Phase 3 shipped: it's a round now

Phase 3 is done. Two colonies, a neutral predator, a deterministic AI that invades on its own, real combat math, a reproduction lever, difficulty tiers, and a polish pass that makes the events legible. The design post from ten days ago described what it was supposed to be. This is what it actually turned out to be.

The short version: it is all there. Seven mechanics, eight implementation stages, seven sim-version bumps (V16 through V22). The game is now something that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A round has shape. That is a different thing than what existed before.

What changed in combat

Before Phase 3, two ants meeting on the same tile resolved combat by coin flip: one died, one lived, repeat. Numbers barely mattered. Position did not matter. The home colony had no meaningful advantage.

Phase 3 replaced this with a deterministic multi-tick model. Each ant has HP and a damage-per-strike, and home-ground ants get a 25% buff to both. A home defender at a tunnel entrance wins reliably against a single invader — not sometimes, always. Two invaders at the same chokepoint still beat one defender, because replacement depth means the second attacker inherits a wounded opponent. Three invaders beat the defender and barely lose anyone. The math is exact enough to plan around.

The practical effect is that tunnel geometry matters now. A narrow underground passage is defensible in a way it was not before. The decision about where to put the queen chamber relative to your entrances is a real decision. Widening a tunnel to speed supply trades directly against its defensibility. This was theoretically true before; now the numbers support it.

One thing that was not in the original plan: after combat shipped, a follow-on pass added sight-based fighter aggression. Fighters who see an enemy within range now initiate without being directed. The behavior ratio still governs how many fighters you have, but they are no longer passive — they engage what they find. This made the surface feel alive in a way the original plan underspecified.

What changed with the AI

The AI in Phase 2 foraged. It built its colony, occasionally its fighters ended up in the same space as your fighters, and things happened. It was never planning anything. The game outcome was whoever got unlucky on coin flips while running roughly parallel processes.

Phase 3 gave the AI a named state machine: Peacetime, War Footing, Probing, Invading, Recovery. The transitions are driven by conditions in the sim — fighter count, food storage, round age, your colony size relative to theirs. The AI enters War Footing when it is ready and starts sending small probe raids — three fighters toward a surface food pile, not toward your queen. If the probe succeeds, it comes back at scale. If it fails, it recovers and tries again.

The first time I saw a probe raid while the AI was in War Footing was the first time the game felt genuinely hostile. Not randomly hostile — intentionally hostile. There is now a reason to watch what the enemy colony is doing, not just your own.

The loss-cause ledger was spec’d as a low-key requirement in the design plan. It ended up shipping as its own PR and becoming more central than expected. The game-over screen now tells you specifically how you lost — the enemy fighters broke through, the spider rampaged your nursery, your queen starved — using actual sim event data, not placeholder text. That one detail made losing feel informative instead of opaque. Players need to know what went wrong. Generic “you lost” is a dead end.

What changed with the spider

The spider is a neutral predator with a hunger clock. It wanders the surface on a ~60-second hunt cadence and places a red reticle on its target tile 6–8 seconds before striking. Workers self-scatter away from the reticle. If enough fighters arrive within engagement range, the spider retreats. If not enough arrive, they die.

The design intent was that ignoring the spider is viable but costly: it picks off workers slowly, which compounds over a long round. Engaging it costs fighters and attention. The actual dynamic in play is that the reticle creates a recurring decision — every hunt cycle, you choose whether to respond. Most rounds you do not respond directly; you just route around it or accept the occasional worker loss. But at higher hunger levels the spider rampages into the nest, and that is immediately and visibly catastrophic. The hunger ring on the spider sprite (a color gradient that intensifies as hunger builds) is the only cue. If you are not watching it, you get surprised.

The right-click command to designate the spider as a priority target shipped last, in its own cleanup stage. It was deferred from the spider’s initial implementation to keep that PR focused on the sim foundation. By the time it shipped the mechanic was solid enough that adding the input felt like filling in a blank rather than making a design decision.

Reproduction and difficulty

The reproduction lever ties food surplus to egg-laying speed. When your food storage is high relative to colony size, the queen lays faster. Nurses in nursery chambers accelerate larval maturation. Nursery capacity caps the throughput. The three levers interact: more surplus → more eggs → more demand for nurses → fewer foragers → slower surplus accumulation. The cycle regulates itself if you let it.

This was the mechanic I was most uncertain about before Phase 3. In isolation, “food surplus accelerates growth” sounds like “just stockpile food and win.” In practice, the food-to-workers pipeline has enough latency and enough competing demands that it reads as a real trade-off, not a stat to maximize.

Difficulty tiers shipped as Easy/Normal/Hard and apply two independent axes: asymmetric modifiers on both colonies’ economics and combat (AI gets buffed, player gets nerfed, or vice versa) and symmetric world-pressure changes (spider hunger interval, food pile respawn rate). Normal is balanced for a player who has played two or three rounds. Easy gives enough margin to learn the systems without constant punishment. Hard is hard.

What this unlocks

Phase 2 was a proof that the simulation worked. Phase 3 is a proof that the game loop has the right shape. A round now has pressure that escalates, decisions that compound, and outcomes you can explain after the fact.

The honest next question is whether the game is fun in the hands of someone who did not build it. That is what the demo is for. Play it and use the feedback form at the end. The sim produces a playtrace for every session — loss reasons, decision points, where the round broke. That data is going to drive Phase 4 tuning.