Just beat the demo and it's great. Got a bit of feedback from it.

[vizthex]

Loved the demo & can't wait for the full game to come out. I like how you can place down buildings before having all the items for it as well. Makes planning things out a lot easier lol.

In the meantime, I've got a bit of feedback:

- Being able to rotate things before placing them would be nice. I've never liked the rotate-after-placing style of building in games.
- A way to recycle dead bodies would be nice. Maybe you could make an undertaker ant that can turn 1 body into 1 scrap at a smelter or something?
- Ants should pick up items other ants drop if they die on a trail. This might exist already, but i noticed a few stray items on the ground during my playtime. Being able to highlight dropped items would be good too (perhaps by tapping alt or something?)

- Hotkeys for buildings would be great
- Iron Plates cost a bit too much imo (but mainly the fact that they take forever to smelt lol). I think 2 ingots would be better.
- Being able to hook a combiner into trails and have logic for that would be great - that way you could have an inventor producer that only makes new ones when there's an empty slot, for example (also, a research to automate research point collection would be nice)

- A hotkey to see the lifespan bar of every worker ant. You could make it alt and then add an "alt-mode" that highlights other info, for example (I totally didn't steal that idea from Factorio lol)
- A quickbar for drones would be great, similar to being able to pin things on the HUD in Surviving Mars. Makes it easier to assign launch pads & whatnot.

But yeah, the demo's great and I really liked it. Neat concept for a game.

[Daz]

Just my thoughts to add to yours -

- Agree with the rotate first - I find the rotate after placement to be cumbersome. Just having R/shift-R rotate slowly would be ideal for me.

- Basic ants (small workers, workers and inventors) don't have any cost to them aside from the Energy needed to produce the larva for them, so I think these ones not giving anything back is fair, the later Ants that use resources to modify perhaps should drop something that can be processed back into that resource - Drones drop fabric scrap, for example. Not sure how a Undertaker Trail would work, though, as the ants can (and will) die in random places.

- Not sure of this one - items dropped when an Ant dies seem to teleport to the stockpile that takes them. I mostly notice this on the Energy Cells that you feed the Queen, before I place a stockpile for them I'll have Cells littered around the path, afterwards and they just seem to stack up in the stockpile. Not sure if that's intended behaviour or a performance work-around for the moment.

- Agree that Iron plates are too expensive for what seems to be a basic resource, and the time taken to make them is very long.

- If Counter Gates could monitor the number of ants on a different trail (Like the output of a combiner) this would work quite well, the programming for that is probably harder than I think, and communicating that to Players would be a challenge in it's own right. You might be able to duplicate this with some clever Trail setups, but that's beyond me.

For Drone Pads - I don't think either Pad should have a cost to them, they're just a different type of Trail after all, it's not like the Drones are getting fuel from the pads before take-off. Doing this might trivialise expansion to other Islands, though.

Not sure of how useful the Alt-Lifespan option would be, I suppose if you're going to chose an Ant to do something, you might want to specifically take ones with high or low life depending on what you need. (Low lifespan Ants to a Combiner or Assembler is a great way to prolong their lifespan.)

I'd also like a way to hide all Trails - just so you can zoom out a bit and watch the Ants move around in their perfectly ordered version of Chaos.

Sorry, that ended up a bit longer than intended.

[Lone Emissary]

Agree with most of the suggestions added.
This is probably beyond the scope of the game but having to prepare against other types of ants would be cool. Like slave-making robot ants that you have to prepare yourself against or other ant colonies that drag you into a full blown robot/mecha ant war. This would also force you to plan defensively.

In fact, having a starter ant species to pick from each with its own special set of technologies on top of base ones that would make it stronger and weaker in some aspects would add some additional replayability.