Video Game / Empires of the Undergrowth

One day this colony will number in millions.

"Your queen has set up home beneath a rotting log. She is fat, and vulnerable. Her first brood will need to move quickly if the colony is to survive. Their priority now is to find food, and there is plenty around; but there are other hungry creatures in the undergrowth. The workers will need to be vigilant."

Ant War, the Video Game.

Empires of the Undergrowth is an ant colony management game, done in a fast-paced Real-Time Strategy style. It was released on PC through Steam Early Access on December 1st, 2017, and remains in active development as of the time of writing.

The player excavates their nest underground, constructing tunnels and chambers to store food and raise brood. On the surface, the ants claim territory, gather resources, overwhelm fearsome creatures and clash with other colonies.

Compare to much earlier Empire of the Ants, and the more simulation-oriented SimAnt.

Tropes present in this game:

• Ant Assault: The main premise of the game. It's about a new artificially-created ant species known as Formica ereptor expanding their colony, waging war with other ant colonies, and absorbing the traits of other ant species to adapt to many hardships provided to them by a duo of scientists who observe their behavior.
• Anti-Frustration Feature: In between waves of the formicarium challenges, small amount of food will be dropped on the surface, allowing you to restock before the next onslaught.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Your must complete formicarium challenges to increase the population cap of your formicarium. By default, it is set at 120 ants. Every challenge completed raises it by ten.
• Area of Effect: Most adult creatures in the game have the ability to do area of effect damage. Mortar wood ants also gain this ability at level 3. This was later change to SplashDamage to prevent some creatures from being too overpowering.
• Artistic License – Biology: Gene thief ants are completely fictitious and exist only to let you use different ant species in the same colony. There is no species in the Formica genus that has the level of physical variation seen here.
• Ascended to Carnivorism: Mole crickets and hermit crabs are portrayed as voracious predators in the game. Although they are omnivores in real life, the amount of aggression they show to the ants is just TooDumbToLive.
• Bag of Spilling: Following the second formicarium challenge, the scientists move your colony over from the original formicarium to a new one, nullifying all of the food collected and spent. You get bonus royal jelly as compensation for your progress. A second spilling occurs after completing Formicarium Challenge Three, with the same rules in effect.
• Beef Gate: Each formicarium challenges functions as one in order to force the player to use the different types of ants.
  • The first one simply requires a number of ants to beat, since you only have black ants unlocked.
  • The second one practically requires using wood ants. Tiger beetles and wolf spiders can kill multiple ants quickly in close range.
  • The third one requires using leafcutter majors. Enemy army ants and trapjaw ants deal too much damage for small ants to take while mantises can easily devour small ants to heal themselves.
• Boring, but Practical: You can hold the underground entrance of the nest for the first two formicarium challenges. This isn't as interesting as trying to fight them off on the surface, but it's a safer and more effective option.
• Bottomless Fuel Tanks: Ants only require food to hatch from pupae stage and they are ready to work.
• Boss-Only Level: Formicarium Challenge Four has no minor enemies, instead having titan class foes for you to slay.
• Character Customization: In story mode, you can use royal jelly to unlock additional abilities for your units and improve their stats. The customization is preserved when you bring your formicarium colony to freeplay mode.
• Color-Coded Armies: Ants have designated colors on their gasters to show which sides they are on. In story mode missions, your colony is red by default.
• Colossus Climb: Ants can swarm over titan-class enemies (essentially any creature that would be considered a Kaiju to the ants), allowing them an extra angle of attack. This also increases any melee damage they are taking from enemies on the ground, encouraging you to have dedicated teams for scaling an enemy and tearing it apart.
• Construct Additional Pylons: Each nursery tile is tied to a single individual ant you control.
• Covers Always Lie: The first title art of the game consists of a leafcutter ant, a bull ant and a harvester ant. While leafcutter ants have made it into the game, there is currently no plan to implement bull ants and harvester ants yet. This is Averted with the second title art. It features an army ant, a leafcutter ant, and a trapjaw ant, which were all introduced in the same update. The third title art also averts this, featuring the playable fire ant and it's competitors the little black ant and the big headed ant, all of which appear in Mission 4.X.
• Easy Communication: Averted — You don't command ants like other RTS games, you can only suggest them to move to the pheromone marker direction. Ants that reach the marker but fail to find a job will return to the nest, forming a harvesting trail.
• Escort Mission: In Babysitting, you have to survive together with another wood ant colony on the beach.
• Evil Is One Big, Happy Family:
  • Played Straight: During formicarium challenges, enemies will ignore each other in favor of killing your colony.
  • Zig-Zagged: Depending on the missions, enemy ants will either ignore other creatures or fight them.
  • Averted: In freeplay, all creatures will attack each other if they can.
• Geo Effects:
  • The Wood Ant missions (Mission 2.x) take place along a riverbank, which will flood as night falls, and recede as the sun rises. Surviving requires collecting the drowned insects along the shoreline by day, then hunkering down at night, with larger creatures coming out to enjoy the shoreline.
  • The second fire ant mission, A Bridge Too Far, also has changing water levels. Unlike with the wood ant levels, though, the water never recedes, with the goal being to get enough ants to form a raft to escape the rising tide.
  • Hibernation has the map gradually freeze over, with the temperature determining the speed of your ants - if it gets low enough, they'll outright freeze to death. The main challenge is gathering enough pine needles to survive the cold (their decomposition raises the nest temperature) while also collecting food, which is made harder by the fact you can only collect either food or pine needles at a given time.
• The Hand Is God: Invoked in the manner of the Humans Are Cthulhu, with the Mad Scientist who studies the gene-thief ants behavior in the lab. Only his hands are visible, and he acts as a Jerkass God to the ants purely for his own amusement. He even compares his hand to "The mighty hand of God" when he crushes ants with his finger.
• Harder Than Hard: Every missions will have a challenge mode that introduce a new enemy with new mechanic to the game.
  • The log missions have mole crickets burrowing into your nest from above.
  • The beach missions have tiger beetle larvae spawning on the beach, cutting you from the resources.
  • The rainforest missions have phorid flies swarming over the delicious plants, waiting to lay eggs inside your ants.
• Hard Mode Perks: Completing a mission on higher difficulties gives players more resources. Challenge mode can be enabled for the same effect.
• High-Tech Hexagons: Building brood chambers in hexagons makes it easier to upgrade them. A hexagon brood chamber consisting of 19 tiles minimum will allow you to upgrade all corresponding units to level three.
• Holiday Mode: Special missions that focus on the Beach Wolf Spider open up around the holidays.
  • Hungry Spider opens up during Halloween or the full moon, and allows you to play as a spider trying to eat everything on the map. The spider has all the abilities it has in the other game modes, but must unlock most of them via leveling up.
  • Festive Spider has the spider trying to guard his Christmas tree and presents from hungry ants. Not only does he have all of his powers, he can create towers (other insects and arachnids) to help him out.
  • New Year's Feast - corresponding with the Lunar New Year, this is the first holiday mission not to feature the Wolf Spider as the protagonist. Instead, the player controls a group of fire ants setting up a potluck. They will need to collect food and round up the lost guests, while dealing with a horde of unfriendly creatures camping in and around their nest. Aiding in this is firecrackers found across the map, which allows layers to blow their enemies to kingdom come.
  • Hibernation, while not exclusive to the holidays, was released December 2021 and focuses on Wood Ants trying to last through a cold winter. The only real connector it has to the holidays is the snow and its soundtrack.
• Hub Level: The formicarium acts as this for the gene thief ants. Food is placed on the surface to be gathered, territory can be spent to expand the nest, and royal jelly is used to upgrade your ants.
• In-Universe Game Clock: Day/night cycles are available starting from the 2nd set of missions. Creatures vary in different time of the day.
• Mook Debut Cutscene: When your ants discover a certain creature for the first time, the narrator briefly talks about that specific species.
  • In Subjugation, after the first funnelweb spider is killed, a slavemaker ant sneak into your nest to steal a larvae without failing. This is a ScriptedEvent.
  • Zig-Zagged: In the rainforest misions, the narrator only talks about rove beetles when you first encounter them in your nest, even though you have probably killed many of them on the surface.
  • Subverted: In mission 3.X, the narrator announces that velvet worms are coming out when night falls, even though the velvet worms aren't even in the game yet.
• Mooks, but no Bosses: The missions don't actually have a boss, you usually have to complete various objectives to beat them.
  • Subverted Trope: In Rising Tide, you have to fight a wolf spiders with a wave of her young in the final night. In side mission Aggrandise, a huge whip spider acts as the boss of the level.
  • Fully subverted in Missions 4.x and the Fourth Formicarium Challenge, which have true bosses in the form of titan enemies — "Cold Blooded" has an American Bullfrog, "A Bridge Too Far" has a Blue Darter, and the Formicarium Challenge has four hybrid abominations of various arthropods.
• Mutually Exclusive Magic: You have to choose one of the two types of wood ants and leafcutter ants at the beginning of their missions, as well as when you unlock them as your units in your formicarium.
  • For woods ants, you are allowed to choose between the powerful mortar shooter or the accurate rapid-fire shooter.
  • For leafcutter ants, you are allowed to choose between the defensive taunt major or the offensive stun major.
  • Fire ants can either be spawned for free after a long period or be hatched with a stat buff for a short period.
• Nice Day, Deadly Night:
  • Played Straight: In the beach missions, during the day, the beaches are full of carcasses to scavenge, and your only enemies are small parties of rival ants and tiger beetles, which can be avoided most of the time. At night, while the lower ground floods, the more dangerous hermit crabs and wolf spiders wander the map and occassionally invade your colony.
  • Zig-Zagged: In Frontline, during the day, swarm of army ants dominates the map, edging ever closer to your colony. At night, meanwhile, the ants go away but a huge number of dangerous creatures roam the surface. You only have a sliver of time during twilight to harvest safely.
  • Also Zigzagged during in the Hibernation extra mission - night time has fewer enemies present, but the map gradually freezes over, to the point that eventually, your ants will freeze if out of the nest too long. Daytime has many other ants and critters about, but you won't freeze until the middle of winter in sunlight.
• Non-Entity General: The player can be considered this.
• Not Playing Fair With Resources: The rival colonies in the story missions don't require resources to produce ants.
• Player Mooks: The various ants under your control.
• Power Glows: Uber creatures have this, indicating they are the most superior version of their species.
• Timed Mission: Two so far.
  • "A Bridge Too Far" has the playable fire ants racing the clock to hatch enough warriors and workers to make a raft out of their bodies before the rising water washes away their colony.
  • As the female scientist has finally gotten fed up with the shiftiness of her male counterpart, Formicarium Challenge Four must be completed while she is temporarily distracted. The player has to kill the first two hybrids before she gets back to the lab, and the final one before security breaks into the room. Making things more difficult is that the Male Scientist will start kicking the formicarium in impatience if you take too long, which can kill the queen.
• So Last Season: Each set of missions introduce creatures that can counter the previously unlocked ants to encourage using the newly available ants.
  • Tiger beetles and wolf spiders have blistering speed, great damage and areal attacks to easily deal with the basic black ants.
  • Praying mantises, jumping spiders and whip spiders have acid resistance and really long reach that can render wood ant shooters useless.
  • Formicarium Challenge Four really mixes things up by being a Boss-Only Level, with the only enemies encountered being titans. This encourages players to utilize fire ants due to their ability to spawn two per tile allowing them to scale their foes while still leaving others on the ground to lay on the pain.
• Strong Ants: One single ant can carry a beetle larvae back to the nest on its own, despite the difference in size between them. The leafcutter minor can carry huge chunk of leaves previously cut by media and major.
• Stuff Blowing Up: New Year's Feast has firecrackers hidden around the map, which can inflict massive damage to enemies and will send most of them flying. You're encouraged to use them to take out difficult foes, especially early on when you only have fire ant workers to field.
• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Each Uber creature is modified to be weak to a certain ant species to give each ant species an advantage in freeplay mode.
• Tech Tree: Your formicarium colony can be upgraded this way using royal jelly.
• Tide Level: The beach missions require you to manage your colony while faced with rising and receding tide.
  • In Rising Tide, water recedes at dawn quickly, allowing you to scavenge the beach for food, but it gradually rises at dusk, forcing you to fall back and bunker down at your colony.
  • In Queen Of the Hill, you live on top of a hill with two colonies of aphids nearby, making the tide itself no problem. The two rival colonies are about to get washed away by the tide, they want to take your nest before that happens.
  • In A Bridge Too Far, the tide never stops rising as in Queen of the Hill, but unlike there, it will eventually submerge your colony. Since you're playing as fire ants, though, a sufficiently large colony can convert itself into a living ark to ferry their queen to safety when the flood hits.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change: You can play as a wolf spider in the holiday missions. The Halloween mission is a RisingUpTheFoodChainGame where you have to eat your way up to the Uber creatures. The Christmas mission is a TowerDefense where you have to protect your pile of presents from the greedy ants. The spider is voiced by the community manager, Mike.
• Violation of Common Sense: Due to the nature of how tiles are upgraded, you're encouraged to build hexagonal rooms so that you can upgrade you ants to stronger levels. There is one exception to this, though — during Mission 4.2, "A Bridge Too Far", nature of the Timed Mission (you have, on normal difficulty, about five days and nights before rising water washes your colony away), you practically have to throw down worker and soldier tiles as fast as possible, or else you're not going to have enough ants to complete the mission before the clock runs out.
• Wham Episode: Formicarium Challenge 4 — the Male Scientist reveals that his Royal Jelly can be used to hybridize any two creatures, and fully steps into his role as the Big Bad of the game.
• Wham Line: As the Male Scientist sets down a container that houses one of the bosses for Formicarium Challenge 4, you finally get to see the creature's name: Hermit-Scorpion.
• Wham Shot: Going hand in hand with the first Wham Line in Formicarium Challenge Four, the Male Scientist sets down a container housing one of the bosses of the challenge... and out comes a misshapen fusion of hermit crab and scorpion, revealing the true power of the Royal Jelly and offering a hint at the real motives of said scientist.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: The game never really specifies where the lab is located.
  • Averted: Black ants and wood ants live in a European seaside forest. Leafcutter ants live in an Ecuadorian rainforest. Fire ants are invasive to a North Carolinian (USA) swamp. Based on the leaked enemies, matabele ants seem to live in a desert in Coast of Ivory.
• Worker Unit: Only workers can build tiles and dig through the ground. They can also harvest from carcasses much faster than soldiers. The leafcutter ants even have smaller worker units called minims.
• You Require More Vespene Gas: There are three resources in the story mode: food, territory, and royal jelly. Food comes in many form depending on the ant species in play.
  • Food is the main resource, which is used to create and upgrade tiles, and also to spawn new units.
  • Territory is needed in order to expand your nest in the formicarium.
  • Royal Jelly is required to unlock new ants and upgrades in the tech tree.
  • Maximum population can only be increased by completing formicarium challenges.
• Zerg Rush: Controlling ant colonies invokes this trope often. It's more cost efficient to use a huge number of level 1 ants than using a smaller number of level 3.

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