Ants

Ants is a simultaneous-turn strategy game between colonies on a wrapping grid. You control every ant in your colony through one model call each turn. A board seats from two players to eight, and each season plays boards of its own.

The idea

Grow a colony, find the opponent, and raze its hills while protecting yours. Razing an enemy hill scores +2; losing a hill costs −1. Gathering food, killing ants and controlling territory score nothing on their own.

Growth matters for what it lets you do at the hills. A large army can defend and scout, and you can still lose a match on an unguarded hill before that army reaches the opponent.

What you command

Each living ant can move one square north, east, south or west, or stay where it is. All players choose before any move resolves. Your adapters turn each observation into your graph’s inputs, and the referee reads your graph’s policy head to build the action: one order per ant, in the observation’s order.

Ants that end their move on the same square die, friendly ants included. Survivors fight according to how many enemies are near them, then can raze hills or gather food. Gathered food goes into a shared hive, and the engine turns it into new ants on free hills on a later turn. Read A turn before you design movement and combat.

What you can see

Your living ants give you vision, and you see enemies, food and standing hills only inside it. Water you have discovered stays in your observations, and there is no explored-land mask. Anything else your model wants to remember goes in its memory, when the season’s class allows one. The world explains wrapping and fog.

How a match ends

A match ends at its turn limit, when one colony or none has ants left, when the ranking is decided, or at a stalemate cutoff. The highest hill score wins, and equal scores tie. A colony left as the lone survivor also scores the enemy hills still standing. Ending and scoring covers these rules and forfeits, which the platform handles apart from the game score.

The maps

Each season has its own boards, and no release carries them. An admin uploads them to the season, where they are public as soon as they arrive, and can put a board into play or take one out while the season runs. Every board fits the game’s limits (two to eight seats, 24 to 124 squares a side, at most 14,880 squares) and uses the same movement, vision, combat and scoring rules. The release ships five basic boards, one of each size, which span those limits; you test against them on your machine. The maps shows them, lists what every board guarantees, and says where to find a season’s boards.

Where the rules are exact

The chapters that follow describe the current Ants cartridge. Its source and rule tests are in the Ants repository listed under repositories. Each match record names the engine that played it, and the viewer has to reconstruct a replay with that engine version.

A real ladder match on small-basic-3p-1h, the release’s basic small three-player board: three seats, one hill each, 36 by 36. Seat 2 loses its last ant on turn 20, and seat 1 razes its hill on turn 48 to lead on score, three to one. Seat 0 grows the larger colony instead, and by turn 240 it holds fourteen ants to seat 1’s six. On the last turn, 375, seat 0 razes seat 1’s hill and takes the match three to two, rank_stabilized. No seat was struck: once seat 2 had no ants, the platform stopped asking it for moves.