Note · Don't leave me make ideas at 4 am...
What if after achieve the 99/99, you get, Idk an image of the blue ant resting/leaning her belly against red ant head, as the blue one overfeed herself with bottles of honey.
The thing is, then you get to access a menu with some options, like Arcade, Sandbox, and hardcore?
Arcade, been something similar to what's currently is (maybe with a lover cap),
Sandbox, is Sandbox.
Yet, in Hardcore you introduce a new enemy, Bees.
In this modality, you have to fight bees who tries to defend their resource-
You know what?, screw it up.
In hardcore (or Honeycore), you have a bigger map, yet less random. The resources doesn't generate anywhere, except inside a certain location, who will be the beehive. There, In similar chance as the red ant, there will be a queen bee heavily defended who will fight both, blue and red ants, using workers for this purpose.
Maybe the hive is something like a 10x10 square/circle, which blends into the surroundings; or maybe it's a structure randomly generated inside the map. Idk.
The thing is-. Your objective might be get to a certain ant population, or maybe try to outpace the queen's defences.
Maybe the bees might have others forms of winning over you, like the workers can make the hive terrain bigger (change tile's from forest to hive), or maybe your ant queen have a health bar, and now the bees are chasing them.
And maybe the bees, in order to generate honey, they need workers to fly outside the hive into the forest, and find trees with flowers, stopping the strategy of just blocking the entrances of the hive in order to maximize profits!
And maybe you could make a mechanic in which, if a queen is too big, it uses more than one tile, and maybe, if too big, it need a constant supply of honey, just to keeps that "overdrive" size. (I'm thinking of players going for large numbers, if it's held uncap (idk 500's).),
Maybe there could be a chance to have a second queen (and more production), adding Princesses and Drones, on which you need to get to a certain size (amount of eggs stored and units outside, (maybe the number of available units grows over time, rather than been fix)) before produce a princess and make her fly up to another location (of the user preference) (yet not close to an enemy location).
Although, those thoughts of making more and more units needs to be justified with a force capable of wipe many ants in a short span of time-
Why do I get memories of Dawn of War?...
Oké, now I'm invested; by the morning I might make some sketches or something more... tangible.
Viewing post in sandbox mode + feedback on victory reward comments
whoa cowboy, that's a lot of material
lemme do a quick scope overview of how feasible this all is
-resting belly against the red queen's head: i always thought girls pressing bellies together was really hot, so I've basically already decided on drawing a belly comparison victory screen. however there is room for a different victory screen when you beat the opponent by a large margin, and I'm thinking that I'll draw the blue queen in the background pressing her belly and boobs against glass, and the red queen stuck between the blue queen's belly and the glass, which, in a way, is kinda what you described
-arcade would probably feature a smaller map and be renamed to "skirmish". there would be no need to make this unlockable, it would be available from the start menu (but would not unlock anything)
-"hardcore" is already associated with other game mechanics, most prominently permadeath which is not what you're proposing. the idea is fine but i'm not using that name
-bees: my turn system actually supports up to 5 teams, so I can definitely fit bees. I'll start by experimenting with a beehive tile, basically working like a non-depleting honey basket that can be attacked to provide more honey than a regular basket, but also spawns a bee every time it's attacked. I can also do queen bees, but most likely not with their own hand-drawn and animated avatars, they're just going to be boss units that hit hard and drop a ton of honey when killed. either way, the bee faction is probably not going to be an actual team that can win, just a resource guardian designed to forestall the inevitable
-multiple ant queens: major code rewrite required, don't count on it
-unit taking up more than 1 tile: theoretically possible but not really worth it imo, especially because the size is coming from the insect abdomen which is not (intended to be) the fetish part of the video game. it would also take an even more extensive code rewrite than multiple queens
-drones: MALES IN MY LESBIAN BELLY FETISH GAME (not this time but thanks anyway)