Ant ocracy Campaign

This is the premium version of Antocracy. To see the free version, visit its itch.io profile or play on the web at antocracy.io. If you like it, then please consider purchasing the additional content here!

What you get when you purchase:

• A desktop application playable on Mac or Windows.
• A campaign mode with 10 levels. Upgrade your colony during each level with species-specific tech options. Use the upgrades to adapt your colony as the levels get harder.
• Access to 3 playable ant species (+1 unlocked after beating the campaign). Play as the aggressive Marauder Ants, the fast-growing Leafcutter Ants, or the adaptable Desert Ants.
• 15 additional upgrades for your ants including: an upgrade that makes your workers emit deadly acid when they are killed, an area-of-effect whirlwind attack for your queen, and more!
• 4 additional enemy bugs including the mighty scorpion.
• Enemy termite species with giant queen and deadly soldiers.
• 8 additional standalone free-play levels.
• 10 minutes of additional music made specially for this game for a total 24 minute soundtrack!

Can you lead your ant colony to rule over the land?

Select a unique ant species and play through a randomized campaign of 5 levels selected from 10 total. In each level, raise a target number of young queens in order to select an upgrade from one tech tree, and then also locate a piece of ant trivia somewhere on the map to randomly receive an upgrade from another tech tree. This combination of chosen and randomized upgrades makes each play-through unique and more challenging to optimize. Each playable ant species has 11+ unique upgrades that make each species play differently.

Marauder Ants

Marauder Ants are close relatives to Army Ants, but maintain permanent colonies and can even have multiple queens. These are the easiest species to play as their upgrades focus on growing a large colony of fearsome fighters.

Leafcutter Ants

Leafcutter Ants have the most sophisticated insect societies in the world. Focus on growing your colony as large as possible, but don't forget you still have to take down the bad bugs to win.

Desert Ants

The flexible Desert Ants prefer small, efficient colonies over mega-societies. When playing this species, you can upgrade your queen into a lone assassin.

 

How do the ants decide what to do?

Each worker ant acts totally independently, but with the use of pheromones of different kinds they can influence each other to coordinate their behavior. As you unlock additional pheromones then you can use the queen to lead your ants. Ants react to each pheromone type differently based on their task. For example, ants that are carrying food will move towards higher concentrations of the Colony pheromone, while ants that are retrieving food outside the colony will move away from Colony pheromone and towards Food pheromone.

Background

I've been obsessed with ants since childhood and this game is the result of much research on ant behavior. I was particularly influenced by the work of E.O. Wilson, Deborah Gordon, and Mark Moffett.

What's coming next

Depending on how popular this game is, I have many additional features I'd like to add. Here are some in order of priority:

• Additional playable species (think Argentinean Ants, Fire Ants, Army Ants...)
• Additional enemy bug types
• Coop/competitive multiplayer