The Formican Threat

**Dev. Status** | Conceptual

*Hurrah, hurrah:"*

*The ants go marching ten by ten"*

- *"The Ants go Marching"*
The **Formican Threat**, **Formicans** or more succintly **Giant Ants** are Paradox faction created by tenebrousGuile for Blue Alert and Red Alert. They utilize waves of massive numbers of oversized ants, the crude beginnings of technology, and appropriated mutants of other species twisted by Jade and nuclear fallout and tamed by the ants to drag down and tear apart their foes.

## At A Glance

 **Motives** | Feeding, Reproduction, Expansion, Survival

## Background

### A Bug's Life

The humble ant is one of the most common forms of animal life on the planet. Quadrillions of them are estimated to share the planet Earth with the human species. Ants share a few things in common with humanity, such as their fondness for congregating in enormous artificial communal habitats and their capability to organise farms and livestock. Ants are well known for their surprising strength for such small creatures, their industriousness their abilities to cooperate and even make war. Something that it shares with its close relatives; the bees and wasps, and to the similar but unrelated termites who have pestered carpenters since time immemorial as well as lesser known strains of Thrips, Aphids, Shrimps, and Ambrosia Beetles.

They are ancient creatures who have gathered in their billions long before humanity had ever evolved and seen many giants come and go across tens of millions of years. Dinosaurs and mammoths were both contemporaries of these eusocial insects at some point and these small insects have outlived both. Such is their success that their kind can be found on every continent of the world, even Antarctica thanks to specimens brought there by Epsilon. Even in the depths of the underworld or the sea-domes of the Aelva where the Kumun, Atlanteans and other societies have dwelled largely separate from the world above, many of these eusocial insects have survived and thrived.

And in the relatively brief time that these insects have coexisted with sapient life on Earth they have come to a certain accord. The scraps of food left behind by sapient life forms offer valuable nutrition to these little insects, and so they have often been drawn to the living spaces of these beings. Bees in particualr were seen as highly valuable for their ability to make sweet honey as a tasty treat for the flavour starved; and were treasured greatly by those who craved sugary tastes. Though certainly the wasps' fondness for human paper and the termites' appreciation for wooden constructs is rather unappreciated.

However the ant and its eusocial insectoid and crustacean kin are small creatures of relatively little brainpower. As such it has crawled beneath the feet of civilisation for thousands of years, scurrying in the shadows of ever more elaborate constructions of man with little comprehension of what works they were crawling through. Their shapings of the environment were small, mostly invisible to those who did not study them obsessively and while the occasional big sapient might be felled by toying around with a swarm or through fatal allergies and the sting of such insects was the cause of many a child's tears, orders of magnitudes more insects were killed by larger creatures seeking to get rid of them.

Few would imagine that these insects would ever really amount to much beyond scientific curiosity even as many were taken in to be modified by science in an effort to adapt them to assorted purposes. Biological science was used and abused to transform them into a myriad of strange and perhaps unusual purposes and shapes, such as the Technocratic Combine's famous giant ants who often serve as shock troopers or as meat livestock. But this is not about those controlled, carefully managed constructs of genetic science, but of something far more wild, unsure of its place in the world and capable of thought.

### Of Crystals and Insects

The arrival of Jade via meteor in the late 1960s would be the herald of tremendous change for the world as the Chinese civil war entered a new and deadly phase through the technologies unlocked by the strange crystals. But they also had a catastrophic effect on the environment as they spread across the battle-scarred landscapes of the warring states. Most life forms exposed to Jade died of radiation sickness or of fatal, uncontrolled mutations; usually at best becoming the monstrous and horrific blobs of flesh that came to be known as visceroids or simply becoming more fuel for the growth of Jade. Others were driven to irrational madness and violent obsession with the Jade, attacking anything that might get in the way of acquiring more of the crystal. Some however, some managed through either luck or design; achieve stability.

These mutants would be further stabilised by the mass usage of radiological weapons by the factions of the Chinese Civil War as well as intermingling with experiments in genetic science that managed to be released into the wild. And they grew with astonishing speed. They were thrust into a confused and complex world fully formed with little sense of what came before. The dismal arthropoid intelligence they once had was now replaced by something far more sophisticated, something capable of self aware reflection, sapient awareness, and sophontic thought. But they had no context for the world they were in, they were creatures without history and no organically developed culture save for what they knew of their diminuitive forebears. They were in essence, infants forced into sudden adulthood. Their minds and bodies were fully developed yet their sense of self and identity was nonexistent. However, there was something they came to quickly understand.

War.

The decades of merciless war and the hostility of the warring factions to their efforts to understand coloured their understanding of the world. The Post-Atomic Warlords, their clients, and their supporting factions were threats, and were dangerous to interact with. So they dug deeper to try and find their own space. The species and factions who already inhabited the underworld such as the mole like Kumun, the stunted Dawuardin, and the terrifying precambrian Anoxites were already there and wanted little more to do with them. So they too, were warred with. In the seas that their shrimp kin tried to inhabit, the Alaevva and other creatures of the deep reacted with almost immediate hostility. Creatures born of the fire had no place before the knife ears, and the other beings took a dim view of the idea of sharing.

The pressures of war and conflict and the need for greater organisation would change them, mould them. It brought the brain bugs of these hives together, coordinating, communicating. Language, understanding, culture. These were the building blocks of a new society. One that would shield these Eusocial life forms from the dangers that wanted to snuff them out. If humans and non-humans of seemingly every stripe seemed to fear them, then they would take all steps to protect themselves. They would master the craft of armies, planning, maneuvre and begin to tinker with the promise of technology. The body could do much, but paired with technology, it could be used to do virtually anything they reasoned.

But the supplies of Jade that they relied on were still being carefully contained and managed by the humans, and their efforts to make more were struggling. Others reacted unpleasantly to the spread of Jade. And of course, the Chinese and the other Jade tainted continually tracked down the deposits they sought to create and worked to purge the Formicans from the fruits of their work so they could steal it. At best, allowing them to live so that humans who never worked for it could harvest their crystals and give them pittances in return so that they would be able to continue their farm work. This state of affairs could not continue, not if the Formicans were to grow or expand. They needed to be free, and freedom would come.

### Empire of the Ants

The third world war made the already tangled situation in the transpacific rim warzone explode into a confusing free for all of virtually limitless violence. And with this came the carte blanche to break free of so many attempted controls. With the chaos came the opportunity to really spread Jade as they desired. Who was going to be able to monitor them properly when the front lines were changing constantly as a result of the interference of so many foreign parties? Especially when the increasingly Jade dependent armies in the central warzone were also increasingly willing to overlook the spread of Jade as long as they could harvest some; and some humans even seemed to want to spread it as much as possible actively.

The bulk of most foreign armies sought to avoid getting too entangled in places such as the great Chinese theatre lest the intense need for manpower at that theatre strain their resources. As such the Formican Threat was able to build in general silence. The various armies at play reported to their allies that there were some problems with unusual fauna but out of a desire to keep the secrets of Jade to themselves for various reasons gave little hard intelligence beyond that. Given this, it was virtually inevitable that the phenomenon of the giant arthropods went so unnoticed while the world was busy waging the largest war in its history across every continent and ocean. This suited the brain bugs fine, a chance to study the world without being probed in return.

So they sought to expand their reach, taking their tunnels beyond the reaches of China and throughout the Underworld come what may. Isolated encounters with forces such as the Protectorate and Alien or extraversial interventionists drove their further curiosity, intrigued by yet other forms of intelligence that sought to share the world with them. But as ever their primary focus remained on the cultivation of Jade. It was their lifeblood, it was their fuel, and it was the key to greater understanding and physical development. They needed it, they craved it, and they seeded it where they could. Such obviously did not endear them to many, but it did spread the addiction of the green crystal to a number of underworld societies.

And it would be these underground societies that the Formicans would find themselves increasingly in conflict with. While the underworld is a truly vast labyrinth, the feeling of being threatened by an unknown force expanding into one's home territory is never one that sits well with many. And the earlier wars in the dark intensified as the combatants sought to either monopolise or drive back the Jade spreading throughout the dark depths of the world. Secretive forces around the world sought to stick their hand into the conflict, hoping to profit or advantage themselves one way or the other from the shake ups in the parts of the world beneath the waves and the soil. In particular, forces bearing the sigil of a Scorpion were quite interested in getting the Formicans to rouse trouble.

Isolated reports of incidents involving giant arthropods untied to the Combine or Gaeans grew more frequent. Perhaps the most well-known among conspiracy enthusiasts was that of a nest that erupted in the British isles that was dealt with by a secretive Allied task force in the midst of the third world war, seeking to feed off of the energy of Nuclear Fusion reactors. Though the Queen and Brain Bugs who lead the assault were killed before the ants could spread out of the island, incidents like this were starting to flare up in commonality around the world, though no part of the world more so than China. However, the final fate of the great warzone would eclipse all news of ants. The bombs fell and the missiles were launched, and in less than twenty-four hours the warring halves of China would sunder themselves

### It came from Atomia!

The nuclear conclusion to the struggles for the Middle Kingdom that split the trans-pacific warzone apart for so many years was sudden, awful, and dramatic. The work of thousands of years of civilisation buried by their own folly overnight. But these armies were simply brutalised, not dead; only a hundred million out of more than a billion Chinese had died, the war could continue. They began to rise out of their shelters and gather survivors as the exchange came to an end. There they found that the ants had already begun to claim large portions of the wastelands. Empowered by the now widespread Jade and radiation, the Formicans began to build on the surface in large amounts for the first time.

But others had also survived with their strength intact, and others now sought to investigate what had brought the Transpacific Warzone to such a terrible end. But most concerning of all was what the Bombs awakened. Under the Green banner of the Viceroy, the Atomic Dynasty from its capital in the China announced that they would now be founding the fifth world, against the Allies, the Soviets, the Axis, and the Combine. And they would seek to reclaim what had been lost to the bandits who had arisen from the rubble. And pests such as the Formicans would not be tolerated in their efforts to desecrate the despoiled lands.

The underworld, alarmed by the nuclear exchange then began to investigate the surface; while the sea peoples rose to the surface to investigate and bring old grudges to the fore; the Alaeva in particular bringing their hatred of the green fire to bear. The aliens and extraversals stepped up their activities, regarding the atomic bombings as an especially significant event, and the secret armies intensified their efforts to push the world in one direction or the other. Forces from divergent timelines were starting to be more common, and the great silvery horde of the Protectorate surged into being all at once in places deemed forgotten or out of the way by the organics, immediately starting to flood into places such as Mongolia or the Canadian North.

The wasteland wars that provide an intersection for so many of the world's strangest and most casualty-accepting armies to collide in were conflict on a scale not yet seen by the Formicans. Enormous armies rampaged through the twisted landscape, doing battle with different varieties of strange foes every day. There was no peace among men or any other creature to be found there, just the crucible of the very worst sort of conflict imaginable. The Formicans studied and learned from it, and grew increasingly wise to the ways of large-scale warfare, technology, and the building of society. Yet they know that they cannot simply fight various menageries of armies within the wastes if they wish to truly achieve civilisation.

They had to expand, and expand they did. The reports of conflicts with oversized arthropods began to erupt in number and frequency around the world. No more was the war with the "Formican Threat" as the Daily Mail labelled it, a secret one. Perhaps the more conventional powers were as of yet unaware of the full scale of the formicans, but after brazen assaults such as the attack on Fort Khalkin in the eastern Soviet Union or the attempted invasion of Bangladesh, there could be no denying that the ants were real, especially when they made such little effort to hide themselves compared to many other strange armies. But as the Formicans continue to evolve and develop, some tepid efforts at understanding and reaching an accord with other intelligences have been made.

The Formicans understand that they are feared, yet their ultimate quest remains one for answers and understanding. They struggle to comprehend the world they have been thrust into, and they crave the knowledge and wisdom that will help them find their place.

## Army Ants

### Soldier Ants

All soldier ants are built two units at a time, though this can be upgraded for even larger hordes. Unless noted otherwise, all non-flying formican infantry can dig.