Part 6: Random Word Beginning with "Ant"

Chapter 6 - Random Word Beginning with "Ant"



I decided to play ahead a bit, as there's really nothing new left to show off, so I figured I'd spare you several more updates of "ants eat and murder" jokes.

As you have more areas, it becomes easier to conquer nests. Before, the black ants would quickly die out when entering a red nest. Now, they can slowly grow and stand their own ground. Hell, the red side's weakened now that, despite my losing the black queen in that green space, my killing the red queen stuck there as well, making the square neutral. Not for long, of course.



So let's start things off by going to the doghouse.



...And then immediately leaving, as odds are high that our queen won't last enough for me to slaughter the lot of them.



Right, let's try that again.







Immediately after this, I decide to go to another area, not even opting to finish off the bulk of the red ants.



Somehow, my square is black now, which is weird as hell for many reasons.

Generally, a square will stay striped until you eliminate ALL the ants, not just the queen. There were clearly 200-something ants still around after I went to this screen, and right now I'm still in the same area. I haven't actually left yet.

Also, earlier on, if I simply killed a red queen and left, a new one would show up quickly and start kicking the black ants' butts. This doesn't happen now that I have a sizable portion of black squares, as the more black squares you have, the more dominant you are. The whole idea of Full Game is to spread out as fast as fucking possible and annihilate the red ants early to avoid a stalemate like mine. Without cheats (or hell, probably even with these cheats), it'd be much faster for me to simply start a new game and spam the hell out of Breeders than to even try to make any headway here.

But apparently as soon as I murdered the red queen, all the red ants decide to simultaneously kill themselves. I don't know anymore.



So I go to the dog house area. There is absolutely no difference in the overworld. Despite us being under a dog house, nothing changes. There's two or three "overworld" maps, and then there's "house" maps. They don't really bother factoring in the design of the house itself.







After trading regicides, it's time to deal with the red menace populating the square I just conquered.



It's a laughable offense.



Right, let's try this again.





Still in doghouse land. I don't know anymore.



Then I spam frameskip some more until something happens.







Right. The final outside square is the red home base. This is where they start. Even though the game doesn't really give a shit about this space over the others, it's kind of a cool feeling to go in there and simply destroy the queen that started this whole blasted war.



Alright, here we go!











Way to go, team!

What you just saw is part of the optimal strategy for this game. You beat the initial red colony in the bottom-right corner, crank breeders to max, hop around to different colonies since colonies grow faster without you, and hope you get enough colonies to annihilate the red colonies automatically.

The ideal way to play the game is to not actually play the game.

So anyway, through no involvement of my own, the final outside red space is conquered. Before we prepare to go inside the house, however, I'll go over a thing or two that popped up in the thread.



People wanted me to show off killing the caterpillar. First, I wanted to clarify the food the spider drops.







All that food is from killing that spider. The PC version may be different, but it's definitely lucrative to murder spiders.



Also, many of the northern squares have this same golf club and ball in the same exact positions. Manchild is so miserable, he literally leaves his entire golf set lying outside. He also has no problem mowing over them, despite having no god damn grass in his dirtclod of a yard.



I go to overview to find the caterpillar, which I'm only showing off because I want to show you what an army of ~200 ants ready to murder at your bidding looks like.



Ah, our victim!





And there you go. Dead caterpillar, with a modest bit of food. It won't kill you, either, as caterpillars are defenseless and can do nothing but slowly move forward.



So we lack only one space to completely control the outside area. It's time to attack the stoop.



Good fucking god does the game chug with 600 ants in-game.



The game likes to randomly rebalance by mysteriously removing ants to make the game run better.

Here's a useless aside. In the bottom status bar, the red and yellow ants are colored in, but not the black ants. Are they supposed to be white ants? Or transparent? Meh.



Regicide, murder, eat, yawn.



Mass genocide, yawn.





Massive ant war with hundreds of casualties, yawn.



Anyway, we've fully conquered outside and nearly double the red colonies. Amazing what cheat codes can do.

Still, even with cheat codes, this game's tedious as hell and gets stale quickly. There's not really much strategy to this game, and you end up spending a lot of time waiting around for your breeders to spread to new colonies, and then to at least get enough ants so that you have a small chance of beating their colony. Or, you just do the first part and literally dick around in house mode for the rest of the game simply watching and waiting for the screen to turn black.

Next time, I'm just going to do the entire house in one update and finish the full game because I'm pretty much out of things to say at this point.