Pocket Ants: Colony Simulator is a strategy game where you develop your ant colony to improve your odds against the dangers of the outside world – and other players. Here is what you need to know before you start up your sisterhood.
What to expect
Pocket Ants: Colony Simulator is a strategy worker-management game that sees you collecting resources, fighting nests, creatures, and, other players, and building chambers to become the strongest colony. This game, however, doesn’t work like other ant games and is more of a commitment than you may think, as the enemies on the map will respawn every 12 or 24 hours, ready to be bested again.
This isn’t a game that’ll see you building complex colonies and systems, the game is to be approached as if a multiplayer base-building game, where you are ultimately trying to build an army to fight and defend against other players. When you are online, however, you needn’t worry about the threat of other players and can focus on upgrading your chambers, organizing your army, and fighting other players.
This guide is focused on the nest-management and base-building elements of the game, but it is important to keep in mind that your efforts are being put towards being able to support a bigger and stronger army.
Building and developing your nest
Building chambers and upgrading them require natural resources, primarily leaves and seeds, which can be found outside your nest, and fungus, which is created from depositing leaves into the allocated fungus chamber for an instant decomposition. Your workforce of ants will collect resources whilst offline, so when you’re online, try to prioritize certain resources to get the upgrades or builds going before you leave.
Your workforce is limited by your food processing chamber, the one in which ants can deposit leaves to be turned into fungus. This is one of the most important chambers to upgrade when it comes to nest development. A bigger workforce, obviously, allows for quicker resource acquisition. It requires solely leaves to upgrade this chamber, so assign at least 75% of your workforce to forage for leaves while you are online to try and upgrade it before you leave.
This being said, the leaf storage chamber is the next most important chamber. Upgraded through fungus, this chamber allows you to store more leaves. Due to leaves being the most in-demand resource for building and upgrading, having a bountiful supply will assist you in taking on more builds and upgrades at once. If this is to be upgraded, assign at least 75% of your workforce to bring leaves to make fungus to try and upgrade the chamber before you leave.
Seeds are primarily used for more advanced, army-building chambers, but are also used exclusively to upgrade the Queen’s chamber and the nursery chamber. Upgrading these allows for stronger soldiers and more eggs to be laid simultaneously. Having both of these upgraded allows for a stronger battalion, which may not be too useful for the development of your colony, but having strong and numerous soldier ants will help protect your trails.
For this reason, it is important to keep an eye on the seed storage chamber, upgraded through leaves and fungus. I would advise, however, to only upgrade it as is necessary, so if you do want to upgrade the other chambers, you could have enough saved up for an upgrade or build on a whim.
Prioritizing your ants whilst you’re online to gather either fungus or leaves will allow you to upgrade your food processing chamber significantly faster, ready for when you next open the game, when your ants will have collected all the resources they can, no matter the distribution of workforce.
Fighting for natural resources
The life of an ant is difficult, and Pocket Ants: Colony Simulator has managed to emulate the harsh resistance. You may find that creatures or the red ant colony get in the way of resource gathering. This is why it is important to have around eight to ten soldiers on standby, as that is all you can order about at once and should be adequate for defeating regular creatures and protecting your colony from the red ants.
Creatures will only be a problem if they are in the way of your needed resource. You must fight them to progress. Simply gather your soldiers, again, preferably 8 to 10, and take them down quickly, or say goodbye to your sisters!
The red ant colony will only be a threat when you need a source they have claimed. There is nothing stopping you from sneaking over and gathering the resource whilst their soldier ants are absent, but if you begin a trail, your ants are at risk. To prevent you from constantly having to hatch new ants, send some soldier ants to assemble near the source. This way, any red ant soldiers that go to attack your trail will be detected by your soldiers and hopefully dealt with. If you assemble your soldiers on top of the source, then they will be fighting all the red ants that stray there, which could be fine if you plan to take down the red ant colony but could be detrimental if you don’t have enough soldiers to pull off an attack.
So, keep your soldiers on standby to protect your ants, it’ll save a lot of trouble and give access to needed sources, to feed your colony’s workforce!
It really is as simple as that. Soon, you’ll be flooded with all the fungus, leaves, and seeds you could ever need, all by prioritizing and protecting your workforce. With this in mind, you should be able to upgrade at least a couple of chambers every time you go to leave the game, so every visit will be an improvement from the last! Any tips I’ve missed out on? Put them in the comments below.
Interested in Pocket Ants: Colony Simulator? You can download it on Google Play or the App Store. If you like worker and resource management, you may be interested in my beginner’s guide on Transit King Tycoon: Transport.
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