Empires of the Undergrowth [0.122] (2017)

Update 0.122 (03 July 2018)

Freeplay Mode Added

- Customisable - play your way! Freeplay is a highly customisable game mode giving the player full control over what creatures and landmarks can spawn, how hard they want the game, how the difficulty of the game will change as time goes on and much more.
- The Dunes Freeplay map – a monster of a map! The Dunes is the largest map in the game to date, made possible through optimisation of the surface tiles allowing us to get more for the processing power. It boasts:
- 4 possible start locations for the player’s colony 120 by 120 surface tile grid (the previous biggest being 96 by 126) 80 locations for landmarks to spawn and 25 locations for creatures to spawn
- Save-able Freeplay colonies can be saved and returned to later, allowing you to take your time and even try that horrible attack wave again. For now saving is manual and there is no backup; we are planning on introducing backups in a future update.
- Landmarks – let’s make this interesting! Landmarks are various interesting points on the surface. They are randomised in look, functionality and location, will appear and disappear as your game progresses and scale with the difficulty setting.
- Aphid Farm Has between 2 and 4 patches of 10 aphids Has randomly generated plant decoration Ladybird attacks increase with difficulty
- Poppy Plant Will intermittently drop poppy seeds; the dropped seeds have a limited lifetime
- Funnel Web Nest Generates dead creature chunks Contains funnel web spiders that will kill nearby enemy creatures (from the player’s colony… or anything else it is big enough to take on!) Number of spiders increases with difficulty Has randomly generated stones nearby
- Dead Fish A large source of food Will attract enemy ants
- Infestation Attracts large group of enemies of a specific type This large group stays around the central point The size of the group increases with difficulty
- Creatures fight each other In Freeplay mode creatures on the surface will duke it out with one another. However, they will not just attack anyone! Some of them will not attack larger creatures, or will ignore the smaller ones. In Freeplay every creature has a list of other creatures they do not want to fight.
- Random start location The player will start in a random pre-prepared start location. These undergrounds are similar in the resources that are available but the locations of resources are different, including where they start on the surface.
- Day / night cycle and spawning If turned on, the game will slowly tick from day to night and back again. When day turns to night nocturnal creatures will come out, and diurnal creatures will hide. Some creatures are about in both time periods. A full 24 hour cycle lasts 30 minutes in game-time.
- Food spoiling Creatures killed in Freeplay mode have a limited time to be harvested before they “spoil” and disappear (3m). Additionally, food generated by funnel web and poppy plant landmarks do the same so as to not cause too great a buildup of food.
- Uber creatures – oh boy, it’s a big one! Ubers are souped-up versions of some of the larger creatures. They can be identified by a red glow, increased size and will be announced in a message when they spawn. There are 4 types that are as difficult as each other and all provide 1000 food when killed. They take much longer to spoil than other creatures because of this (10m). The 4 types are uber hermit crab, uber beach tiger beetle, uber devil’s coach horse adult and uber beach wolf spider. Enabling Uber Creatures increases your score.
- Attack waves Up for a real challenge? With this enabled waves of enemies will spawn every 5 minutes after an initial setup period of 12 minutes. These wave will get stronger over time and do not drop food. How many can you survive? Enabling attack waves increases your score significantly.
- Difficulty settings Difficulty is handled differently in Freeplay mode. The difficulty changes as the game goes on and affects things such as the spawn rate of enemy creatures, how aggressive they are, how much food dead creatures drop and the difficulty of landmarks. You can set the start point of the game difficulty and how you would like it to change as the game progresses. There are several options.
- Constant – the difficulty remains at the value initially set and gets no harder.
- Ramp – the difficulty gradually increases at a steady rate.
- Spikes – the difficulty remains constant however it will spike up in difficulty every now and then. It spikes for a random amount and for a random length.
- Ramp with spikes – the difficulty steadily increases as the game progresses but will every now and then spike up in difficulty. It spikes for a random amount and for a random length.
- Scale With Colony – as your colony size increases so does the difficulty, meaning you should always feel a bit pressured no matter how well you are doing.
- Random – every so often the difficulty is randomised and stays there for a random amount of time. Note you may end up starting at some very hard difficulty.
- Nest entrance can be dug out, and are hidden until done so (visible on minimap) In Freeplay, your route to the nest entrance is not dug out to begin with, giving you the freedom to plan your nest your way. You will know where the entrance is from the minimap, however you will need to tunnel to it to reach the surface.
- Select your species Choose from one of the species from the campaign (currently black ants or wood ants) or chose one of your Formicarium colonies to play Freeplay with! If you choose one of your formicarium colonies all the upgrades you have chosen for that colony will be available for your Freeplay colony (note the ants themselves do not transfer, just the upgrades).
- Fog of war Enemies and food will be hidden from you unless you are nearby, what will be lurking for you in the shadows? Fog of war greatly increases your score!
- Soft population cap (Upkeep) After a certain number of tiles have been built, further tiles will begin to increase in cost. This makes the end game more challenging whilst also keeping performance high. Workers have a seperate population. This can be disabled in setup.
- So, what’s the point? You are free to build up a colony and try and survive as long as you can! You can also try to score as high as possible as you will be given a score on defeat. This score is affected by several options: -- Nest invasions increases score by 50% -- Uber creatures increases score by 10% -- Attack waves increases score by 10% -- Fog of war increases score by 150% -- Disabling population upkeep reduces your score by 60%

Battle Arena

- The battle arena offers a fast way to pit two armies against each other. It is useful in devising strategies to take on certain enemy types or just to watch two sides fight duke it out!
- Battle Arena is accessible from the Other Modes menu just below Freeplay.

Other Features

- Placing a marker will draw the path the ants are likely to take to reach it
- Hovering over a chamber will now give information about the room (ants, eggs, tile levels, storage)
- Realistic mode added in general options (hides tile surfer outlines, food outlines, path arrows on markers and marker icon overlays)
- Monitor select is now available and can be applied when running in fullscreen mode

Changes / Improvements

- Surface minimap will now fade in when tunnelling to the surface
- Surface minimap now flashes once surface tunnel is excavated
- Beach wolf spider will now wander only if its target location is far from its current location
- Main menu music will play over loading screen and will fade out as the level begins
- Stunned swirl updated
- Tunnel exit tagged for excavation restores when loaded
- Reduced ant reaction time (wood ants should no longer reach targets before starting to fire)
- All ants have an icon on them which roughly describes their role (worker, melee, ranged, tank)
- The nest group can now be selected and can have aggression and gathering turned on and off
- Request to dig to surface can now be cancelled
- Minimap darkens as the day darkens
- Game will now pause when notifications are open (can be toggled on and off via notification button or option)
- Some tech tree icons have been updated
- Some furniture added to main menu screen

Bug Fixes

- Navigation fixes and improvements, navigation calls are now more consistent and fail less often
- Fixed some texture issues on wood ant queen
- Various assets have received minor updates
- Fixed a crash that could happen when harvesting a dead creature
- Fixed an issue where woodlice would sometimes not stop when they use their bunker ability
- Fixed a memory leak
- Fixed tile graphical glitches on Linux platforms
- Fixed issues and improved enemy pack movement
- Fixed a memory leak with the job manager
- Fixed an issue with animation timing
- Fixed a spelling mistake on the splash image
- Fixed an issue where attack and gather buttons were resetting or setting erroneously
- Fixed an issue meaning creatures that spawned at map edges could get stuck (mostly an issue with ladybirds)
- Slow resistance is considered when slowing creatures on a funnel web; larger creatures should slow down less
- Fixed an issue where rapid-fire wood ant purchases were activating the wrong abilities
- Fixed an issue where green glow effect (and others) could be applied after death
- When looking for food or enemies, line of sight is now only blocked by tiles. This should solve issues of food being stuck on ramps.
- Nest group will no longer count food and speed tiles
- Fixed an issue where ants did not always die on tile deletion
- Fixed an issue where creatures that did not contain food could spawn a corpse
- Fixed an issue where after queen abilities activate the queen would stop animating
- Fixed an issue where hats were causing collision and nav mesh changes
- Potentially fixed issue with some hardware causing large black shadows to appear in 1_1 and 1_2
- Fixed a crash that could happen in levels with no surface
- Fixed some text capitalisation inconsistencies
- Changed title of Other Modes
- Fixed an issue where moving the marker between the surface and underground could cause ants to walk to the edge of the map
- Fixed an issue where ants could get stuck facing walls underground, especially when there were a lot of ants about
- Fixed an issue where ants when loaded from a save would immediately go home from a trail end
- Fixed an issue where ants would spin on the spot when walking or picking up food at the bottom of ramps
- Fixed an issue where wood ant projectiles could hit a lip on the tunnel exit
- Fixed an issue where ants were moved towards the queen on load if they were nearby (still exists but not as bad)
- Word cost removed from build tooltips
- Fixed right clicking on harvestable resource placing marker correctly
- Prevented photo mode when in a cutscene
- Fixed an issue where ants would be very slow to register to a marker with no ants assigned

Performance Improvements

- Changed the way in which we decorate levels. As a side effect this increases performance on all levels.
- Added in an optimisation for surface tile grid renders
- Slight optimisation added to minimap rendering
- Refined collisions for substantial performance improvements
- Performance improvements with certain animations
- Performance improvements with skeletal mesh updates
- Blueprint Nativisation in use for substantial performance gains
- Major optimisations in nurseries
- Creature decision making moved into C++ for major performance boost
- Job management speed improved
- Minor array access improvements
- Minor creature AI speed improvements
- Performance improvement added for rendering the upgrade overlay
- Several minor performance improvements