Random Events

I think that's a great idea!

Small and large area effects... maybe ones that affect buffs and nerfs for attacks in that area.

For example there's heavy rain which causes attacks on nests in that area to have a reduced effectiveness due the attacking army being disoriented by the rain.

Yep both good suggestions... there are so many things that can be added in here.
Another suggestion was ant-lions. Those things are freaky.

I reckon that there should be an ongoing update of random events after the game's launch so that players could create their own additions and the community could vote them into the game... or out if they were considered cruddy.

Another few random events might be things like:
A drought which only affects leaf-cutter ants but over a long period of time.
A locust plague which increases food income for hunting fields of highly aggressive species of ants.
A pesticide spraying which kills off a lot of hunting field ants in a particular region (maybe everyone).

LoL! I like the daily login bonus, definately.
I don't like the idea of a complete destruction of your nest, but definately the surface should be damaged with random events that aren't particularly rare... footprints by animals, or an ant-eater attack, or maybe a tree falling down over it, that kind of thing. Doesn't destroy stuff, but it does put the building efforts behind while the damage is repaired, things like that.

Haha drunk rat puke wtf.

I think the exact bonus and nerf should be known to the players. After all even if it were hidden and only admins knew it, it wouldn't be long until some entrepreneurial spreadsheeting maths genius will pretty soon post the figures anyway, so we might as well be upfront with it. Plus it's kinda nice to know whether this buff gave you 5% or 15%... puts things in perspective... should you be pleased or super pleased with that random event... otherwise it's a bit of a "huh...meh" and that's no fun.

I like the some nerfs (like borked buildings) are present until player manually clears them... gives yet another reason to encourage activity.

when I was younger my family owned a property with a (small) orchard, and we had these apple trees, and the wasps would claim apples for their own, and one day I decided to observe the wasps, and I noticed that they acted funny after eating them. (long story short, the wasps were drunk) I didn't get a chance to observe what happens when a sober wasp and a drunk wasp meet each other, but at the time I imagined it would have been much the same as two humans interacting, but in wasp language. "have you been hitting the apples again?? I told you that stuff is bad for you" so a confused swarm of drunk wasps might not be too far fetched of an event.

Information is key in games like these, so players should absolutely be informed if things are affecting other things. if you find a random jellybean you should be told that you found a random jellybean and also what it gives or does to you. (maybe its a black licorice jellybean and all your workers vomiting from eating it make you lose food, but it should still tell you that)

However, such a system is going to need to have background stuff going on to determine whether the event should happen or not, it could feel completely random to the player, but in the code its technically not and randomness doesn't actually exist, so while you should get told if you have a -10% damage debuff, you might not get told that you and several other players actions are indirectly building up to the drunk wasp swarm apocalypse via however that hypothetical event gets triggered.


we could have players nests exist in the void like in antzzz, but then the actual anthills on the map are temporary, and people fight over physical control of the map, and if your anthill gets destroyed then you just have to make a new one, but you could keep your nest. it would also open the door to alliances actually organising control of the map outside of registering at strategic times to all match up in the sameish place. So maybe while your nest can't be destroyed, your anthill can, opening the door to drunk bear attacks. Shouldn't have built your anthill so close to the juniper berries, right? (although maybe complete anthill destruction should be reserved for players and stuff like bear attacks are just milder but extreme sounding events. like the bear just causes a disturbance but then you can still tell your friends "I got attacked by a bear!")

I really like the movable anthill/safe nest idea... it really sucks being a newbie and waiting for hours for convoys, and it would also be really cool if alliances were vying for control of certain parts of the map.