And while the roving predators stay around, the enemy ants have enough general gumption to actually get into your hive and start laying into your Queen. Not only do you have to deal with roving predators but there are also enemy ants (the object of many levels being to defeat them) who will happily lay into your ants as well. On the first level you only have to deal with a preying mantis - the aim of the level being to gather enough resources and food to defeat it - but as the game progresses things get tougher. It's also up to you to make sure you have enough warriors around to defend your workforce as there are plenty of predators around who take great pleasure in munching on any ants they come across. So while you can order your ant queen to produce more eggs, which in turn hatch into different ant types, you have to make sure you have enough food to sustain them beforehand.
Maintenance of your work force is important - if you run out of food, which your ants use up at a regular rate, they'll start expiring. Oddly you also can't send out an individual warrior ant to explore - they can only be selected and controlled in groups which is slightly mystifying. But there is a minor downside to this in that it means you have to use your warrior ants to explore the landscape looking for more food (unexplored land being shrouded in black) when they could be defending the nest. This is mostly a boon to the game - it means you don't have to spend the game micromanaging your ants and telling them individually to go out and get food.
Instead, by using the priority window you can tell what kind of tasks you want your ants to get up to - ranking some jobs higher than others or telling them to ignore certain tasks. You don't actually have any direct control over where your workers go - they'll automatically busy themselves, fetching food or resources, maintaining the nest, carrying ant eggs around the nest. Clicking on this icon activates that food source and signals your worker ants to come out of the nest and start taking the food back into the anthill, and the same procedure applies to the building materials that your ants need to build and maintain rooms. These food sources can be found by taking control of a group of your warrior ants and getting them to scout around till they find a small apple icon, usually in the midst of some unappetitizing fungi. RiceĪs you'd expect, your ants need to food to survive so your first priority when starting one of the twenty or so single player levels is to track down a food source. But whereas Sim Ant was a simulation of life in and above an anthill Empire of the Ants is more of a RTS strategy game with ants in it - which is where it falls down a bit, but more on that later. an ant game with an anthill and above ground view? Didn't Maxis do that a few years back?' And you'd be right - Empire of the Ants does bear more than a passing resemblance to Maxis's Sim Ant. Now, the more astute of you might at this point be thinking. And the second is the astral projection/disembodied spirit type view that most strategy fans will be familiar with, where you float eerily above the battlefield directing your troops. You have two views of the miniature world of your ants - the first is the anthill view where you can dig out new tunnels and set up new rooms for your ants to use. Through the game you have to build up your ant forces to the level where they can take on whatever foe awaits them outside the nest, or whatever objective has been set for that level. You play an up and coming ant commander has been given the task of overseeing the welfare and expansion of a colony of russet ants.
In actual fact, Empire of the Ants is a rather playable if slightly flawed strategy game set not in a post-apocalyptic landscape populated with super-sized ants but in the 'real' world, featuring normal sized ants going about their everyday business. Toastīecause there's nary a giant ant to be seen in Empire of the Ants. After all, with a title like that it surely had to be set in some future world, perhaps after a nuclear holocaust, where Giant Ants ruled the world and man had to struggle to survive against the antennaed peril. So it was with some measure of excitement that I greeted Microids' new release Empire of the Ants. And despite the fact that it was little more than a basic adventure game with a variety of mini shoot-the-ant type games mixed in, it was rather addictive. You had to see the ants off and ensure the world was safe again for good old apple-pie eating Americans.
#EMPIRES OF THE UNDERGROWTH MULTIPLAYER MOVIE#
This title was based loosely upon the black and white B movie 'Them' and, like the film in question, revolved around a horde of radioactive giant ants which had taken upon themselves to attack the local populace. Cinemaware produced, amongst other things, a game called It Came From The Desert.
#EMPIRES OF THE UNDERGROWTH MULTIPLAYER SOFTWARE#
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, where the Amiga still thrived, there was a software house known as Cinemaware.