You build an underground nest and fight off rival colonies, spiders and beetles in Empires of the Undergrowth, an ant colony strategy game with real-time battles. Real-time means the action keeps moving while you play, so there are no turns to wait through. Your colony starts around a central queen chamber, and you choose which blocks your workers dig out to make storerooms, nurseries and passages through soil and bedrock.
Most of a session goes into keeping the nest fed and safe. Workers haul food back from the surface, because food is what breeds new ants. Rival colonies, spiders and beetles attack on sight, so your nest needs fighters ready. Rather than clicking each ant, you place pheromone markers, the scent trails ants use to mark a path, and your groups follow them, so you aren't micromanaging every fighter.
What you work toward is the campaign, a story told through documentary-style missions with full voice acting. It follows a lab experiment built around gene-thief ants. Royal Jelly and Territory are the rewards you earn from missions, and they build up your lab colony in the Formicarium between story missions. Outside the story, you can play skirmishes against the computer, sandbox games or seasonal challenges.
- Developer
- Slug Disco Studios
- Publisher
- Hooded Horse
- Release
- Steam 1.0: 2024-06-07 · Steam Early Access: 2017-12-01
- Platforms
- Windows, macOS
Game data
Playable Colonies
Empires of the Undergrowth lets you play ant and termite species alongside the starting gene-thief colony. Black, wood, fire, leafcutter and Matabele ants and the fungus-growing termite each have their own story mission, and the gene-thief colony can add their soldiers with Royal Jelly. Bullet ant soldiers open after the main story, and the exploding species come with the Exploding Ants expansion. Big-headed ants and little black ants are only playable in extra missions and custom games, not the main story.
Uber Creatures
Uber creatures are tougher, glowing versions of the game's regular creatures, with better stats and sometimes different abilities. They come from five environments, and they can appear at random in Freeplay or turn up in certain missions. After 8 minutes on the surface, an uber can move underground through a nest entrance, and killing one is worth 3,000 food.
Titans
Titans are the oversized enemies in Empires of the Undergrowth, and they come in animal forms from spiders and centipedes to crabs and snakes. They can hit several ants at once, and their size and health follow the difficulty you choose while their abilities stay the same. Beach Brawl and the SWAMPED! update both added Titans to the game.
Empires of the Undergrowth Controls
| Action | Desktop |
|---|---|
| Pan the camera | Move the cursor to a screen edge |
| Zoom | Mouse wheel |
| Place the active group's pheromone marker | Right-click the map or minimap |
| Mark a soil tile for digging | Click a reachable soil tile |
| Move the camera | Click the minimap |
Empires of the Undergrowth gameplay tips
- Keep soldiers posted near the queen. She is the colony's only egg layer, and the colony is lost if she dies.
- Keep workers at home for nest jobs. Nest work runs in a set order: digging first, then building, then spawning. Soldiers can't do any of it, so keep workers in the nest to handle these jobs.
- Build food storage beside the nest entrance. Each food storage tile costs 5 food and holds 10, 40 or 100 food, depending on its level. Placing storage near the entrance shortens the trips workers make outside, so each run is quicker.
- Build more than one brood chamber. Units from the same brood chamber form one control group, and you can't select single ants. That makes each brood chamber its own squad, which lets you split your army when you need to.
- Keep several pheromone groups in use. There are five, labeled I to V, and each has its own markers. That way you can send different groups to different places at the same time.
- Keep a route open back to the queen. Ants need a path to return to her, and any unit that can't get back dies. Before you send a squad far from the nest, make sure there is a path back to her.