How to beat the first Formicarium Challenge (spoiler)

[Ed]

As the title says, this is how I did it. Don't read further if you want to do it for yourself :)

Preparing the Formicarium for the attacks:

- Dig out enough extra space to support 500 food - preferably near the foot of the nest
- Build 43 soldier ants - keep collecting food until you have them all. Build them near as possible to the hole to the surface, so they respawn near where the enemy is coming in when they are killed
- DON'T build any more worker ants than the initial 7 you began with
- When doing the first two levels (on Easy :P) select Royal Jelly both times as the prize for completing them. This will allow you to upgrade your soldier ants to make them tougher.
- Upgrade your solider ants using the Royal Jelly to the toughest they can get (level 3)
- Finally, get your food stores back up to 500 having built your 43 soldier ants

Now, when the ants and beetles attack, you will be ready. They will come in waves and only the very final wave (with the beetles) will cause you any major problems - but even this you will overcome! :) Your ants will keep respawning and you will kill all the invaders!

You're welcome!

Unfortunately, completing this Challenge didn't give me enough Royal Jelly to buy the acid-spraying Wood Ants - so I have to rely on my Black Ant soldiers for level 2.1.

[Serafine]

Honestly I think the low pop cap wasn't such a good idea. It also clearly shows a major balancing issue in the game, namely the balance between soldiers and workers.
Workers are complete wimps and you want as few of them as possible but as much soldiers as possible.

This leads to utterly ridiculous populations where your colony has 95% soldiers and 5% workers, something that NEVER happens in nature and in-game throws up all sorts of economy issues like out-of-worker economy deadlock and out-of-eggs-economy deadlock.


I already suggested a solution, the most simple solution possible and I really hope the devs are looking into it - give soldiers all worker abilities.

- It's realistic, Formica ants do not have a soldier caste (only ants like Atta, Pheidole and to a lesser degree Camponotus have those).
- It solves ALL economy deadlock issues, like out-of-worker economy deadlock, out-of-eggs economy deadlock and the infamous preudo-out-of-workers-because-digging-gets-prioritized-over-everything-else economy deadlock.
- Your combat ants can actually do the jobs they are supposed to do, particularly carving out enemy mobs to kill them. Right now carving out enemy mobs essentially has a fixed cost of 2-4 workers because these workers will ALWAYS charge head on into what they carved out and instantly die.
- Additional realism. Players would use cheap weak workers for egg-care and colony maintenance and the larger workers for foraging and fighting - exactly like real ants do. The minor workers wouldn't go away they would still have their place, a realistic place like they have in actual real ant colonies. Actually they would have a more proper and better defined place in the game than they have right now.

[Ed]

Interesting thoughts.
One would expect soldiers to be better at things like digging anyway, with their powerful mandibles. But we wouldn't want/expect soldiers to be tending over the eggs?
If we give soldiers all worker abilities than there is no need to build any workers?

[Serafine]

Originally posted by Ed:

But we wouldn't want/expect soldiers to be tending over the eggs?

Formica ants do not have soldiers.
They are polymorphic which means they have smaller and larger workers, something the game actually reflects really well.
Only ant species like Atta and Pheidole have soldiers and they make up like 10-20% of the entire population (some Pheidole species can have more, but then Pheidole ants are predators that actively hunt and kill other arthropods while most ants species are primarily scavengers).

Originally posted by Ed:

If we give soldiers all worker abilities than there is no need to build any workers?

The weak workers (minor workers) would still have a place because they are dirt cheap. You don't want the soldiers (major workers) to babysit your eggs, when wimpy minor workers can do that for less than half the price.
That's pretty much EXACTLY what polymorphic ants do, they use the tiny workers to tend the brood and the large workers to fight and forage*. However if needed the larger workers are very capable of tending the brood as well, because having your colony collapsing when a specific 10% of your population dies would be a really terrible example of overspecialization and probably not survive for long in evolutionairy terms.

(*Well, some of the largest majors are often used as storage containers due to their huge social stomachs but in general it's still true).

[Ed]

Thanks Serafine. You clearly know a lot about ants and you have thought this through. So we'll see what the devs do.

[Jarhead0331]

How do you get more food in the Formicarium in order to grow more ants?

[Ed]

The scientist will throw more seeds in after you complete sub-tasks, plus you can select extra food as a reward for completing the missions.