Other languages:

The ant colony means the ants living together but here the word colony is normally also used to refer to the physical nest built underground too.

The different owner status of colonies

Properties

The colony has

Population (the number of ants living there). This population is directly related to the zone of control (zoc) that may interfere with other colonies. The area of the zoc in propotional to the polulation, i.e. the radius is propotional to the square root of the population.
- Worker count
- Warrior count

Inherited from the nest:

Capacity (max ants and max food)
- Experienced players may build secret chambers too. Those can not be destroyed by players themselves, only by ants.
Food (how much food is stored)
Location information, what country and region it is in. (used for scoring)
Name

Implementation note: All numbers are stored as floating numbers but the user interface rounds values.

Orders

The player may set what the ants should be doing in the colony. See Colony Orders

Founding

See Found New Colony (was Build Nest and Colonize)

Competition for food

If 2 (or more) colonies areas overlap they compete for food making it harder to get enough food in both colonies. Both allied and enemy colonies have the same effect.

Over time

Ordered to expand, the colony expands the nest's capacity.
Ordered to breed the colony do so if there is enough capacity.
If the food level (r_workers * r_food) is above 40% the food increases. If lower it decreases and when out of food, ants start dying. NOTE: This is one way to kill your colony.
If the number of ants in the colony is bigger than the nest capacity limit, the number of ant is slowly decreased
Slowly migrating actual Worker and Warrior amount towards the setting (ants are given new tasks)
Sometimes cave ins and other accidents occur (decreasing capacity and killing ants)
See Technical Implementation for the actual calculations being done