This will be the last newsletter of 2023, with one more vlog to come in December. 2023 has been a formative year for Empires of the Undergrowth with the freeplay / custom game mode being brought much closer to its final form, and the bulk of the systems and level work on the final stages of the game being done.


Fire ants in the swamp from Solstitium on our Discord

The end is, finally, in sight – but there’s still a stretch to go. To that end, the main feature of this newsletter is an updated roadmap that might take us all the way to release (we’ll have to see how things go!). We’ll spend the majority of our word allowance going over that.


The Empires of the Undergrowth roadmap gets updated every six months, with the optimistic thought that one of them may unexpectedly be the last one we have to do. Is this that one? We don’t know – probably not, but hope springs eternal as they say. Feast your arthropod-hungry eyes on this beauty, as we then go through each step in turn:


Now I am become roadmap, destroyer of deadlines

A couple of changes from the last one include using year quarters to refer to time instead of seasons to help our friends in the southern hemisphere, and giving a slightly longer explanation at each station. If there’s no ballpark date on a step then that’s because we’re not comfortable putting one there just yet, although we are aiming to get everything done as swiftly as we can. The ordering and timing is, as always, subject to change.


First up is achievements. These have been thoroughly detailed in both the previous newsletter and the most recent vlog, so I’ll keep this section brief. In short, more than 100 new achievements are being added for all of the existing campaign and seasonal levels. We still intend to run an optional beta on Steam to test out some of these, and with any luck we’ll have some news on this very soon – keep your face orbs unshrouded.


A while back we held a contest to design a custom game / freeplay map for Empires of the Undergrowth, picking one winner from YouTube / Discord entries and another from Bilibili. We had a good time going over the finalists (in a pre-recorded video for the Bilibili one and a fun livestream for the YouTube one) and ultimately settled on our winners – Strawclutch, and Imprisoned.



We have already very nearly completed work on bringing these designs to the game – our level designer John has built them, and our environment artist DanC has decorated them. So, let’s talk about each one in turn.


Strawclutch (designed by Noctazar) will, at least in its skirmish form, be a fast-paced map with short overall playtime. The four colony spaces are in close proximity to each other, and in the very middle of the map is a large growth of aphid-bearing milkweed plants. These act as the main food source when played as a skirmish game, and there will be early and repeated quarrels as the colonies vie for control of this territory.


Clutching at straws in the middle of the winning map design by Noctazar


Our Bilibili winner is called Imprisoned (designed by 鶴轟), and it features a locking mechanism that will put colonies in direct conflict with each other only periodically, as the water level changes. This had to be adapted somewhat from the original concept to work without fire ant bridges (see later in the roadmap for more information about that) but the basic premise remains the same – for most of the time in this map, colonies can only get to each other via a long road, but with the change of the water level there will be fighting.


A lot going on in Imprisoned by 鶴轟

It was a lot of fun running this contest and there’s a very strong possibility of us doing more stuff like this in the future, perhaps post-release as part of ongoing content after we reach version 1.0.

There is one more custom game map coming along at the time of this update: Sand Spit, which is designed for 3v1 setups. We detailed this map more back in the July newsletter – so have a look back there for some more detailed information (and some pictures). All 3 of these maps will be coming simultaneously, and with any luck will be part of the upcoming beta test that focuses on the achievements as well.

For anyone wondering about other work-in-progress custom game maps that we’ve shown glimpses of, such as Archipelago and Wetlands – they are dependent on fire ant bridging being completed for custom games and we’ll discuss more about this later on.


The New Year’s Feast event level will be returning in January and February to coincide with Chinese New Year – with a whole bunch of achievements attached. This time around we’ll be making a bit more of an event of it, too – with some new cosmetic updates to make the map a bit more thematically pleasing, as well as a much-needed balance pass to bring the map up to speed with the food rebalancing that happened back with the 0.31 update.



For those of you who haven’t played it yet – it’s a whimsical themed level based around fire ants collecting ingredients for a hotpot, with an explosive twist and a fantastical ending. Check out the trailer above for a preview – the level will reappear on January 8th, marking its return with a lantern in the main menu.


Version 0.31 of the game introduced some sweeping changes to the way AI colonies worked in a freeplay / custom game. Whilst they’ve been successful in lots of ways, it’s clear that there are some further things we can do to make it more effective without too much cheating.


In the UE4 Editor, AI colonies look like this for reasons that no-one but Liam knows

One of the issues we’ve had recently is quite simply just playtime – taking time to play the mode exhaustively ourselves outside of the context of just having it working or fixing it. We spend all of our time developing and playing in chunks – we listen to a lot of external feedback from testers and players, and implement it based on general consensus. However, this is often lacking the personal context of lots of time just spent playing for the sake of playing.

Our devs have gained good momentum on tier 5 right now and we don’t want to disrupt that – so we’ve put aside several days in the new year to do nothing but play custom games and take notes. Rather than immediately run off and fix every issue we come across, as is usually the case with development work, we will absorb the experience in its entirety. We hope this will give us some sounder knowledge for what we should prioritise in making the mode work better.


This is another thing that we’ve spoken about extensively before, so I’ll be brief – right now tier 4 challenge mode is waiting for the aforementioned tier 5 momentum wave to crest. Once that spike of activity reaches its zenith and dies back down again, the six-spotted fishing spider will finally make its long-awaited appearance, wearing its pirate hat if you want it to.


Yarrr!


Fire ant bridging in custom levels is tricky for several reasons. How do we handle multiple colonies competing for the bridging spot, for the most obvious example – these problems have been mostly solved, but the more time-consuming issue of allowing fire ant bridges to be save-able in a custom game has not. Once it has been, fire ant bridging will be introduced to appropriate maps.


We will inevitably hit a period of time where we’re getting everything finalised and ready, ramping up the marketing effort and preparing for the very scary task of bringing our first project to full release for the entire world. How long this ends up being is complete guesswork right now, but it is likely that at this time there will be enough of a gap to squeeze in an extra level / custom game map or two.

John (level designer) told me recently that he’s had some ideas that he’s itching to try out, but he’s being very good and concentrating on getting the game to 1.0 right now. This period of time is when he might have a few spare hours to bring these to fruition.


Archipelago – on hold for the time being

It might be here that custom game maps Archipelago and Wetlands make their appearance – they both have some aspects to them that will require input from all 3 of the devs to work, though, so we’ll have to see how we do with the implementation of fire ant bridging in custom games.


Finally, after years of work, we will be here – and this is now a real horizon-loomer. Final release will feature the last 3 story / campaign levels (the fifth tier will have 3 levels, instead of 2 like the others) and the ultimate formicarium challenge that the scientist has been preparing your colony for. I hope you’re all ready.


Time for some pretty Empires of the Undergrowth screenies! If you’d like to be featured in this section at some point in the future, the easiest way is to join our Discord and post on the screenshot channel there. Other than that, I’ll occasionally trawl through the community tab on Steam to see what’s been going on there. By default, press F9 to enter photo mode (hiding the UI) – hold down shift while you do that to uncouple the camera from the floor for some neater angles.


The big-headed ants overlooking an uber beach wolf spider from Dolly on our Discord


A pleasingly picturesque view of 4.2 A Bridge Too Far by Orion (Dilphy) on our Discord


The army is on the march in the formicarium from GoldenUngy on our Discord

For those of you who have joined us since last time, welcome to our infamously difficult Halloween level, which will earn its conquerors the rarest achievement in Empires of the Undergrowth. To celebrate this time around we've made an updated 4k trailer with the newer environment artwork. Enjoy!



The Hungry Spider's cobweb appears around Halloween and on full moons, and he's absolutely ravenous. Help him grow and defeat his enemies in a gluttonous fury as he stalks a web-shaped map. His hunger causes him to constantly lose health - quickly unlocking the 'devour' ability is paramount as it'll keep him alive. Take down bigger and stronger prey, upgrading his abilities as you go.

EDIT: A bit of bad news re: the Hungry Spider livestream, but hopefully a good compromise too:

Mike was due to do the 'One Chip Challenge' if he fails the Hungry Spider level live on stream at the weekend. However, after looking into the challenge we have decided that he should not do it. We apologise to anyone looking forward to his reaction.

Although the chip is a food and adheres to food standards, we do not want to encourage anyone else to participate in the activity and as such will not be doing it.

So, as and alternative (and because John has ruined Mike's fun), John will eat a scoop full of mixed preserved insects - a mix of buffalo worms, meal worms, crickets and locusts - each time Mike defeats an uber creature. Bigger insects the further Mike gets into the level.

It's the 1 year anniversary of the Slug Disco vlog! In this episode, Mike talks about the Empires of the Undergrowth map contest results, progress on tier 5, achievements, roadmaps, and more.

The brutally difficult Hungry Spider will be returning, by the way, on October 25th.

As is usually the case, this is also a general Slug Disco vlog with mentions of the rest of our publishing charges - if you'd like to skip these and go directly to the EotU good stuff, skip to time code 2.29.



EDIT: A bit of bad news re: the Hungry Spider livestream, but hopefully a good compromise too:

Mike was due to do the 'One Chip Challenge' if he fails the Hungry Spider level live on stream at the weekend. However, after looking into the challenge we have decided that he should not do it. We apologise to anyone looking forward to his reaction.

Although the chip is a food and adheres to food standards, we do not want to encourage anyone else to participate in the activity and as such will not be doing it.

So, as and alternative (and because John has ruined Mike's fun), John will eat a scoop full of mixed preserved insects - a mix of buffalo worms, meal worms, crickets and locusts - each time Mike defeats an uber creature. Bigger insects the further Mike gets into the level.

Hi everyone! Empires of the Undergrowth and other games published by Hooded Horse are all featured at the Hooded Horse Publisher Sale. Come check it out!

Hooded Horse Strategy Publisher Sale

Welcome to September, the worst month of the year (or so I'm told). I'll do my best to ensure you don't have to listen to Green Day on repeat to get through it, with some lovely news about achievements, map contests and difficulty changes coming to Empires of the Undergrowth. If you think that'd cheer you up, read on.


Leafcutter ants swarm over a huge whip spider in this shot from Steam user Bananta

As the art team and two out of three of our devs press forward with tier 5 work, one of our devs has been making changes to the difficulty options to Empires of the Undergrowth which were detailed in the most recent vlog last month. Before we get onto all the ins and outs of that, let's talk about the recent map contest!


In August we launched a map contest, mainly advertised on YouTube (you should absolutely subscribe to our YouTube channel - we post a whole bunch of great stuff there).

The contest closed at the start of this month, and we have had in the region of 200 entries all told! The brief was to submit an idea for a freeplay or custom game map, which we will then judge and turn our favourite into a fully-fledged map in the game.


John and Mike discussing map designs, whilst John makes an example map (which we will be finishing and adding to the game also!)

We want to do the judging live, so our current plan is to do a livestream at some point towards the end of this month. It would have been earlier but several of our team members are away for the Tokyo Game Show at the moment (more on that later in the newsletter). The exact timing of this is yet to be nailed down but we hope to stream at a time where most people can watch live in some form, hopefully on a weekend.

We're going to have to cut down the entries to 20-30 for the final judging, or we'd be there all night trying to get through 200! Please know that we appreciate all of the entries, and I'll do my best to make sure everyone who sent in an entry is credited for it, even if the entry doesn't make it into the final selection.

Keep an eye on our socials, and on here, for news of when the judging is happening! Remember - it'll likely be a weekend towards the end of this month or the start of October.


A common criticism of our difficulty choices is that the jump between them is not very linear, and in particular that the difference between medium and hard is more than a little unfair - with hard being closer to insane than to medium. We've decided now is the time to get the difficulty selection in its final working order before we finish the project, so one of our three devs has spent a lot of time recently working on that whilst the others crack on with tier 5.


Handy chart showing intended difficulty changes relative to the old standard

As you can see in the chart above, the intent is for difficulties between 'easy' and the new 'extreme' (which sits where the current 'hard' difficulty is) to be a gentler slope upwards. There's lots of reasons for this, and we hope the renaming of 'insane' to 'impossible' gives more people pause for thought if they want to attempt it on a first try (perhaps we should gate off this hardest difficulty on a first playthrough - what do you think?).

The increased resolution in the options outside of the toughest one will, we hope, allow people to make a more appropriate choice for their early playthroughs with better-fitting options for their skill level. There will be four options to choose from outside of the toughest - easy, medium, hard and extreme. We know plenty of people have chosen hard for the first playthrough of a level which, by no fault of their own, lies outside of their current skill level, being 'insane-lite' in some respects. 'Hard' should indicate challenging but achievable with sound game knowledge if not level-specific knowledge - we think that should now be the case.

See the vlog linked below for the full video form of this discussion - the segment begins at 2:38. Also, a reminder that the vlogs also come bi-monthly, in between these newsletters.




We spoke about the achievement additions in the previous newsletter, but we've now had the huge list of new ones in testing for a week or so and they should be arriving in the next patch (tentatively scheduled for October)! We've tried to include a selection of nice standard ones (complete level X on difficulty Y, that sort of thing, similar to the existing ones) along with quite specific challenges for the more adventurous. Here's a small selection of what you can expect (artwork pending), specifically some of the more interesting ones for 2.2 Queen of the Hill. Which ones will you be going after first?


If you don't get the Lord of the Rings reference, we can't be friends


Although we’re not ready to officially reveal the setting and theme for the fifth and final tier of the formicarium story, I can talk a little about how it’s progressing. As we’re bringing to a close the tying-up of other loose ends for the project (freeplay, achievements, etc) most of the dev team is currently working solidly on the fifth tier, and a good 70% of the source control commits that come in are related to it.

After revamping the beach assets for the July update, our environment artist has recently sent in his first completed models and textures for the as-yet unrevealed fifth tier setting. Several more creatures are completed, including some of the more exciting titan-class ones and some others that have novel mechanics associated with them.

New systems (which along with artwork always represent the biggest time sink for a new tier) are coming together and beginning to work in unison, and the species we’ve homed in on for tier 5 requires several of them! One such new system involves a local-scale dynamic change to the environment occurring in one of the levels.

Internal discussion has led to the consensus of a more controlled build-up to how we release information about tier 5 compared to previous marketing cycles. Although as the community manager I’m itching to get that information out there, I understand the team’s desire for a firmer marketing regimen given that it’ll be the last of the truly huge updates as we leave early access. As soon as I have the goahead to start sharing more concrete information, I shall!


Last month, the team travelled to Cologne, Germany to attend Gamescom. Empires of the Undergrowth was represented there as part of the Hooded Horse booth (they're our co-publishers on EotU) - a member of our team was manning that section most of the time! I had my camera with me, and took enough videos to cobble together a travel vlog which was fun to do. It was great to meet some of our players, old and new, from the continent and chat about the game with them. It was also lovely to meet our colleagues from Hooded Horse in person for the first time (for most of us)!



We like to use these public events as a way of gaining a little hands-on feedback from new players, as well - as work-from-home developers, we don't very often get the opportunity to directly observe people who are completely new to the game interacting with its systems, so we take that chance when we can. One thing that came from this particular event is some changes that will be made to 3.1 The Harvest - we'll be introducing a few early game objectives for that level, which should serve as something of a mini-tutorial for leafcutters (very similar to how The Crucible, the leafcutter demo level, works) as well as fully implementing some cut narrator dialogue about refuse chambers. Look out for that in the next update.


EotU developer Matt and environment artist Dan C at Gamescom

Slug Disco were also there with Robert Kaufmann, developer of Horticular - a beautiful garden-building pixel art game that Slug Disco is publishing, but not developing. Horticular was at the Indie Arena Booth, and Robert also got the chance to meet a whole bunch of you and gain some valuable feedback. Horticular development is continuing apace and we're really excited to see everyone's reaction to the finished game - it really is a remarkable project that we're very proud to be representing.


The Horticular station at the Indie Arena Booth

Gamescome is absolutely gigantic, the largest such event in the world, and its 2023 incarnation was an unforgettable experience as the world emerges fully from the shadow of COVID-19 that has loomed for the past several years. It’s always great to have the team together and we cherish those times that we can do that. We’re not quite done with events this year, which leads us on to…


TGS kicks off a few days from the time of writing, and Slug Disco will be represented there with three of our other publishing projects - Horticular and Adapt will be together at the dedicated Slug Disco booth, and Ecosystem will be there as part of the Indie Select 80. Our co-publishers Hooded Horse will be there, too.

Although we don't have a Slug Disco booth for Empires of the Undergrowth, if anyone is there and has a strong urge to play it we will boot it up for you - tell Liam and Dan that Mike sent ya and they'll oblige. If you’re nice.


We’ve had some beautiful screenies of the beach environment since its release in July, and so this month for Screenshot Central we’ll focus on that.

If you’d like to submit a screenshot, the easiest way is to join our Discord and post on the appropriate screenshot channels. You can also upload to the Steam Community page, and I will occasionally look through there. To get great screenshots, hold shift whilst you enter photo mode (F9 by default) - this will uncouple your camera from the ground and allow you to get some better angles on the action.


Attack of the crabs from BrickyGraph631


The beach in all its glory from Orion (Dilphy)


A wood ant queen safe in her burrow from Pumadog

From now until September 4, you can save 20% on Empires of the Undergrowth at the Steam Strategy Fest. Come check the game out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHFamaHashM

https://store.steampowered.com/app/463530/Empires_of_the_Undergrowth/

In Slug Disco Vlog 6, Mike goes over changes to the difficulty settings for EotU and also the map contest that is currently running. We're expanding difficulty to have 5 options instead of 4, with better gradiation between the lower ones - this should help people who want to step up or down to a different difficulty get a better feel for that.

Except for the most difficult, of course, now renamed to 'Impossible'. That's just as punishing a challenge as it ever was!

Dan also gives a brief update about 3 of our other publishing projects - if you want to skip the section about the other 3 games and get straight to the EotU content, the timecode is 1.44.

Thank you everyone who has supported, tested and played the recent release! We're very happy with the reception, and it sets us in good stead to press forward to the completion of the campaign. There are some issues that have cropped up, and those are at the forefront of the next patch that is likely to come in a few weeks, along with some other stuff.


A six-spotted tiger beetle swarmed by fire ants by Gimpsimian on our Discord

This newsletter will mainly concentrate on what you can expect from that next patch, and what is more likely to trickle in over some smaller patches afterwards. The team is very keen to press forward with completing tier 5 now, so that is their primary focus - but there are some other things that will be coming very soon.


This was an unusually large update - the patch notes themselves took over an hour to write up! There were some fairly large changes to the game, and we're glad to say the changes have (mostly) been well received. There's always anxiety when pushing an update that makes some fundamental changes and of course we didn't expect everything to be universally accepted across the board, but things went better than expected in that regard.



Whilst everything is now in place with respect to the freeplay AI changes, it's clear that there's still some work to do there and we'll detail that in its own section after this one.

Almost everyone seems to be enjoying the new beach artwork - with one exception, the dead fish asset! The new one is higher fidelity and is more fitting for the rockpool setting, looking partially decomposed and consumed. I think the fact that people can no longer imagine dropping the fish straight into a hot skillet with some chilli oil and crushed garlic may account for some of the disgust!


Billy Bass is so done

There’s a few more tweaks to come for the beach art - some seaweed has recently been added, and we want to make some changes to the living sea urchin before we move it to make it a bit more visible! You can currently see the sea urchin by going into photo mode and looking at the far east of the map in 2.2 Queen of the Hill.


A sea urchin!

While we're on the topic, I thought I'd just write a paragraph about our versioning convention. Although the build number of the most recent release starts in 0.31, that does not mean the project is only 31% complete. When we release the final campaign levels we'd be at version 0.4 with the current rate of versioning, but it'll just be that during testing - when we release it completely to the world, what by this convention would be 0.4 will be 1.0.

It was never a linear or particularly well-documented convention. If this all sounds convoluted and weird, that's because it is.


The new custom game AI system is vastly improved over the old one in all aspects - it can plan attacks, help allies, guard resources and make analytical decisions on when to attack or defend. As part of this, we felt some confidence in changing the way cheats are applied to AI.

Cheats were always intended to help make up the shortfall that an AI colony has compared to a human player, and we’d hoped that the much more capable AI would need significantly less help. Whilst this is generally true, it’s clear that there’s some ways to go in optimising the AI and helping it with getting the best out of its new brain.

It’s now a modular system, and new behaviours (processes) can be bolted onto it. Liam, who has coded the new system, would like some feedback on how it can be improved, but there is a caveat - he is keen to continue working on tier 5 from now on and therefore additional time he gives to the custom game AI needs to be carefully thought out.


AI leafcutter colony underground construction

An example of a process that would likely help out the AI is one that would allow it to harvest food from defeated colonies - that would take quite some time to implement, so decisions on making new processes like this will be more carefully considered before being put into development. However, some changes are very quick to make and these are likely to come first.

We are interested in feedback on the ordering and priorities that individual colony types should have. An example of this was done during the beta test - leafcutter ants were told to only make minor workers until their first chamber is completed, and this better organises their priority list. These kinds of changes are very quick to make.

If you have suggestions (for all kinds of colony) please post them on our discussion boards with an appropriate title. I’ll be collating the feedback and presenting it to Liam, who will decide which simple changes are best and which are worth investing some more development time to make new modular processes.


The roadmap we released back in May has been mostly fulfilled, and when the time comes to update the roadmap again we'll be expanding and detailing what's left to complete to get us to 1.0.


Done that, done that, haven't done that...

It's looking very much like the "true interim update" that is detailed on the left-hand side will indeed be broken into several updates that will come over the next few months. Some things are just around the corner, and we’ll detail those now.


A full achievement list for the rest of the currently existing game is very close to being ready, so this is one of the first things that will arrive! There will be achievements for all of the campaign levels, as well as some special ones for seasonal levels. Perhaps we can tempt you back to the Festive Spider level later this year with this one?


...or maybe you’d prefer this one for 4.1 inspired by a classic British dish?


All told, we’re shaping up to have well over 100 achievements for those of you who like to go hunting. There’s both the more standard ones (ie, beat level X on difficulty Y) and the more fun ones like Toad In The Hole detailed above.


There is at least one freeplay map arriving shortly, but it isn’t the one that’s on the roadmap. That one - Wetlands - is currently awaiting the completion of being able to save fire ant bridges in a custom game.

That’s a more complicated task than it may appear, and for that reason we may release a beta version of a swamp map that has fire ant bridging with the proviso that level saving will, initially, be disabled for it.

That way, we can gather some feedback about how bridges (and competing fire ant colonies trying to build bridges) work in a custom game before the saving system is fully completed - do you think that’s a good idea? Would we be better off just waiting until things can definitely be saved, or would you be okay with testing a custom game map without being able to save it? Let us know in the discussion forums.


So let’s talk a little about the map that is much closer to being completed, and it’s a quite uniquely shaped one - Sand Spit, which is designed with skirmishes in mind (although you can absolutely play any freeplay setup on it) in a 3v1 format.


Sand Spit from the player's side (work in progress)

The player colony lives on a spit of land protruding from the edge of the mainland. With this unusually asymmetrical layout, the map still has the characteristic lower ground that is awash (pun intended) with resources that carry that inherent extra flood risk.


Sand Spit overview (work in progress)

As you can see from the top-down overview, the map is clearly intended to be played against 3 enemy allies - their nests are close together and they’ll be gathering resources mainly from the same area. You can absolutely alter the setup to have every colony for themselves, but it’ll be a little cramped over there on the mainland if you do that!


Sand Spit from the enemy alliance's side (work in progress)

We’ll update you all on the progress being made on getting fire ant bridge saving working closer to time - but for now, Sand Spit is very close to completion and it’s looking very likely it’ll be arriving sooner rather than later.


For the time being, tier 4’s challenge mode is being pushed a little further down the schedule.

It’s an important addition and we want to do it justice, but we thought we should let you know that the plan is currently to circle back round to the fishing spider’s debut once the current development push for tier 5 is further along. All 3 of the developers and our environmental artist are now focused on the final formicarium tier - we don’t want to lose the good momentum we’ve recently been building on that front.


Starting on the date of publication (20th July, 2023) Empires of the Undergrowth will be taking part in SimFest 2023 on Steam! The game is currently at a historic discount of 20% off, and if you’ve somehow read all the way through this newsletter without owning the game already then firstly, I salute you, and secondly I thought I should let you know about that!



Most of Slug Disco’s other publishing projects are also involved in the festival - Ecosystem, Adapt and Horticular are all present and correct.


Empires of the Undergrowth will be at Gamescom 2023 in Cologne, Germany next month! The entire team will be there, so if you’re attending then please drop by to say hi. There will be more details in next month’s vlog which will be closer to the time.


If you’d like to submit a screenshot for this part of the newsletter in the future, by far the easiest way is to join our Discord and post on the appropriate screenshot channels. You can also upload to the Steam Community page, and I will occasionally scroll through there looking for some standouts. To get great screenshots, hold shift whilst you enter photo mode (F9 by default) - this will uncouple your camera from the ground and allow you to get some better angles on the action.


A green lynx spider is mounted by fire ants from NappyB_TheDankest


Ratatouille - EotU edition from Gimpsimian


The amblypygid's end, also from Gimpsimian

Empires of the Undergrowth is featured on the front page of Steam today, with its first ever 20% off sale. The discount will run until July 29th. Come check it out!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/463530/Empires_of_the_Undergrowth/

It's time for a big overhaul of freeplay, a whole bunch of new art, and a campaign rebalance! Welcome to Empires of the Undergrowth version 0.31, and thank you to everyone who has helped test it for the past week and the focus group who have been on it for the past month or so.

Watch the video for a breakdown of the major new features!



This is part 1 of the update - we are immediately launching into finishing work on part 2, and now that everything is in place and working, we can work on improvement and tweaking. So, once you've given it a spin, head on over to the discussions and let us know what you think could be done to improve the AI and balance of the custom games in general.

• Smarter AI - much cleverer freeplay colonies, with a new modular AI system
  
• Freer Freeplay - new freeplay features, new uber creatures!
  
• Skirmish Mode - quick-to-setup game vs AI colonies based on freeplay
  
• Prettier Artwork - for beach story & freeplay levels, & some creatures!
  
• Campaign Balance - the campaign has been rebalanced with many changes
  
• Mount Your Enemies - many more enemy creatures can now be climbed by your ants!

• Freeplay now lives in the Custom Game menu with the new Skirmish setup mode.
  
• Freeplay AI completely reworked
  
  • Much more intelligent building & food collection priority
    
  • Assists allies under attack & plan coordinated attacks
    
  • Guards resources, steals aphids, harrasses opponents
    
  • Nest designs tailored to species & room location
    
  • New build priority system for different species
    
  • Build orders adapt to storage & battle needs
    
  • Will hide from rising water on applicable maps
    
  • Customisable temperament & reactions
• Streamlined setup mode called Skirmish
  
  • Quick battle setup vs computer-controlled colonies
    
  • Emphasises colony vs colony combat with conquest victory condition
    
  • Preset landmarks & creature spawns
    
  • Generally shorter form games
• New landmarks
  
  • Huge creatures (whip spider, great blue skimmer or bullfrog)
    
  • Caterpillar plants
    
  • Relocatable aphid plants (rosemary in beach levels, fewflower milkweed otherwise)
    
  • Carnivorous plants
• New uber creatures
  
  • Bombardier beetle
    
  • Red velvet ant
    
  • Eastern newt
    
  • Narrow-mouthed toad
• Beach tiger beetle & beach wolf spider are now custom game / extra level only creatures
  
• The above have had stats & abilities changed to differentiate them from the new campaign creatures taking their place (see below)
  
• Freeplay can optionally use the fixed landmarks from Skirmish
  
• Freeplay now has the option of spawning environmental creatures with roaming patrol routes

Most levels in the campaign have been changed. In general, in the 1.x & 2.x levels aggressive creatures drop less food, whilst environmental food is increased. In the 4.x levels, aggressive creatures drop slightly more food. The 1.x, 2.x & 4.x levels should now feel fairly consistent in that regard. There are many other changes, too.

All beach, forest & rainforest creatures have had their food quantity recalculated & reduced
All swamp creatures have had food quantities increased to bring them in line with the new values in the rest of the game

1.1 New Home & 1.2 Subjugation

• Food has been added into both levels
  
• 1.2 slave maker attacks will now have level 2 & 3 ants amongst them
  
• 1.2 slave maker attacks will get harder more rapidly on hard & insane
  
• Challenge mode cricket attacks will be more frequent on harder difficulties
  
• Funnel web spiders now become food items rather than harvestable corpses on death
  
• Enemies in top-left of 1.2 will now attack the queen on being unearthed

2.1 Rising Tide & 2.2 Queen of the Hill

• More food added to the undergrounds of both levels
  
• Has higher level enemy ants on the map & in attack waves
  
• Notification about creature mounting moved to 2.1
  
• 2.1 underground caverns added
  
• 2.1 has more daytime surface food
  
• 2.1 has a new food arrival event with new narrator dialogue
  
• 2.2 aphids now produce food throughout the night
  
• Melee wood ants speed increased to 320 up from 300
  
• Melee wood ants given 30% AoE resistance
  
• Reduced number of challenge mode beetle larvae in some areas
  
• Creature changes
  
• Beach tiger beetle replaced with northern dune tiger beetle (same stats as old beach tiger beetle)
  
• Beach wolf spider replaced with sand bear wolf spider (same stats as old beach wolf spider)
  
• Larger variant of hermit crab added

3.2 Front Line

• Level 2 & 3 huge whip spider added for hard & insane in 3.2
  
• Significantly increased health of huge whip spider
  
• Huge whip spider now has a health bar like the bullfrog & great blue skimmer

4.1 Cold Blood & 4.2 A Bridge Too Far

• Aggressive creatures now drop a little more food
  
• Pervasive fire ant free hatch timer improved to 1m30s (from 1m40s)

The beach environment has been updated to bring it up to the fidelity of the more recent swamp & rotting log environments. 2.1, 2.2 & the freeplay / custom game maps The Dunes & Towhead all use these new assets.

• New decorative beach assets: rippling beach sand, flowering bindweed, samphire plants, water weeds, limpets, scallop shells, sea-smoothed rocks, sea urchins
  
• New artwork for the 2 replacement beach creatures: northern dune tiger beetle & sand bear wolf spider
  
• New model for black ant queen
  
• New water look for beach levels

In this update, many more creatures can be climbed and mounted by your ants - not just the very largest creatures! As a general rule of thumb, most creatures as big or larger than a large tiger beetle can be climbed - but there are some exceptions. Smaller mountable enemies cannot be climbed by larger ants - for example, a leafcutter major cannot climb a wolf spider.

Ants mounted on enemies deal bonus damage, and apply a damage buff to allies attacking the creatures from the ground. There are circumstances where you may be better off disabling enemy mounting, however - if speed is an issue, it takes ants time to climb up and down larger creatures, and if a creature despawns with ants still on it those ants will be lost.

The pine woods tree frog is currently unmountable but this will be changed once we’ve fixed a crash related to it.

• Food has been added into most extra levels in line with the food value changes
  
• The Hungry Spider now has 80% thorns resistance
  
• Aggrandise
  
  • Different levels of huge whip spider final boss added depending on difficulty
    
  • Removed extra whip spider juveniles from the final boss
    
  • Fish no longer loses resources on harder difficulties
    
  • Huge whip spider will no longer ignore player’s ants on the way to the queen

• Realistic Mode removed & replaced with Advanced Options for control of individual things it did
  
• Seasonal costumes option added in Advanced Options to allow them to be disabled
  
• Point values have been reassessed & updated (this affects enemy creature spawning & score)
  
• User interface updated in multiple places (adaptations, level select, options menu, achievements) to use up more screen space & allow more space for language & UI scaling
  
• UI scaling slider added to the menu to allow manual increasing of UI scale (good for handhelds & TVs)
  
• Updated harvesting spots on some dead creatures so no more ants are harvesting than there is food available
  
• Minor performance improvements & reduction of visual artefacts on resources
  
• Changed the Battle Arena tile set to the new beach one
  
• Localisation additions & changes
  
• Updated enemy mounting button icon
  
• Tooltips will now show when the game is paused

• Fixed some visual effects remaining on creatures after death
  
• Fixed an issue where attack points could sometimes be unreachable causing attacker to wait on the floor by them
  
• Uber velvet worm can now be harvested by 8 ants at a time
  
• 1.1 & 1.2 player colony now black in colour
  
• Fixed an issue in Tug Of War 2 that would lead to the enemy colony spawning black ants
  
• Decals now correctly delete when a tile is downgraded or deleted
  
• Fixed an issue where ants would not rotate for a short while after collecting a queen egg
  
• Fixed an issue where ladybirds may not land if they are not being observed by the player (quantum ladybird wave function now collapsed)
  
• Fixed an issue where loaded eggs would only appear after the game had started
  
• Fixed a pontoon construction point in 4.2
  
• Numerous text & AI scaling fixes
  
• Matched the colour select UI more closely to the in-game colours
  
• Queens will no longer perform pain animation on loading
  
• Salamanders & newts will still be rendered when just off-screen
  
• Aura effects should display better on inclined surfaces
  
• Lynx spider should no longer do its climbing animation when walking
  
• Fixed a wood ant firing sound issue

• There are some localisation issues causing problems with custom game setup. We intend to fix this as soon as possible.
  
• There are still some crashes being reported, but we don't have enough to pin down causes. If you experience a crash, please manually email the 3 crash files as attachments to us. Instructions on how to do this are in this thread on Steam. This needs to be done for us to see what's happening - hitting "send and close" on the crash dialogue doesn't work.
  
• Some extra levels are unbalanced, and The Other Foot in particular might not be winnable on higher difficulties. It is possible to beat the level on easy, so if you want the reward before we can fix the level then we suggest playing on easy.
  
• The Besieged victory condition in freeplay currently has very weak or empty early waves until the difficulty increases. Until we patch this, it can be avoided by playing with environmental difficulty set to insane.

• Whilst the new freeplay AI is in place and working, it is not yet as optimised as it could be. The system is very easily tweaked, however, so we'd love to hear your suggestions for it - please post on the forums.
  
• Similarly, freeplay creature statistics are now divorced from the campaign and can be tweaked without altering the difficulty of a story level. If you have ideas for making creature stats and abilities more balanced, let us know. This applies to both colony ants and environmental creatures.