Using only army ants is extremely effective on higher difficulty.

You don't need to continuously send your workers to the tube, just keep the progress bar from becoming empty.

Focus on building army ant mediae as soon as you can and let them take care of the distraction.

When you are done, turn attack off and send your workers to the tube. Take as much time as you can to harvest food. Figure your nest layout before digging to the surface.

Build 4 to 5 small chambers of workers.

Start excavating when the active enemies are about to be defeated.

Use multiple pheromone groups to harvest and battle at the same time.

Replay the mission multiple times to unlock leafcutter major, wood ant shooter and their special abilities.

You can earn UPs by either failing, quitting or restarting the mission.

Expanding on the strategy above, you can sort of use trigger groups containing one worker and assign them to many groups of enemies at once, sending them to your nest before the AI can fight them.

Provoked enemies will rush towards your nest so your ally should be safe.

When your ally tries to attack the tiger beetle larvae, begin killing other large creatures on the map for food.

The level 1 ants are not effective in taking groups of large creatures by themselves.

Follow your ally's army everywhere it goes.

If it has lost most of its army to the small beach wolf spiders, it will be much more vulnerable to the underground enemies.

Notice when your ally starts digging inside its nest to come and help soon.They must be able to unleash rove beetles by themselves. Remember to leave food for the allies.If you have successfully saved your ally earlier, they will come to help you. Retreat shortly afterwards to deal with the medium tiger beetles, which will soon rush towards your nest.Bring your shooters and workers to help kill the small spiders. Quickly build some shooters to attack woodlice, rove beetle larvae, and individual rove beetles for food and to save time.It prioritizes attacking faraway enemies with its pedipalps so keep a small group of workers nearby to distract it.

Save a decent amount of food before attempting to kill the huge whip spider.When playing on harder difficulties, make sure you are ready to fight any difficult chambers. Choose which chamber to attack depending on the types of enemies. Use multiple pheromone groups to harvest and battle at the same time. Focus on building trap-jaw ants and upgrading wood ants.

Empires of the undergrowth demo