidebar, and have different strategies to capitalise on it. Use this information to adjust your own strategy and crush their forces.
- There is strength in numbers. Your colonies grow faster and hit harder the more ants are in them, so make sure you consolidate your forces when necessary. Control the frontier. Each occupied location will grow your population, so don't unnecessarily leave a location empty. However, no ant colonies grow in a location where two or more colonies are engaged in combat.
- Use superior strategy: Utilise the Ant-pire's superior tactical prowess to gain the upper hand. Other ants will never leave a battle, but we know that victory can be gained by sending forces beyond the frontier or retreating from the enemy hordes where needed.
Credits
StormRaven Games - Jaco van Hemert - Carel van Hemert (SkyyStorm)
Contains sounds from Freesounds.org
Screenshots
| WebGL | https://jaco-van-hemert.itch.io/what-is-this-an-empire-for-ants |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/56/what-is-this-an-empire-for-ants |
Ratings
| Overall | 96th | 4.095⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 82th | 4.054⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 593th | 3.243⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 169th | 4.135⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 549th | 3.662⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 274th | 3.653⭐ | 38🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 254th | 3.568⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 364th | 3.73⭐ | 39🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 37🗳️ | 55🗨️ |
Ironically, I found that the South Ant-merica map was easier than the Eur-ant-sia. Maybe it's the infighting between two enemy factions in South Ant-merica, maybe it's the Samurai Ant's strong ability in Eur-ant-sia, or maybe it's a bit of column A and B.
Would it be redund-ant to comment on how I like the ant puns again? If so, I will conclude this review here. Maybe I should have been a bit more hesit-ant before I overloaded this review with all these ant puns. They're way too abund-ant!
Glory to the Ant-pire!
Glory to the Ant-pire.
- The dedication to the bit with ant puns is very good lol, though like, is there a quit button on it just for the pun? It's a webGL game, why is there a quit button :p
- Love that there are different abilities for the different ants, though it's hard to really see the differences, I guess it must really be there, but would like it to be more visible. Maybe abilities triggers could be shown explicitly in some way, like damage number in brackets, or growth number with (-10) for whatever their penalties incur. Not super important, but it allows the player to feel the individuality of each factions.
- One gripe is that the button to send ants and the button for selecting a destination are distinct. I feel like it should be okay to click on the general area to start selection and on the general area to confirm destination. Or with a drag gesture. It's a minor gripe :p
- The AI is quite good, or maybe I'm quite dumb, either way, there's enough challenge without it feeling too easy or too hard. Victory is hard earned and that's great.
- I guess if I had to really think about it, the game doesn't really innovate much since it's a mechanic that's been used many times before. I think the abilities are an innovation?
- The ability to change the speed of the simulation is great.
- There's a Windows version on the itch page as well (which needs a quit button), and we didn't think of removing the one in the WebGL build. Whoops.
- The Ant-pire's enemies definitely have differing abilities, but I do agree that it feels a bit subtle at times. Some extra UI feedback could be helpful in this regard.
- We concur with your feeling about the sending. E.g. Sometimes I'd accidentally select another colony when I wanted to send someone to that location. We had a bit of an issue figuring out how to make the location selection be easier to click without making the ability to select a new ant colony harder. The drag idea is intriguing; there's a few UI habits we've fallen into that it'll hamper, but it might be worth it.
Glory to the Ant-pire!
Selecting colonies and their path was slightly quirky which cost me an ant or hundreds. But other than that it felt good in gameplay. In the first match I totally forgot to check opponents ability.
Well done!
Playing on Normal right from the start wasn't a good decision. And I agree with an earlier comment, that Australia is more difficult on Easy and Normal than Euroasia or South America. It doesn't matter a lot, because you can play it in any order, but tiering it 1-3 suggests difficulty spike. I would argue that South America is the easiest if you are lucky enough for enemy ants to focus on each other.
You probably thought about it, but I would love to play different types of ants to employ different strategies. Like Australian ants are good for early aggro plays, and Samurai ants on focused attacks to regain their numbers after conquering a colony.
Do you plan to work on that a bit more for some kind of extended version?
We might extend it a bit, who knows! Thank you for playing.
I'm impressed with how polished and complete this feels, given the time limit. The art works well, and the difficulty is pretty good too I think. I also thought the different advantages the other ants had were interesting.
Most similar games I've played have armies also be able to fight on roads between cities, not just at the cities themselves, and I felt like not doing that actually allowed for a little different strategy at times, because it actually made sense to retreat. It might have made it a little easier to win at times - if an AI sent a large army at one of your cities that you couldn't beat, it usually meant that they left the city it came form lightly defended, and easy to take over. I did that a lot in the first level, and I think it's the reason I ended up with more cities, and therefore more production.
My only real criticism is that the theme seems somewhat minimal. Aside from the puns, it seems like this game would have been made to suit almost any theme, but a lot of games are like that (mine included), so, you know.