Freeplay AI Colony

This page shows the mechanics of AI colonies in freeplay.

## **Settings**

You can play without, with or against AI colonies in freeplay. You must choose a color and a team for each colony before you start a freeplay game. You can have up to 4 colonies and 4 teams in a freeplay game. You can control whether colonies can invade enemy nests.

If you choose to play with gene-thief ants, you can pick whichever colonies from your story-mode save files. If you choose to play with wood ants, leafcutter ants or fire ants, you must pick either of the 2 variants.

Ally colonies are located next to each other. Enemy colonies are located on the opposing sides of the map.

You can control temperament of AI colonies: *Docile*, *Timid*, *Balanced* and *Aggressive*. This affects which units they choose to build, as well as how frequently they attack enemy colonies and defend ally colonies.

You can also control how fast they respond to general events.

You can choose cheat frequency of AI colonies: *None*, *Headstart*, *Underhanded*, *Cheater*, *Crooked* and *Corrupt*. They can gain free food and spawn ants without requring food or workers. Cheat is automatically disabled when the nest is invaded.

AI colonies aren't affected by upkeep and randomized caverns.

## **Behaviors**

Third generation AI behaviors are currently used in freeplay, with some modifications.

All ants move to the surface to gather resources if storage isn't full. Queen workers move inside to finish the remaining nest jobs when storage is full and stay permanently after the colonies have reached maturity.

AI colonies can decide how to interact with other colonies by themselves. They control 2 pheromone groups and flexibly assign jobs for each group. They focus on gathering food and take unguarded aphids at first. They can't actively hunt specific enemies like Uber creatures or titans.

AI colonies decide to attack other colonies depending on temperament. Less aggressive colonies respond to enemy marker placement while more aggressive colonies directly invade enemy nests.

## **Nest building**

AI colonies usually build 2 chambers at the same time. They will upgrade storage and soldier (non-worker) units as soon as they can. They only upgrade worker unitss after they have built and upgraded everything else.

Omnivorous ants start with the same predug nest and no resource.

Leafcutter ants start with a 19-tiled queen chamber, leaf storage, refuse storage and extra minors, depending on cheat setting. The final nest design is different from omnivorous species. Leafcutter ants will try to complete a 19-tiled minor chamber first.

Unit composition is chosen depending on species and temperament. Less aggressive colonies use more worker units while more aggressive colonies use more of the most expensive soldier units.

**Black ants/ Little black ants/ Fire ants**:

DocileTimidBalanced/ Aggressive
**Wood ants**:

DocileTimidBalanced/ Aggressive
**Big-headed ants**:

DocileTimidBalancedAggressive
**Leafcutter ants**:

DocileTimidBalancedAggressive
**Gene-thief ants**:

Gene-thief ant units are categorized into 3 groups: worker unit, melee/ ranged unit and tank unit. Unit composition is also chosen depending on which unit group they have access to like the following minimaps.

If they have access to multiple unit options in the same group, they will randomly choose from the available options and try to build at least 1 chamber for each unit option.

If tank units aren't available, they are replaced with melee/ ranged units. If melee/ ranged units aren't available, they are replaced with worker units.

DocileTimidBalancedAgrressive

## **Trivia**

* AI colonies were not meant to be in the game until John adamantly pestered Liam to keep actual functional nests in **Queen of the Hill**. He ported the code of the enemy colony in **The Harvest** into freeplay later on and made it work, which convinced Liam to focus on building better AI colonies for future missions and freeplay.

## **References**

1. ↑ Confirmed by Mike on Discord (10/7/2023).
2. ↑ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=K\_FNnDNe1Dw&t=2468s