Idle Ants

What is Idle Ants?

Idle Ants is an online incremental game. You can play it on the creator’s github site, or on Kongregate, or on Google Play. It also has a sequel, with redesigned UI and some rebalancing. It’s gameplay isn’t visual, you can’t see the ants in your colony scurrying around or interact visually, its just buttons, menus and numbers going up, but that doesn’t make it less fun. The game is basically:

• Ants produce food
• The more food you have, the more ants you can buy
• The more ants you have, the faster food gets produced.

Except it’s more complicated than that because you can then buy Queens, who produce ants passively, and later on, Nests, who produce Queens passively. And then there are different types of ants, who produce other materials like crystals and soil, some of whom will use up other materials in the process, so its a complex numbers game of making sure you have enough production of a material so support units producing another material from it so you don’t go into a deficit.

While there’s no official documentation for the game, it’s pretty easy to figure things out. And yes, that does say Octillion and Nonillion in the screenshot above. What can I say, it’s fun‽

Prestige & Worlds

When you’ve become pretty powerful, and have many nests and units of all kinds, you may be able to travel to a new world. This acts like a prestige system, where everything is reset in exchange for the obtaining of “Experience”, which you can spend on long-term upgrades like time warping and efficiency increases. Additionally, other worlds have special properties, such as special perks to specific stats, infestations that need to be cleared in order to travel, or one of three other classes of units, either bees, beetles, or sea creatures. Bees produce honey, and can do similar things to ants with that honey, and later on you can get Bears and Pandas, which are powerful. Beetles produce all sorts of materials, and later on you can get Moles, who are incredibly powerful¹, and Sea Creatures produce sand and use that sand to make lots of stuff.

Conclusion

Idle Ants is a fun kind of game if you are interested in that kidn of thing, slightly addictive, interesting, lots of depth and strategy, but also can be bypassed by just AFKing a lot. I reccomend running it whilst doing something else, and then just chekking in on it every so often to spend some of your accumulating wealth to maximise profits. Plus leave it running overnight :stonks:. 9⁄10 would grind again.

Footnotes & Citations