Thanks for the people who have helped us identify a crash with the recent short optional beta. This has now been fixed and we're ready to move this patch to the main branch just in time for Christmas. It is now possible to save your freeplay games that include AI colonies! This should make them more viable for long-term games instead of short skirmishes. Freeplay AI should still be considered to be in its early days and there are a multitude of extra things we'd like to do for it (making it cleverer being the main one) but it's likely this is the last feature update for freeplay until after the 4th tier campaign levels (fire ants) are released.

Headline Features

• Saving is now available with AI colonies in freeplay
  • Please keep an eye out for strange behaviours of the enemy or allied colonies after a save and load in freeplay; it is possible some of their behaviour has not been correctly restored. Please report these on our forums or Discord!

Fixes

• Fixed some underground visual tile bugs
• Fixed a minor issue with the slave maker button in battle arena
• Swarm slave makers now have team colours working properly
• Fixed a surface tile painting issue on The Dunes
• Removed some specks of dirt that were floating on the open nest entrances in The Dunes
• Fixed an issue where AIs that were cheating could only get a free hatch once per game
• Fixed issues with the AI colonys visibility of spawned landmarks (should lead to some more sensible landmark harvesting decisions)
• Fixed an issue where surface tunnels could switch when a freeplay game was loaded
• Fixed an issue where randomised caverns were not loading and saving
• Fixed an issue where some creatures could freeze if interrupted during picking up another creature
• Creatures eaten by other creatures will no longer drop invisible food
• Festive Spider level funnel web kills now count towards your experience
• Adjusted web size in Christmas spider level the better represent the area funnel webs can detect enemies
• Webs in the Festive Spider level will no longer expand upwards covering the map
• Webs stop increasing in size beyond level 9 in the Festive Spider level
• Fixed an animation issue to do with wood ants rapid firing
• In freeplay uber mole crickets now count towards the hunter victory condition
• Can no longer tag and untag another colonys tunnel exit for excavation
• Stopped aphids moving when being eaten by a ladybird; should fix floating honeydew

Optimisations

• Optimisation added to creature spawning when looking up its class (should speed things up when lots of ants are hatching at once such as the beginning of a freeplay game)