Future Ideas

See Road Map for planned ideas and fixes.

Network

Adaptive timeout on network requests. Several good, decrease but a minimum at 1 sec? One fail, increase 2sec(?) but max at 10sec?

Competition among players

New players

• People coming late into the game shall also be able to build colonies or get benefit, even in cities with lot of existing players. https://plus.google.com/+ErikMelkersson/posts/6iQhazsenvT
• How to make the room for a new player in a town dominated by a Species?
• Maximum controlled nests, based on level, to make people release control of colonies?

Colonies

• Idea: Ability to help a small colony more often? To get new players something to do when they are eager.

Map

• very zoomed in
  • The same as in zoomed in but also individual ants
• zoomed in
  • attacking enemies

Ability to turn features on/off just as in ColorPlanet (https://plus.google.com/+PatrickDrechsler/posts/P1sbicd1MfC)

Species

Currently all species have the same properties but I am thinking about letting them have different skills.

• Faster builders
• Breed faster
• Bigger, better warrior skills

Actions

Ability to add scent track on your position for ants from colony to food

On map

• Send Location - TODO send "ping" to your players of your species to coordinate attacks or similar. As a message in the Species Chat.

Attack

When you attack you expose your own position to everyone for 5 minutes(?) after the last attack command.

Spy ants

Build spy ants that can scout ant hills for you. If you carry them you can insert them instantly or send them to scout, but that takes time based on distance.

Do the attack

• You are in range of an Enemy Colony
• Click the colony and select "Start Attack".
• You see a "board" with your warrior ant count and the colony population count.
• Every second a new attack in called from the client causing counting on the server to take place
  • Both sides have casualties
  • There might be cave in-s casing colony capacity decrease and loosing ant on one or the other side.
• The attacker may stop the attack stopping the fight.
• If one or the other side looses all ants the fight is over.

Defence

• A defender may also be on location and can then attack the attackers warrior ants by him/herself by attacking the, on the map, exposed colony attacker. Even if the attacker stops the attack.

Manually help out (?)

By smashing ants on the map a player can kill enemy ants too, one at a time.

Scent track

To make the ant of a nest find food faster for a while

Animals

• Animals not on a colony will move towards nearby colonies or in a random direction every time unit.

• Show up nearby users, or on locations where users have been.
• Notifications to nearby users (with setting)
• Track players location every hour, to use for animal spawning

Loose ideas

• Connecting colonies for cooperation or for genetic diversity or something. Idea from https://plus.google.com/+ErikMelkersson/posts/6iQhazsenvT<

Badges

Checked twice daily, or at changing interval like every 23 or 25 hours, or maybe every 6 hours... see how hard the check is to perform first.

• Populator badges for areas: (number of ants in an area - check is very easy, just a sum)
  • 100 ants - bronze, 2'000 ants - silver, 50'000 ants - gold, 1'000'000 - rainbow
  • for country, region and county.
• Performace badges:
  • Check is made on actions performed the last 24*7 hours (a week). Limits for Gold, silver and bronze.
  • Founding nests
  • Helping
  • Killing colonies
  • Sabotage
  • Give food
  • Scare away

Implementation notes to myself

Area badges:

• insert select sum(..) on duplicate key update greatest(..)

Performance

Buildings

"Some ground building/item"

• May be built by several players or a higher level player working hard? X amount of energy within a time limit (24 hours?)
  • Maybe X=10k energy is reasonable. (Many players together should be able to do it fine: Example: level 14 (pretty high), May have 240 and 28 bars * 50 = 1640, fetching 28 more from colonies gives 1400 more. 3-4 such player could do it. It requires a lot of planning but it is actually manageable by single player too)
• Gives advantages to nearby nests. Defense bonus? Growth? Food production?
• Does the building have a color or help everyone around? I think everyone. Changed my mind: It helps everyone near but is is controlled by one species at a certain moment. Gives some kind of score bonus.
• May be pushed or pulled by players, (max per time unit = simply cost a lot of energy). This way you may "steal" such a building.
• The building gives a bonus score to the team holding it. You "hold" it by having it close to your colony. Must be withing X meters and at least size X. (You can not just found new colony and get control immediately)
• Needs some maintenance or they will slowly fade away.
  • It has an bar fading - maybe two weeks or so to fade out totally unless someone does something about it
  • Any player may use their own energy to fill it up
• Who will get notifications about it? Fading/filling/moving/controlling "Subscribe" to it? No one?

Maybe later, or maybe not:

• May be upgraded in levels. Best "upgrader" gets something.
• May be upgraded by players "helping" it, max once per time unit. Or simply a lot of energy needed to upgrade it.