Antopolis: The Ant Colony Simulator

Start with one queen and a patch of soil. End with a sprawling underground city and thousands of ants moving on your command. Antopolis is a top-down colony sim played at the scale of the bugs themselves, where a human is a giant, a robin is a dragon and a neighbourhood is a whole world.

FOUND YOUR COLONY

Every game opens with a queen's nuptial flight. Fly her over the garden, choose your ground and shed your wings. Six weeks later she emerges with a handful of workers and a tiny starter nest. Everything after that is up to you.

DIG A LIVING NEST

Carve your colony out of the earth one tile at a time, down through soft topsoil, stubborn clay and slow stone. Lay out 10 kinds of chamber: food stores, egg and larva nurseries, the queen's chamber, middens, cemeteries, guard rooms, dormitories, quarantine wards and gyne chambers for raising new queens. One key flips between the surface and a cutaway of the nest, so you can watch the whole colony at work below ground.

RAISE THE RIGHT ANTS

Your queen lays eggs, eggs hatch into hungry larvae and larvae grow into workers. Every larva has to be fed, so a colony that grows faster than its larder will starve. Watch nurses carry eggs and feed larvae by hand, and balance nimble minor workers against armoured major soldiers to fit the moment.

FORAGE BY SCENT

Ants find their way by smell. Foragers lay and follow pheromone trails, and routes that pay off get reinforced until the colony organises itself around the richest food. Toggle the pheromone overlay to watch the colony think, and fling out scouting parties to push back the fog of war. Claim aphid herds on garden plants, milk them for honeydew, and guard your livestock from predators and thieving rivals.

SURVIVE THE FOOD CHAIN

This is a three-way war between your colony, the local wildlife and rival ant colonies. Soak enemies in stacking formic acid, then close in to bite. Grow large, but beware the swarms of rival nests.

Beetles, spiders, wasps, robins, frogs, grass snakes and careless human shoes all want a piece of you, while springtails, caterpillars and earthworms are food worth hunting.

A WORLD THAT FIGHTS BACK

Explore lawns, flower beds, ponds and driveways, cross the road (mind the traffic) and raid houses for kitchen scraps. Day turns to night, storms roll in, and overflowing waste breeds disease, so manage your middens and quarantine the sick before a plague tears through the nest. When the alarm sounds for a storm, flood, plague or raid, your workers scramble for the entrance.

GO DEEPER

Possess a single ant and ride along at ground level, where a blade of grass is a tree. Raise new queens and send them out to found satellite nests across the map. Hover over anything in the world to read its real species and scientific name.

KEY FEATURES

• Found a colony from a single queen's nuptial flight
• Dig a 10-chamber nest through layered soil
• A real ant life cycle with minor worker and major soldier castes
• Emergent pheromone foraging you can actually see
• Aphid farming and a honeydew economy
• Scouting parties to uncover the map
• Stacking formic acid and bite combat
• A full backyard food chain of predators and prey
• Three-way war against wildlife and rival ant colonies
• Weather, day and night, disease and natural disasters
• Possess a single ant for a ground-level view
• Expand with satellite nests led by new queens

ON THE ROADMAP

Antopolis is in active development. Planned additions include:

• More playable species: fire, leafcutter, bullet and carpenter ants
• New biomes: forest, rainforest, desert and an indoor mansion
• Aphid predators such as ladybirds
• Bigger nests, a weather and seasons overhaul, more natural disasters and an end-game crisis
• A graphics and audio pass
• Steam achievements, more languages, mod support and multiplayer