Developer Tower Five and publisher Microids have shared a new trailer and a blog post for the microscopic RTS Empire of the Ants. In them, the team goes over the game’s ambitious AI that allows for up to 20,000 units on the battlefield.
The developers point out that, as you develop your armies, you can accumulate up to 4,200 units under the command from your antennae. Adding to this are your various opponents and the neutral insects that populate the world, making the strategy game capable of accommodating up to 20,000 units in a single game.
“It was important to have a large number of characters,” says Quentin Daveau, Game Engineer at Tower Five. “Firstly, for authenticity’s sake, because insects are extremely numerous in real life. But also to offer players an impressive aspect, with swarming masses charging at each other. When a legion of gunners positions themselves on a mountain and it becomes entirely green, it’s really something.”
Displaying thousands of insects at once without compromising performance was one of the major challenges for the devs from Tower Five studio. To that end, the developers have decided against using the usual method of skeletal animation and instead opted for vertex animation. It was more work, but the end result is less demanding on the machine.
The team also used other techniques to optimize the performance of Empire of the Ants, such as limiting the number of calculations for the agents. For example, an insect tasked with producing a resource will not think again until it has finished its task. Avoiding continuous updates to the AI reduces the load on the processor.
The second major hurdle had been making the artificial intelligence credible, especially in its movements. The team hard to innovate again, with the units testing the surrounding terrain on the fly, as if they were moving blindly.
Of course, Tower Five also worked hard on the AI’s decision-making to achieve a satisfactory result. To achieve this, the studio gave the player the same tools as the computer: it doesn’t have more resources or stronger units. It doesn’t see the entire map but only around itself and has a reaction time quite close to that of a human.
