The player colony lives on a spit of land protruding from the edge of the mainland. Sand Spit from the player's side (work in progress) So let’s talk a little about the map that is much closer to being completed, and it’s a quite uniquely shaped one - Sand Spit, which is designed with skirmishes in mind (although you can absolutely play any freeplay setup on it) in a 3v1 format. I’ll be collating the feedback and presenting it to Liam, who will decide which simple changes are best and which are worth investing some more development time to make new modular processes. If you have suggestions (for all kinds of colony) please post them on our discussion boards with an appropriate title. These kinds of changes are very quick to make. An example of this was done during the beta test - leafcutter ants were told to only make minor workers until their first chamber is completed, and this better organises their priority list. We are interested in feedback on the ordering and priorities that individual colony types should have.

However, some changes are very quick to make and these are likely to come first.

Liam, who has coded the new system, would like some feedback on how it can be improved, but there is a caveat - he is keen to continue working on tier 5 from now on and therefore additional time he gives to the custom game AI needs to be carefully thought out.ĪI leafcutter colony underground constructionĪn example of a process that would likely help out the AI is one that would allow it to harvest food from defeated colonies - that would take quite some time to implement, so decisions on making new processes like this will be more carefully considered before being put into development. It’s now a modular system, and new behaviours (processes) can be bolted onto it. Whilst this is generally true, it’s clear that there’s some ways to go in optimising the AI and helping it with getting the best out of its new brain. As part of this, we felt some confidence in changing the way cheats are applied to AI.Ĭheats were always intended to help make up the shortfall that an AI colony has compared to a human player, and we’d hoped that the much more capable AI would need significantly less help. The new custom game AI system is vastly improved over the old one in all aspects - it can plan attacks, help allies, guard resources and make analytical decisions on when to attack or defend.

Empires of the undergrowth review