Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/The Undergrowth Threat

The Undergrowth Threat is one of the forty-two DLC factions in Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict.

Description
"Those bugs! They're going to kill us all!!"

- The last words of a Encantadian Scientist, from a fragment of the Experimental No.1 Video log

The humble ant is one of the most common forms of animal life on Gaiaterra. Quadrillions of them are estimated to share Gaiaterra with the sentient species. Ants share a few things in common with humanity, such as their fondness for congregating in enormous artificial communal habitats and their capability to organise farms and livestock. Ants are well known for their surprising strength for such small creatures, their industriousness their abilities to cooperate and even make war. Something that it shares with its close relatives; the bees and wasps, and to the similar but unrelated termites who have pestered carpenters since time immemorial as well as lesser known strains of Thrips, Aphids, Shrimps, and Ambrosia Beetles.

They are ancient creatures who have gathered in their billions long before humanity had ever evolved and seen many giants come and go across tens of millions of years. Dinosaurs and mammoths were both contemporaries of these eusocial insects at some point and these small insects have outlived both. Such is their success that their kind can be found on every continent of Elysea's Home, even (Antarctica) thanks to specimens brought there by Andora. Even in the depths of the underworld or the sea-domes of the Rapture where the societies have dwelled largely separate from the world above, many of these eusocial insects have survived and thrived.

And in the relatively brief time that these insects have coexisted with sapient life on Gaiaterra they have come to a certain accord. The scraps of food left behind by sapient life forms offer valuable nutrition to these little insects, and so they have often been drawn to the living spaces of these beings. Bees in particualr were seen as highly valuable for their ability to make sweet honey as a tasty treat for the flavour starved; and were treasured greatly by those who craved sugary tastes. Though certainly the wasps' fondness for human paper and the termites' appreciation for wooden constructs is rather unappreciated.

However the ant and its eusocial insectoid and crustacean kin are small creatures of relatively little brainpower. As such it has crawled beneath the feet of civilisation for thousands of years, even before Balthazar killed Tacitus, scurrying in the shadows of ever more elaborate constructions of man with little comprehension of what works they were crawling through. Their shapings of the environment were small, mostly invisible to those who did not study them obsessively and while the occasional big sapient might be felled by toying around with a swarm or through fatal allergies and the sting of such insects was the cause of many a child's tears, orders of magnitudes more insects were killed by larger creatures seeking to get rid of them.

Few would imagine that these insects would ever really amount to much beyond scientific curiosity even as many were taken in to be modified by science in an effort to adapt them to assorted purposes. Biological science was used and abused to transform them into a myriad of strange and perhaps unusual purposes and shapes, such as the giant ants originated from the Embry Wasteland after the bombs fell in the closing days of the Civil War. But this is not about those controlled, carefully managed constructs of genetic science, but of something far more wild, unsure of its place in the world and capable of thought. One of which comes from a secret lab within the Aristocracy of Encantadia.

Lore Articles

 * Experiment No. 1, an Encantadia experiment that gone wrong
 * The Hives of the Threat

Relations

 * Aristocracy of Encantadia: At War

Arsenal
Main Article: Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/Threat Arsenal

Underground Nest
Unlike other factions, the Queen starts on a separate map, known as the underground, with only a few workers. The Threat can only build their structures underground, save for some defenses and support structures, and the workers must excavate the surrounding area before they can build anything. But in turn, the enemy will have to enter the underground, where they are disadvantaged, to kill the Queen, and aircraft will struggle to damage their structures.

Tiny Insects
The Threat forces are large, but only by a relative to other insects. Thus even their biggest units are the size of small dogs with the exception of the Arachnid, Hive, and Vek breed. While their size makes them both weaker and fragile, they can be massed more easily and can climb onto large enemies to do more damage. If ants on the ground are killed, climbing ants will dismount until the required percentage is met. Ants can only use basic attack and can't use other abilities while climbing. The climbed enemies will take extra damage from all further attacks if there are enough ants on top of them and have their speed reduced, and in some cases immobilized.

Egg Nests
Unlike other factions the Threat doesn't produce their units instantly. Instead they would lay eggs after any available workers in nest group can go to the Queen and bring an egg from her to an empty brood tile. Eggs gradually turn into white larvae, yellow pupae, and finally active creatures. New eggs will be placed afterward but the larvae stop growing if the corresponding ants are still active. Each brood tile can only incubate one ant at a time. Untis don't need food directly fed to them to be spawned. Pupae will turn into new active insects as long as there is enough resource.

Pheremone Markers
You can only control groups of insects, not individual insects. Units, which are spawned from the same chamber, are assigned to the same control groups. Each control group is represented by an ant icon in the control tabs. The icons to the right of the control tabs let you prevent your units from gathering, attacking, and mounting enemies. New control groups will be automatically put in the nest pheromone group. Nest workers will do nest jobs in order of priority. Nest soldiers wander near the queen. They can still be commanded to gather, attack or mount enemies. Units must form a trail while they are moving toward a pheromone marker. After a certain number of ants have reached their destination, some units will stop midway and go back to the nest entrance if they are on the surface or to the queen if they are underground.

Structures
Basic Structures