Empires of the Undergrowth

Empires of the Undergrowth is a real-time strategy game and base-builder where the strategy is happening at ant scale. You dig your nest into a hex-based maze of soil and bedrock, expanding storage rooms, nurseries and hallways out from a central chamber that hosts your queen, and the entire colony depends on her staying alive. Above ground, your foragers brave a world full of larger and meaner things — beetles, ladybugs, amphibians, hermit crabs, mantises, rival ant colonies — to bring back the food that sustains everything else.

The pheromone system is the game's signature design choice. Instead of selecting individual units, you assign nurseries to pheromone groups and place markers in the world that direct each group's behaviour: scout, gather food, engage in combat, return home. You can specialise groups on the fly, adjust their rules of engagement, and shift strategies mid-battle as the food supply collapses, the surface goes dark, or another colony attacks. Learning to balance fielded soldiers against base maintenance is most of the macro game.

Multiple species each fight differently. Trap-jaw ants leap into melee and replenish health on jump-back; leafcutter majors draw aggression onto themselves so allies can flank; wood ants evolve formic acid artillery, fired either as long-range bombardment or as a rapid straight-line spray. Special modes let multiple species coexist in one colony, which radically changes how engagements play. A campaign frames the play as a lab experiment narrated by a documentary filmmaker, with a persistent lab colony of mysterious Formica ereptor gene-thief ants that you upgrade across missions for a slow-burn metagame around what the scientist running the experiment is actually doing.