There have been many changes since the last beta update. This will hopefully be the final version before general Freeplay release. Many of the changes have focused around having a better game experience, making the end game more difficult and improving performance. Along with this many bug fixes have been added.

Features

• Population upkeep cost added to Freeplay. This feature has been added in order to make the end game more challenging whilst also keeping performance high. The end game is now more difficult with fewer creatures.
  • This is a soft population cap and will increase the cost of ants beyond a specific population
  • Workers have a seperate population
  • Cost increase is exponential (starts small and increases rapidly with each ant)
  • This can be disabled in setup, however doing so will reduce score by 60%
  • Added in notifications for a few things in freeplay
  • Fog added to minimap when Fog of war is on

Bug Fixes

• Fixed an issue where moving the marker between the surface and underground could cause ants to walk to the edge of the map
• Fixed an issue where ants could get stuck facing walls underground, especially when there were a lot of ants about
• Fixed an issue where resource score was lost when a game was loaded in Freeplay
• Fixed an issue where hovering chamber info could be seen in the death animation
• Fixed an issue where dead creatures would disappear if brought underground with Fog Of War on in Freeplay
• Fixed an issue where stored corpses despawned on game load in Freeplay
• Time now restores correctly for scoreboard on loaded Freeplay games
• You can no longer save Freeplay if your queen is dead
• Fixed the levels displaying incorrectly on chamber hover information
• Slightly altered queen start position on The Dunes Freeplay map
• Fixed an issue preventing ladybirds spawning at the the correct rate for the difficulty in Freeplay
• Fixed an issue where ants when loaded from a save would immediately go home from a trail end
• Fixed an issue where ants would spin on the spot when walking or picking up food at the bottom of ramps
• Fixed an issue where wood ant projectiles could hit a lip on the tunnel exit
• Fixed an issue where ants were moved towards the queen on load if they were nearby (still exists but not as bad)
• Fixed an issue where saved fish would have their food restored on load and could duplicate
• Right clicking a notification now unpauses the game
• Word cost removed from build tooltips
• Fixed right clicking on harvestable resource placing marker correctly
• Prevented photo mode when in a cutscene
• Fixed an issue where ants would be very slow to register to a marker with no ants assigned
• Funnel Web spiders will no longer attack wave creatures in freeplay
• Minimap damage notification will no work no matter where your starting location

Changes / Improvements

• Loading throbber returned to the loading screen
• Tunnel exit tagged for excavation restores when loaded
• Changed the information on chamber hover to be more relevant to each chamber
• Reduced ant reaction time (wood ants should no longer reach targets before starting to fire)

Freeplay

• Ant fog of war vision radius has been increased (nearly double)
• At higher difficulties creatures will now drop less food (starting from 50% difficulty) and be much more likely to attack the player in Freeplay
• Later waves will now produce higher level ants
• Wave power significantly increased
• Wave timer has been reduced to 5 minutes and a 12 minute setup time has been added.
• Every 5th level wave creatures changed
• Added a warning to the player if they do not tunnel to the surface when waves are queing up to spawn
• Ubers can now spawn in all waves after wave 15
• Wave number is constantly displayed once they start spawning
• Added wave number to Freeplay score screen
• Chance of Ubers spawning increases with difficulty
• 14 landmarks will always spawn at the beginning
• Landmarks types are now evenly distributed
• A new landmark spawns every 150s down from 180s
• Uber creatures stats reworked, should attack slower but be more deadly and deal AOE damage
• Prevented smaller creatures spawning in waves later on (tiny spiders and devils coach horse larvae)
• More creatures spawn at lower difficulties
• Added a reload button on defeat in Freeplay

Performance Improvements

• Refined collisions for substantial performance improvements
• Performance improvements with certain animations
• Performance improvements with skeletal mesh updates
• Small optimisations added in for Freeplay
• Blueprint Nativisation in use for substantial performance gains
• Major optimisations in nurseries
• Creature decision making moved into C++ for major performance boost
• Job management speed improved
• Minor array access improvements
• Minor creature AI speed improvements
• Multiple minor optimisations