One of the interesting things about SimAnt was that it was really one of the first
RTS games. It had a lot of elements in it that were seen in later games like
warcraft II and
starcraft and
TA. Basically you spent most of the time 'mining' a
resource (food) and attacking the enemy's
base (
anthill) as well as dealing with the humans and colonizing new areas.
Obviously the
strategy was much less advanced back then, there were just the few types of
ants and you could only control one at a time. But i think it would be cool to create a new version of this game which was more advanced, gave you more control, etc.. it would be neat.
Connecting to the red ant colony via underground burrows was a viable option in the IBM version of the game. It was a quite useful strategy. However, it did pose its own dangers as sometimes the queen would wander to the bottom of the colony. These areas are susceptable to flooding and the queen would sometimes end up drowning. Once a queen was gone there was no way of creating a new one (except for leaving the colony and returning later, the game created a new queen for some reason.)
An excellent option using the bottom hole was to run through with a soldier ant and fight the queen. eventually, after many tries, you could usually kill the queen. Once the queen of the red colony died, you could use the spider to eat their ants, no new ones would be produced.
there were other ways of subtly 'cheating'. If the red ant colony was in its beginning stage you could stick a rock over their hole. Its impossible to remove the rock from below. They would eventually build new holes but you could usually clog them all and starve the ants off. Also, you could seal your own colony off and keep it alive. All you had to do was send the yellow ant out to get food. If the yellow ant was 'hungry' it would eat food instead of picking it up. And since the game treated the ants as one communal organism, feeding one ant gave the whole colony food. Therefore, you could keep the other ants underground, and tell them to concentrate only on tending eggs. The yellow ant could do all the eating.
also, on the version I had, there was a little unmarked button on the toolbar - the 'mystery' button. You could press this and all kinds of random stuff would happen... sometimes the spider would start shooting lazers, sometimes all the red ants would die, soemtimes all the black ants would die, sometimes the queens would die, etc, etc. If the odds were strongly against you, you could go 'scorched earth' untill most of the ants were dead, then start over again.