HYPERCELL’s brand new strategy game puts you in charge of ant colonies. You’ll expand colonies in different locations and breed EIGHT types of ants to survive and thrive in a hostile environment. As your adventurer ants explore the location, you’ll discover more colonies created by different insects.
Read on for a detailed overview of the game and find out the true objective in Ant Colony: Wild Forest. We’ll also walk you through some of the mechanics that the tutorial doesn’t mention. Use this guide to grow and strengthen your colony!
Objective
As you breed ants and build the colony, you might think of Ant Colony: Wild Forest as a simulator/city builder game. However, the game is more about survival of the fittest than anything else.
Enemies like ladybugs and spiders will raid your Ant Colony. When that happens, you have the perfect chance to kill them and turn them into food. However, if they kill your queen, you lose! Similarly, there are nearby colonies that you must raid and destroy to claim the location for yourself.
To do all this, you must build a strong colony, breed the right types of ants, and attack with the right strategy. You’ll learn to do all that as you read through this guide.
Ant Colony: Wild Forest Mechanics Overview
If you played through the tutorial, you’ll have an understanding of how the basics work. However, there are a few mechanics that the tutorial doesn’t cover. In this section, you’ll find an overview of all the building, breeding, and ant management mechanics that Ant Colony: Wild Forest has.
Buy Ants
Also called the Ants Queen Shop, this is where you order the queen to breed a certain type of ant.
Once you choose the type of ant you want, workers feed the required amount of food to the queen, she lays the egg, and that egg hatches the type of ant you ordered. Below is the list of all types of ants you can breed in Ant Colony: Wild Forest.
- Adventurer: Fast ant that scouts the map, searches for resources, and fights with enemies that raid your colony.
- Loader: A strong ant capable of carrying a large amount of resources at once.
- Builder: Underground ant that feeds the queen and other ants, digs, builds, breaks, and buries. Upgrades ants.
- Attacker: A large ant participating in raids on enemy bases.
- Seeker: A coward version of Adventurer. Scouts the map, searches for resources but runs away from the enemies.
- Defender: Patrols around the anthill, protects ants, and stops thieves.
- Bodyguard: Patrols ant paths far from an anthill.
- Hermit: Can carry a large amount of resources at a time. Patrols in a large radius.
Not all ant types are available to breed straight away. You’ll unlock the likes of Bodyguard, Hermit, and Defender only after clearing Forest.
Rarity Skills
There are three rarities in Ant Colony: Wild Forest- Rare, Epic, and Legendary. Depending on the rarity of the card you have, you can unlock certain rarity skills for your Queen and every ant.
In the Deck tab, you can see all the ant cards you own and check their characteristics.
Below is an image of a rare Adventurer ant card. Under Rarity Skills, you’ll see Speed +10% and Health +10% unlocked. These are the skills you get for using a Rare Adventurer ant card.
Using an Epic Adventurer ant card will unlock another skill that reduces the Price (food consumption) of Adventurer ant by 10%. Similarly, using a Legendary Adventurer ant card increases the Adventurer’s damage by +1.
All ants have different Rarity Skills, including the Queen. Make sure to read up on all ant cards as it will help you create the perfect strategy and build the best decks for every location. More on Decks later on.
Build
Right next to Buy Ants is the Build tab. This is where you command your workers to dig, fill, and build anything you need within the colony. One unique thing about building in Ant Colony is that you don’t need to worry about the materials. You just command your workers to build or remove something and they’ll get to it.
All they need is food, which they source themselves.
Here’s a list of everything that you can build:
- Queen Room: Stores ant eggs.
- Queen Stock: Stores ant eggs and food.
- Food Stock: Stores food.
- Chitin Stock: Stores chitin (material used to upgrade ants)
- Workshop: Used for upgrading ants.
You can also command the ants to dig and expand your colony, delete a room entirely, or fill a place with sand to build from scratch.
Let’s take a closer look at how the Workshop works in Ant Colony.
Workshop
After building a Chitin Stock, your ants will start collecting Chitin flakes, and the Workshop will appear in the Build tab. As the ants collect more chitin, assign some builders to build the Workshop.
Once the Workshop is ready, you can now upgrade your ants. Upgrading ants improves their stats like Health, Speed, and Damage. It also increases their production price.
Workers Priority
The Workers Priority tab is where you can command your worker ants to prioritize certain tasks.
There is a linear mode where you can prioritize all tasks equally or an exponential mode to focus the entire workforce on a single task.
Say you want to focus the entire workforce on ants production. Set the priority table accordingly and all workers will prioritize feeding the queen so she can produce ants at a rapid pace.
Perks
Perks are helpful little boosts that you can equip on certain types of ants. There are 21 perks in the game right now and you can unlock these by completing certain tasks. You can find out all about them in the Perks section. Read up their descriptions and you can easily figure out which Perks are worth having.
Queen’s Dance should certainly be on the top of your list.
Deck
You can create your own Deck of ant cards as you unlock their various types. The cards in your deck will decide what type of ants do you want your Queen to produce. A Deck can have up to 8 cards. One is reserved for the Queen, while the remaining seven spots are yours to fill as you want.
As you complete the in-game tasks and conquer locations, you’ll unlock more and more ant cards.
This is also where you can merge duplicate cards to forge higher rarity ant cards for your deck. You’ll need THREE duplicates to forge a higher rarity card of any ant type.
Scouting
Lastly, on the screen outside your colony, you’ll see the Scouting button beside the Buy Ant tab. This is used for sending your scouts in a certain direction to explore the location for resources and possible enemy bases.
Tap on the Scouting button and you’ll see NINE circles on your screen. Tap on any circle to command your ants to travel in that direction and scout the location.
Scouting is a must to open up new areas for resources as well as locating the enemies, i.e., the targets that you must destroy to claim the location for yourself.
Ant Colony: Wild Forest Beginner Tips and Tricks
Now that you know how everything works in Ant Colony: Wild Forest, here are a few tips and tricks that’ll make you the best ant colonizer.
Tip #1: Build a Chitin Stock ASAP!
Once you have enough Queen and Food Stocks, build a Chitin Stock. With the Chitin Stock set up, you’ll be able to build a Workshop and upgrade your ants using Chitin flakes.
You can clear the normal difficulties of every location using the base forms of the ants. However, as you enter the Hard difficulty of each location, you will have to upgrade some of your ants to achieve the given targets.
Tip #2: Protect the Queen
Every enemy that attacks your colony will go for the queen straightaway. And since the queen is not the best of fighters, it is important that you protect your queen. There are a few strategies that you can follow to better protect her from invaders.
- Don’t place the queen near the entrance. It’s best to build a new Queen Room in the deepest, darkest corner of your colony.
- Hide her behind the Barracks. All your Attacker ants stay in the Barracks. So, if you can hide your Queen behind the Barracks, every attacker will have to face the strong and deadly Attacker ants before reaching the Queen.
Tip #3: Breed Defenders, Don’t Rely on Workers
Some of the worker ants can hold their own against weaker invaders. However, as soon as a strong enemy raids your colony, they’ll crush your workers and kill your queen in an instant. That’s why Defenders are so important. If you have enough Defenders patrolling outside the anthill, next to no invaders will enter the colony.
Moreover, these Defenders also keep an eye out for your Adventurer and Seeker ants. You’ll see a decline in Adventurer ant death rates when the Defenders are about.
Tip #4: Prioritize Ant Production
Worker Priority allows you to manage your ant-force more effectively. You can command all your worker ants to prioritize a certain task to finish it up quickly. Early on, you should focus all your resources on Ant Production. Order at least 10 Adventurers and Loaders early on so you’re never short on food. After that,
Conclusion
That’s it for our Ant Colony: Wild Forest beginners guide. Stay tuned for more in-detailed content and do check out our other guides for Amikin Survival and Tarisland. Also, keep an eye on our Codes section to get the latest redeem codes for all your favorite mobile games.
