4.1 Cold Blood Frogs spam

[{P}Mr.Otter]

So I was finishing with the bullfrog boss with a total of 90 tier 3 fire ants. Though the boss was rough and looks like he can spam his abilities very fast leaving almost no time for the ants to overwhelm him, after waves and waves he died.

The part that made me lose the game was the sheer amount of frogs and salamanders they send directly into the base.

Is it normal that for medium difficulty, to have like 10 frogs and 10 salamanders?
I just though the sheer amount of enemies spawned into your base felt unfair.
I guess next time ill make 2000 ants to make sure there's not a whole insectarium released into my base.
:)

[{NLR} C´est Moi ;D]

The longer you take to kill the bullfrog, the more enemies will appear in the final wave.

If you have a decent of food stored up and at least two upgraded fire ant groups (70-80 ants per group should suffice on impossible, so less needed on lower difficulties), you should be able to hold off the wave, especially if you're being active with taking them out, since they don't all spawn at once.

Make sure you're fighting them in open areas, not narrow tunnels, so dig out lots of terrain in your nest if needed before or after fighting the bullfrog

Use micro to get good surrounds (turn off combat, place group marker behind enemy, wait for some ants to walk past, then turn combat on)

Make sure you have workers to replenish losses.

[Tiarun]

better yet dont fight them in the nest, there are 2 portals into your nest. one to the north one to the south. camp outside and its easy.

[Mike]

Originally posted by AntBZK:

The main issue with 4.1 is that people take too long to deal with the bullfrog and don't dig out the nest enough to surround the amphibians.

We do our best to telegraph this with the super important notification early on in the level, but I think it still gets missed quite often.

[fastheinz39]

Half of the fun of this one is seeing if one can hang on one more day before dealing with the frog. It gets rough fast! So yeah...make MANY ants and get as many to level III as possible.

[Fransens]

Originally posted by AntBZK:

The main issue with 4.1 is that people take too long to deal with the bullfrog and don't dig out the nest enough to surround the amphibians.

Not really sure I'll be following the "surround them" advice when this game's micromanagement potential literally is just the A-Move.
Hell, if your army gets big enough it takes forever to tell your ants to move differently and once they are in combat range they fight their way anyway.
And I don't buy the "turn off attack" then and position yourself that way.
I dunno about you guys but when a corridor has 4 frogs and 1 lizard that spam AOE instant-kill attacks I'd say micro goes out the effin' window.

And to those that argue about fighting in big open spaces...
...the whole time the game has hammered into me that you have to build corridors from which hexagonal chambers branch out (upgrade mechanic) and now the level just expects you to go against all the previous lessons and just tell you to dig out everything?
Well, not everything but you know what I mean.

Nah, This level's final wave being based on how many days you've played or whatever it is... that's just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ if you end up with about a dozen of amphibians surrounding your queen at the and after killing almost a dozen that were on the way there.

This map infuriates because until that moment it was the most fun I had in this game.
Cold Blood is the perfect example of "My Way Or The Highway" mission design.
If you don't play it like the game tells you to you get punished at the end even if you basically dominated the entire level until that point.
Where is the logic in that?
I'm done with this.

[{NLR} C´est Moi ;D]

Originally posted by Fransens:

Originally posted by AntBZK:

The main issue with 4.1 is that people take too long to deal with the bullfrog and don't dig out the nest enough to surround the amphibians.

Not really sure I'll be following the "surround them" advice when this game's micromanagement potential literally is just the A-Move.
Hell, if your army gets big enough it takes forever to tell your ants to move differently and once they are in combat range they fight their way anyway.
And I don't buy the "turn off attack" then and position yourself that way.
I dunno about you guys but when a corridor has 4 frogs and 1 lizard that spam AOE instant-kill attacks I'd say micro goes out the effin' window.

And to those that argue about fighting in big open spaces...
...the whole time the game has hammered into me that you have to build corridors from which hexagonal chambers branch out (upgrade mechanic) and now the level just expects you to go against all the previous lessons and just tell you to dig out everything?
Well, not everything but you know what I mean.

Nah, This level's final wave being based on how many days you've played or whatever it is... that's just ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ if you end up with about a dozen of amphibians surrounding your queen at the and after killing almost a dozen that were on the way there.

This map infuriates because until that moment it was the most fun I had in this game.
Cold Blood is the perfect example of "My Way Or The Highway" mission design.
If you don't play it like the game tells you to you get punished at the end even if you basically dominated the entire level until that point.
Where is the logic in that?
I'm done with this.

Sounds like you had one big control group of ants, which yea, makes it nearly impossibly to micro or control reliably.
You'll want to split up your ants into smaller groups to make them easier to manage. The more ants in a pheromone group, the longer it takes for them all to react to your orders.

And combat off/combat on works well even in tunnels, just wait for them to run behind the toad, then turn it on. It's not as good, because you'll still stack up on one side, but it'll make the toad attack the other side initially, which can save a lot of ants.

And keeping a neat looking nest is still fine, you just need some open area to efficiently engage the toads inside your nest.

You can also just fight them outside the nest, before they enter, seeing as they actually enter through a couple points that have a glowy effect going on.

Of course, with only one group of ants, that's not really viable, hence more reason to split up your ants.

4.1 and 4.2 are much more demanding of the player and will start punishing things you could get away with before in earlier levels.

[hekele]

Originally posted by Mike:

Originally posted by AntBZK:

The main issue with 4.1 is that people take too long to deal with the bullfrog and don't dig out the nest enough to surround the amphibians.

We do our best to telegraph this with the super important notification early on in the level, but I think it still gets missed quite often.

I think it's not clear exactly how fast that's going to escalate. In previous levels, the nightly waves ramp up, but not exponentially. In my case, I couldn't deal with the big bullfrog because the other ants were spamming me all day long with non-stop attacks that don't end until nightfall and then all night I'm dealing with toads in my nest. I had about 130 ants but couldn't keep up with the 8+ bullfrogs rampaging through the nest picking off all my eggs and larvae and workers trying to replenish them.

[Raldavar]

You're taking too long if you have an army of 80+ ants when fighting the Bull Frog. You only need about 30 or so fully upgraded soldiers to kill the Bull Frog on Insane. The trick is to have two separate armies, one being about 30 upgraded soldiers for the bullfrog, while the other being about 12 or so soldiers to defend with and kill creatures as you dig out the nest.

Remember that the timer is really off after you kill the Bullfrog. You actually have 2 minutes so gather as much of the frog as possible before you call your entire army back for the final invasion wave.

[RUDOG_102]

Yep just have more ants more food

[Imperatordavius]

I've said this a few times, in regards to dealing with the toads and salamanders, while many do struggle against them, there are often '2' culprits for why they fail the ending when so many toads and salamanders invade the nest at once.

Culprit 1) Lack of Soldiers, especially lvl 3.

So many associate their failings with this culprit, and while it is a major problem, you can easily circumvent this by just building more soldiers and getting them ready. If you have about six hundred level 3 soldiers, 300 tiles meaning you get 2 per tile, that should be sufficient to deal with any number of toads/salamanders. The idea is similar to how certain species get around being the major food supply for other species... have so many they can't eat everyone.

Culprit 2) Lack of 'nest workers'

This is by far the 'biggest' reason that most don't take into account. During most gameplay of 4.1 you can easily get away with having say about '30' workers tending to the eggs and queen within the nest. By the time you get to a huge swarm of ants, nothing above ground threatens you, as any losses are replaced quickly/easily. Even if they try, they cannot stop your tidal wave of ants as you ball up and push ever onward to victory. The only exception to this is the Bullfrog which can kill your ants in huge swaths, but again by that time your workers can easily keep up with the losses.

However... at the end when your covering so many locations and entrances, you might not be able to stretch your ants everywhere and if you try your ants get eaten in large groups. Before the final wave of toads/salamanders, your on average losing 20-30 ants at a time, at most 30-35, so you have plenty of workers by that time with say 19 workers (a full layout of 3/4/5/4/3 hexagon pattern of workers.

But... that's not enough, not nearly enough when your losing 30-40-50 ants over the course of five-6 seconds 'every' cycle. You need more workers. Without the soldiers to body block the toads/salamanders start to get on top of the nest tiles where the workers are trying to deliver their eggs, and are getting 'eaten' or drawn into battle... thus reducing your work force further and further as the toads don't ignore the workers, and will happily chomp them down alongside soldiers attacking them.

Generally i find that having 1 worker for every 3 soldiers is enough of a ratio to ensure, at least for the fire ants, that when you have such HUGE numbers, they can maintain their numbers.

[zylvanbane]

I've played this scenario several times. Usually take out the black ants on day 3 and the yellow on day 5. By day 6, the bullfrog isn't too difficult. This last time, however, my ants stopped spawning despite having thousands of food in storage. Not just my pervasive fire ants either. I kept some workers handy to farm aphids I'd collected, and they didn't respawn either. Not sure what happened, but the amphibian swarm just ran over me.

[{P}Mr.Otter]

I see I am not alone in this, thinking that it's very difficult, especially being on medium difficulty. I just tried again and failed. I will take everyone's strategy into account and retry again.

Though this 2nd run made me realise 2 things.

1. The narrator seems to suggest that, after beating the Bullfrog, the ants should go 'ABOVE' ground to prepare for the chaos to come. So I guess abandon the nest and defending the queen? Does the narrator know that these amphibians are omnipotent and dig in a B line to either the queen or larvae nests?

2. Rushing the bullfrog is a bad idea (even if you can kill it). Beating this boss requires waves of ants, meaning, a good supply of food stocked. If you don't have enough food stockpiled then it's over anyways.
The boss isn't the final objective, it's the trigger for the last objective.
The real objective is survive the omnipotent amphibians that will rush the nest and you need a good supply of 1. Food, 2. Workers, 3. Tier 3 ants.

I genuinely though rushing the boss would help, since the more days you wait, the more aggressive the fauna becomes AND the Bullfrog keeps regenerating HP. This is the bait, don't rush and take your time.

[{P}Mr.Otter]

It took 4 days in-game and 174 tier 3 units for me to win.

I added more workers as some user maintained and made sure I had around 500 extra food for troop replenishment.

I also separated the ants into 4 groups for the night raids. Basically 1 group on each side. I micro-managed the ants and changed them from group to group depending on the enemy's direction of attack.

With that being said I fought every enemy inside the nest. I wasn't about to get caught with my pants down trying to fight outside while sneaky salamanders B-line for the queen.

This was certainly a lot harder than the previous levels, but it's not impossible.
There was also a huge source of food in the top left of the map that was never cited nor mentioned by the narrator.

I've only found about the food source by looking more at the map trying to min-max my food production.

Also, taking out the black ants after day 3 with 100 tier 3 ants was doable.
I just had to camp outside their base for 5 minutes while slowly overwhelming their forces.

All of that being said, thank you everyone for the advice!

[{NLR} C´est Moi ;D]

Originally posted by Imperatordavius:

I've said this a few times, in regards to dealing with the toads and salamanders, while many do struggle against them, there are often '2' culprits for why they fail the ending when so many toads and salamanders invade the nest at once.

Culprit 1) Lack of Soldiers, especially lvl 3.

So many associate their failings with this culprit, and while it is a major problem, you can easily circumvent this by just building more soldiers and getting them ready. If you have about six hundred level 3 soldiers, 300 tiles meaning you get 2 per tile, that should be sufficient to deal with any number of toads/salamanders. The idea is similar to how certain species get around being the major food supply for other species... have so many they can't eat everyone.

600 soldiers is such massive overkill, and unless you're playing on easy, you'd have to spend so much extra time in the mission to get those numbers, when you could have just won much sooner.
Plus with so many ants, you'd need 100+ per pheromone group, which would make controlling them much harder, and so I think you'd actually be doing worse, than if you had just had even half that.

So long you have an open'ish nest to engage them in, and don't have all your ants in one group, so you can actually split up and deal with multiple sides at once (turning off combat/gather on your nest group important too!), you should be fine.

[Soul]

I pretty much farmed that level on medium difficulty so much..... heres what I do to beat it before night 3.... which I do with one single group....

first I use my ants to clear out a decent space for my soldiers... then clear a path to exti and drop some food tiles at entrance....

I then use workers to gather food and build soldiers.... on medium difficulty I start with 9 soldiers before leaving nest....

I send soldiers to go gather aphids nearby entrance.... then carefully take the group down south to gather the aphids close to my base without alerting the other colony.....

then go back into base and start clearing the area of all the food.... first to the right of the entrance spot.... then right above that spot.... then the one to the left..... then top left.... then below that..... by then I should have about 25 soldiers or so.... I clear out a decent space before the big ones.... and clear those two spots....

in between clearing i'd periodically send soldiers up to gather from my aphids....

by time I start gathering at the bottom of the nest area with all the food.... i'll have 30 soldiers.... and I cleared all the area around my queen.... and plop down 2 rows of workers around her... with speed tiles later on surrounding them....

I build 30 workers.... and add them to gather alongside soldiers for bottom of nest area giving me 30 soldiers and 30 workers gathering.... I can end up gathering all the food before the first toad attacks at night like that....

which soon as I gather all the food i'll send my workers to go gather from aphids for rest of game pretty much... all 30 of em....

I focus on building soldiers to a certain point.... like cant recall number..... but its like 60 or so before I start focusing on upgrading them to tier 3's....

so by first night i'd have cleared all food before first toad invades.... and have my army waiting for it in upper left cause I already cleared out the whole upper half of the map.... right after toad dies thats it for that invasion...

I send my soldiers outside up to the top left of map to collect from the pinecone.... 600 food.... gather it.... and send soldiers to upper right part of map to gather the caterpillars from the plant.... then send them to make a bridge in top right of map to collect the aphids.... then send them to collect the aphids on the small island to the left and middle of map..... then send them to gather aphids to the bottom right of map island..... THEN send them to gather aphids right above the southern colony.... it aggro's the colony... but right after gathering that one I go right into that colony and destroy it and collect all the food....

I then rush over to the top left aphid spot and gather those.... and rush the next colony... i'll destroy it.... but depending on time I tend to just ignore the food and go out to collect the aphids right below that nest and send my army to wait right on top my queen for the night attacks....

so both colonies destroyed before night 2... with food collected from 1.... and whole time im just upgrading ants to tier 3... I dont make new ones till my army is pretty much upgraded from the ones I made the first night....

night 2 is a couple of enemies.... but basically there is a pattern of how many..... like I know when a certain toad spawns in that there will be no more attacks that night.... so during the night i'll go back to second colony and gather what food I didnt collect...

after that I wait a bit.... sending my army around the map and gather little spots of food.... catepillars and such..... taking my time a bit.... waiting on my 50 aphids to gather up food and upgrade my ants....

by time im ready to attack the frog im sitting at all my soldiers upgraded.... and I have 200 of em.... with about 500 food in storage.... and with my workers still on aphids.... I can fight frog just fine... once frog is near death i'll send in my workers to nest group to help replenish my numbers... or if I need to do it mid fight.... gather all the food and return to base....

I set my massive army right on top my queen.... and I barely move it.... letting the enemies come in and go towards my queen... but basically if I move my army its just orbiting around my queen.... i'll move the marker to just allow some ants to engage a nearby enemy that is say attacking my units spawning from eggs.... but move the marker right back when I think enough ants can handle it...

but doing it before night 3 means there are a lot less enemies that spawn too....

but thats how I been doing it now for medium mode with no challenge activated.....