SimAnt Background & Quick Tutorial
The following has been carefully extracted from the original SimAnt user manual available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DyY9_Oc_9SSkENI14ZqxlZRLRJnhKQcep3FdJuo-W3U/edit?hl=en_US
Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungus, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labor, and exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television. - Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell
In SimAnt, you are the intelligence of an ant colony. The individual ants are like the individual brain cells of your being. You will hop into and out of individual ants, using them as tools. many of your ants will dies, including at times the one you are inhabiting. but death of individual ants will not greatly affect you as a colony. in fact, one of your ants dying will hurt you about as much as a human trimming a fingernail.
There are three ways to play SimAnt: Quick Games, Full Games and Experimental Games.
Quick Games In Quick Games, you are a black ant colony competing with a red ant colony for food and territory. Your goal is to defeat the red ants and take over your home turf—the local patch of ground in the backyard. Your task will be complicated by marauding spiders, voracious ant lions, torrential rains, crushing human feet and merciless lawn mowers.
Full Games In Full Games you must take over the entire backyard section by section, then take over the house and drive out the humans. in addition to hordes of red ants and other pests, you will face the chemical death of insecticides.
Experimental Games In Experimental games, you are a human playing and experimenting with ants. Your tools let you build wall and barriers to run ants through mazes; add food; add ants; dig or fill holes; test ants’ reactions to various trail-marking and alarm chemicals; and play with insecticide.
In addition, there is a Tutorial mode that walks you through the basics of life as an ant.
In SimAnt, the Rules to learn are based on ant biology and behavior, including:
- Communication: Ants have very sophisticated communication methods. (Scent Trails, dances?)
- Nest Building: Ants dig for safety and temperature control, and to make brood chambers for the young.
- Foraging: Ants must find food and return it home safely.
- Brood Care: Ants tend and protect their eggs, larvae and pupae.
- Altruism: Ants must protect the queen and brood at all costs.
- Territoriality: Ants defend their home turf from all competitors.
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Cooperative Behavior: Groups of ants working together can bring home large pieces of food and defeat much larger enemies.
But the most important Tool of all is the simulator itself. Test your knowledge, plans, theories and ideas as you watch your colonies develop or decline. Experiment with the ants and test their intelligence and adaptability to various conditions.
Before playing SimAnt there are a few things you'll want to know:
BASIC STRATEGY
In a Quick Game, you lead your ants to food, defend your nest and queen, and destroy the red colony. You win when you kill the red queen. In a Full Game, you do the same, plus breed new queens, send them out to make new colonies, and take over the whole house and yard. You win when you eliminate all the red colonies in the yard and you drive the humans out of the house. In an Experimental Game, you do whatever you want. You win when you decide you've won.
DYING
Ants don't care much about individualism. Even to each other they all look alike. When an ant dies, it's no big deal (even to the ant that dies). It's the safety of the queen and whole colony that counts. The death of any ant other than the queen is not important --- even you.
Because of this, in SimAnt, unlike in most other games, dying is not losing. It's not the end of the world, much less the end of the game. You just lose a little time and energy.
REPRODUCTION
In the ant world, very few ants can reproduce. Most ants --- all the workers and soldiers --- are sterile females. Only at certain times are the males and fertile females who can start new colonies produced. The reproductives, called Breeders in SimAnt, are large, use up a lot of food, and do no work. Only a colony that stores up enough extra food can afford to make Breeders and reproduce.
You will now see four windows: the Edit Window (your close-up view), the Map Window (your overall view), the Behavior Control Window (for telling your ants what to do), and the Caste Control Window (for controlling what kind of ants your colony produces).
You will now see four windows: the Edit Window (your close-up view), the Map Window (your overall view), the Behavior Control Window (for telling your ants what to do), and the Caste Control Window (for controlling what kind of ants your colony produces).
The Edit Window is active and on top. Near the top of the Edit Window is a Message Bar. Keep an eye on it for helpful hints during the game. Above the Edit Window is a control panel with lots of buttons. Click on the PAUSE button to stop the game while we look around (it’s the button with a picture of PAWS on it).
Activate the Edit Window by clicking on it or selecting Edit from the Window Menu. Click on the Yellow Ant button in the control panel. The Edit Window centers on the Yellow Ant. It should be underground. (If it isn't, then open the File Menu, select New, click on Quick Game, and click on the PAUSE button.)
You should now be looking at the black ant nest. The big black ant is the queen. The other ant is the Yellow Ant.
Click and hold on the queen. An info window appears telling you what kind of ant she is and what she is doing. This window is available for all ants and brood (eggs, larvae and pupae).
The Yellow Ant is you. Through the Yellow Ant you will lead your colony to victory (or not, as the case may be). Click and hold on the Yellow Ant and a menu appears. This menu helps you lead your colony. We'll explain Recruit, Release and Exchange later. The Help item (question mark) displays info on controlling the Yellow Ant.
To move the Yellow Ant, you don't need the menu. Just click where you want it to go. To make it dig, double-click where you want it to go. Click to make the Yellow Ant move around in the tunnel, and double-click in the dirt to make it dig. If you climbed out of the tunnel to the surface, click in the center of the anthill to go back down.
Note: When a game is paused, it doesn't completely stop --- it is in a “single-step” mode. Everything stops until you move the Yellow Ant. While it is moving, the game is in action: the other ants, spiders, and insects move. Pausing the game gives you time to think, but no protection from enemies.
SURFACE, SURFACE Scroll the Edit Window so the grass at the surface is showing at the top of the window. Double-click on the grass. The Yellow Ant will dig its way to the top, and the Edit Window will show the surface above the nest.
DANGER Once you are on the surface, you risk being eaten by the spider. If you are eaten, you will be reborn back in the nest as a new Yellow Ant, so all you lose is time and energy. But since dying is a hassle, try to avoid it. Other dangers that might catch you are ant lion traps, human feet and the dreaded lawn mower.
FEED ME The most important thing for you to do now is to find food for your colony. Food is shown in SimAnt as green balls.
Once you get to the food, double-click on a food ball to pick it up. You can only hold one ball at a time, so you better call for help.
CALL OUT THE CAVALRY Click and hold on the Yellow Ant to see the Yellow Ant Menu. Slide the pointer to highlight Recruit 5, and release the pointer. Five black ants will rush to the Yellow Ant, ready for action. Once they arrive, click and hold on the Yellow Ant to see the Yellow Ant Menu, then highlight Release All and release the pointer. The ants will grab some food and rush back to the nest with it.
AntFact: As ants bring food home to their nests, they leave a chemical trail. Other ants of the colony can smell the trail and know it leads to food. They also find their nests by smell.
In SimAnt, when an ant carries food back to its colony, it automatically leaves a scent trail along the way. To check it out, click and hold on the SCENT button, slide the pointer to highlight B-Trail, and release it. Then, as you make your way back to the nest with your load of food, notice the trail you leave.
When you have the display of Scents on, you can see these trail markers as well as colony scents. When the screen gets too cluttered, you can turn the scent display off. The ants will still smell the Scents, but you won't see them.
DELIVERY Once you return to your nest, double-click where you want the Yellow Ant to put the food down. You don't have to go back for more --- your ants will follow the trail and bring back all the food. You should now look for more food, and show it to your ants.
A big part of playing SimAnt is keeping your colony and the Yellow Ant healthy. Health is based on how much food you find. The healthier your ants are the better their odds in battles with red ants. In SimAnt, health directly relates to hunger. If the ants have enough food, they are healthy.
At the bottom of the Edit Window Control Panel is the Health Graph. It shows the health levels of the Yellow Ant, the black colony and the red colony. The higher the bars, the better the health.
FINE DINING? The more you move the Yellow Ant, the more energy it uses and the more it needs to eat. When the Yellow Ant is hungry and you double-click on food, it eats it instead of picking it up. If there is no food around, a nearby black ant will feed you. If there is no food or black ants nearby, recruit some to feed you.
Ants share their food with each other. Even after they've eaten it. When an ant feeds the Yellow Ant, it's not a pretty sight --- that's why we put in an animated sequence of it.
AntFact: Ants have two stomachs, one to digest food for themselves, and one to hold food to share with the whole colony. The extra stomach is called the crop. (And when there are thousands of ants in a colony, that's a lot of crop.)
As leader of your colony, you have to do more than point to food. You have to make job assignments. Select Behavior from the Window Menu to open the Behavior Control Window.
There are three basic things that your ants must do: forage (find food and bring it back), dig (enlarge the nest), and nurse (take care of the queen and her young). The computer will automatically assign these jobs to your ants, but if you do it yourself, you can make better use of your resources than the computer can.
Each of the three activities is at the corner of a triangle. The triangle is like a joystick controller. Somewhere in the triangle is a “knob” that you can click and drag. The closer you drag the knob to a corner, the more ants will perform that job. The percentages of ants at each job are displayed in the three corners. Click on the percentage boxes to toggle to a display of the actual number of ants at each job.
All the time we've been puttering around looking for food and reading tutorials, the evil red queen has been cranking out eggs that have hatched and grown to fill the ranks of the bad guys. They've been gathering food, digging out their nest and raising soldiers. Time to rumble.
In a real game, you'll want to be sneakier, but for the sake of this tutorial, let's try a frontal attack. Before you begin your campaign, Exchange your Yellow Ant into a soldier; you'll have better odds in fights. First, pause the game and find a soldier --- if you can. Soldiers have larger heads than workers, but may still be difficult to pick out just by looking at them. Click and hold on any ant to bring up a little information window that tells, among other things, whether the ant is a worker, soldier, or other type of ant.
Once you have a soldier picked out, click and hold on the Yellow Ant and slide the pointer to Exchange and release. Now click on the soldier to exchange bodies with the Yellow Ant.
Start your Yellow Ant towards the enemy nest. On the way, click and hold on the Yellow Ant, then slide the pointer to Recruit 10. Do it again, if you have enough ants. As you reach enemy territory, individual red and black ants will pair up in life-and-death battles. As the leader, you may want to avoid direct contact with the enemy. If you lose a fight, the Yellow Ant will die and be reborn back at the nest. The black ants will wander away, and you will have to start the campaign over again.
If you stay alive, and your troops outnumber the enemy, lead them down into the red nest and attack the queen. If not, don't worry about it. You can always try again.
OTHER WINDOWS While we're here, let's check out a couple other windows that are helpful in playing SimAnt. The History Window tracks the rise and fall of ant population, health and welfare. Click on the buttons to see the different graphs, click and hold on the Help Button for an on-screen explanation of all the buttons, and click and hold in the graph area to see the current number value for each graph.
The Info Window is a tutorial on real ants. It is set up like a cardfile with hot links between cards. See the Info Window section of the manual for complete details.