Colony

Colony is a real-time strategy game about two ant colonies competing for a meadow. You lead a colony rather than controlling individual ants: choose which ants to hatch, where to gather, what to research and when to attack. Build a strong economy to support your warriors.

Grow your colony

Your ants have different roles. Workers gather food from plants and, once you learn how, mushrooms. Architects carry wood, which you need for warehouses, traps and warriors. Warriors defend the colony from enemies and wild creatures, and launch attacks. Build a Laboratory to unlock technologies and warriors, and warehouses to house more ants and give gatherers nearby drop-off points. Collection zones direct the colony’s gathering.

The meadow

Plants seed, sprout and ripen. Food left ungathered grows into wood, while wood left untaken slowly rots. Forestry mode lets you leave plants to grow into wood deliberately. Maps contain ponds with lilies, streams with log bridges, swamps, stones, fallen snags and four kinds of mushrooms. Both halves of the field are mirrored, giving neither colony a better start.

Wildlife

Wild creatures can threaten your ants or their food, and their behavior varies:

• Spiders: catch ants in webs, and new young spiders hatch from the cocoons.
• Ground beetles: live in snags and chase ants that come too close.
• Praying mantises: lie in ambush and can wade through the stream.
• Water striders: steal loads from ants walking along the water’s edge.
• Red ants: form a neutral colony that leaves you alone unless attacked. If you attack, they hold a grudge and raid your workers. Destroying their nest gives you its entire food store.
• Snails: emerge from ponds and streams to eat food growing on the shore. Workers can gnaw them, with bigger snails providing a richer meal.

Caves and research

Each mysterious cave can be explored once. Send ten workers or architects inside, and they may return with food or wood, come back empty-handed or vanish without a trace. The enemy explores caves too.

Research can improve plant growth and ant speed, strengthen warriors, unlock flanking maneuvers, create self-growing stores, add warehouses, and enable mushroom gathering and farming. Automation technologies let the colony place zones, leave plants to grow into wood, hatch ants, set traps and choose when to attack, leaving you to focus on larger decisions.

Fight for the meadow

Send warriors directly at the enemy or around the edge of the field to attack from the flank. You can place poison traps on enemy trails and choose whether your warriors attack wildlife or leave it alone. A colony loses when it has no workers and no food.

Game options

Choose from four difficulty levels, from peaceful Explorer mode, where the enemy never attacks, to Hard. Four map sizes and world settings let you set the number of stones, swamps, snags, ponds, streams, caves, wildlife and mushrooms to few, normal or many. You can play with fog of war or keep the whole map in view, or choose A Lot Of Resources mode for a fast, resource-rich game. Matches include a detailed end summary and charts, and the game has 22 Steam achievements, music that follows the course of the match and rebindable hotkeys.