Struggling with Combatants

[benjymlewis]

Combatants is really inscrutable to me.
No matter how many workers I create, I can't get them to keep a steady stream of food going into the queen at all. Instead, they keep on milling about uselessly, even when I try to make them follow me. Meanwhile the enemy ants have no problem grabbing the food, and not only that, but they are also intrinsically stronger than my ants by default, so no matter what I do, I'm getting overpowered.

Is there actually a way to play this game that makes sense? I'm at a loss.

[Noodl]

It's tough, especially the third stage. The best strat I've found is to lead two workers over to food, then after they grab it send them on instinct and try to kite the ant coming for you, or sacrifice yourself. Take the new workers and swap to soldier production and get as much food back to the queen as you can. If you can make 5 soldiers and keep them close enemies will die in 1 shot, as they have 6 hp. 2 soldiers + you can also work well, it'll just take 2 proper shots from all three of you. Even then, it's like herding cats.

[Megaton Samurai]

I have the cherry on this and one of the best strategies is to get close to enemy ants (while in a certain range they will always chase) and run them back to your queen to have it tank while you shoot them. Completely trivializes any map where you start near them since you can kill them off before they start producing more.

Basically the game is unplayable as s strategy game. You have to abuse AI and bad pathing until you can get 6-10 soldiers (when you have enough firepower to 1-shot ants).

[benjymlewis]

Hmm, okay thanks for the tips. It seems that the best way to play is to try and cheese it as much as possible by figuring out how to exploit loopholes in the enemy AI. Seems so fiddly and annoying of a game lol. But I will try again.

[codeorange]

This is the worst game in the pack so far. Not only is Barbuta somehow less slow and clunky than this, it also functions as intended which is not the case for Combatants at all. Big shame because this could be like an 8-bit version of Team Buddies, but the pacing is glacial and the tech looks non-existent outside of exploiting the bad AI.

They need to pause the game while you're giving out orders, make it a Pause-and-play strategy game where you can drag a cursor to finetune your guy's movement instead of relying on the terrible AI. Why give you multiple handicaps when you're struggling from the same problems as the CPU? Hoping they patch it so the AI's pathing on your side isn't as terrible at least.

[Meng]

I literally do not understand what i'm meant to be doing or how i'm supposed to gain an advantage in this game.

What am i supposed to do in level 2? They are stronger and have more units, am i just meant to kite them around and shoot them (which takes ages and isn't very fun)

[Krazplay]

It seems hard at first but once you get used to the AI it's ok, except one or two very annoying levels (Open Field).
Yeah, it's also RNG dependent, you can do everything right but things will still go wrong.
I don't remember having to kite, enemies are scattered enough you won't be able to get a lot of them I think, using the Queen as a tank is a good option in some cases, but I don't see it as a main strategy.

With 2 soldiers you easily kill workers, you create one or two workers at the beginning if necessary, but otherwise always make soldiers.
You should nearly always use the Follow command, you're faster than IA ants, but alone you're useless, When they're near the food, you can leave workers on instinct, but sometimes they can be more useful following you.

I believe exploiting their bad pathfinding is intended, they struggle with corners, position yourself and kill them all, if food is scarce, leaving a food alone is a good way to lure them all to shoot them.

[benjymlewis]

OK after some experimentation, I figured out the strategy!!!!

Basically, this is how to win: Create soldiers as soon as possible, and ALWAYS tell them to halt as soon as they come out of the queen. NEVER tell your soldiers to move away from the queen, ever.

At the start, painstakingly deliver food all by yourself one pellet at a time, and eventually get three or four or preferably more soldiers positioned at your queen. Now you are literally invincible - you will always respawn, and anyone who approaches your queen is barraged to death by the array of soldiers positioned there. So now you are free to run around the map all by yourself, killing as many ants by yourself as you can manage, with no fear of being unable to respawn. Have fun with how ridiculously long this can take depending on how much food there is.

I'll try to beat the whole game with this strategy, and if I come across a level it doesn't work with it, I'll report back.

[benjymlewis]

Alright, my strategy is failing on "Open Field". There just isn't enough time to gather enough pellets to get enough soldiers before the entire enemy swarm comes to your queen at once. ... I'll have to be a bit smarter for this one,

[benjymlewis]

Welp, I got the cherry for this game. The thing that's really important to keep in mind is that your player-controlled ant is the only one capable of respawning, so dying a lot is in fact the fastest way to generate new "ants" to throw at the enemy side (just yourself over and over), and this is much faster than actually getting food.

This means that, on levels where the enemy ant AI is too stupid to run into your queen, it is literally impossible to lose as long as you have one ant waiting at your queen and infinite patience to respawn as many times as it takes to kill every enemy ant one at a time.

On maps where the enemy ants _do_ eventually find your queen, things are a lot tougher and require more luck and a different approach. If there are spiders, you can try to bait them to attacking the enemy, but otherwise, I haven't found a strategy that works every time. Sometimes I really just needed good luck to not be bombarded by enemies all at once. ....Eventually I did manage, but it was pretty annoying.

It's important to know the enemy behaviours too - while roaming solo, enemy workers are actually more difficult to take down than enemy soldiers are. You can bait an enemy soldier to uselessly stand still and shoot in the wrong direction, but enemy workers will always approach you, which is harder to deal with, On the other hand, enemy workers are easier for a group of allied soldiers to deal with than enemy soldiers. I guess this is an interesting dynamic.

Once you learn how the AI works, things get easier. But still seems to require a lot of luck, and I'm not exactly sure how possible it is to mitigate the luck factor.