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[Random832]

...Othag Umpigmaduc, the Sungoth of Cudal!
_{(If you find out what the King's name is, you will most likely hunt me down. And you will be right.)}

...lol. that shouldn't be funny, but it is.

[Sareth]

...Othag Umpigmaduc, the Sungoth of Cudal!
_{(If you find out what the King's name is, you will most likely hunt me down. And you will be right.)}

...lol. that shouldn't be funny, but it is.

Anybody want to translate?

[PTTG??]

...Othag Umpigmaduc, the Sungoth of Cudal!
_{(If you find out what the King's name is, you will most likely hunt me down. And you will be right.)}

...lol. that shouldn't be funny, but it is.

Anybody want to translate?

You really don't want to know. If you must, it's in Human, and the his first name is "Angry." his last name also starts with an 'A'...

[Sareth]

I see.

[Grek]

Anger Anusrape, the Pain of Jails

[Fieari]

Personally, I'd prefer antmen to be similar to the "Buggers" of Ender's Game fame.  Maybe not with regards to the telepathy and ansible (FTL communication) but in respect to the Queen being the only "individual", with all the other antmen being her appendages, so to speak.

[Agent_Irons]

Caste society. The vast majority of Antmen actually are ants(with hands, of course). Big ones. No brains, just a set of simple rules. If trail pheromone, follow it. lay trail pheromone everywhere, except if you find food. Then lay A LOT. (this is how regular ants do it, finding the optimal path to food. It's cool, look it up)

A sentient caste lays pheromones on things to guide the stupid ones. Doublebonuspoints if the smart ones are the size of a toaster, and sit atop a stupid antman steed (the size of a cow).

[Rilder]

Appearance:
I'm thinking fairly small, like a medium-sized dog. They're insects, after all, and the chitin exoskeleton can't support too much weight.

Not exactly, the only reason we don't have giant man eating insects today in real life is because our oxygen is too low.

[Mohreb el Yasim]

Movement:
Antmen can carry several times their own body weight with ease,

Not necessarily (even if they're not human size, their strength would still be greatly reduced), but I'd be willing to ignore that for the rule of cool. I mean, if we can have skeletal fish that somehow move around on land, why not antmen that are still pretty darn strong?

 Wait, ant-sized humans would be able to lift 175 times their weight? Awesome! 'Honey I Shrunk the Kids'  would be immensely more awesome had it had that. Imagine the kids tossing away ants several times their size.

 Ontopic, the Rule of Cool trumps all.

not really it would more be human sized ants beeing able to do soo

[lastofthelight]

Anytime I play DF for more then a week at a time, I'm tempted to mod Antmen. Because they are undoubtedly my favorite race. Sadly, I've never been able to do them justice.


Edit: Technically, since they arn't playable in default DF, I guess they arn't a race. They are still cooler then those pansy elves, however.

[puke]

We need an [EXPLODEONBREAKS] tag.

WIN.

[Fieari]

A number of people have modded antmen, but they aren't really any different from dwarves, particularly since they lack castes right now.  In the new release, playing as antmen should be pretty interesting with the different castes and such.

As for [explodeonbreaks], that's apprently already in... just not as a single tag.  It happens by means of physics if you have an exoskeleton surrounding a liquid interior.  So, yay!

[GlyphGryph]

Another vote for "Queens" being seen as a machine rather than a leader. In fact, all ants should see other ants as tools and nothing more. The whole [we have no leader] thing is, I think, cool.

But hive mind is stupid, the way most people mean it when they say that.

Antmen shouldn't be stupid. They shouldn't be stupider than dwarves or humans (well, in general) - it should be their motivations that are different. They don't have individual aspirations - they can't breed, they don't care about their own lives, they just have a job to do. They don't want to do it - they just do. They're intelligence is... focused, if you will. They are not creative, they are not really motivated to do things other than what they are supposed to do, but they should not be stupid.

Communication: Not really a need to define this. I assume it would be a combination of scents, touch, visual movement, and various sounds from clacking to stomping the ground, but its not important. I could see communication with antmen being possible - but it would be difficult. Other races would have to learn how to talk to them, rather than the antmen learning to talk to other races, which would be difficult mechanically. As a bonus, Antmen do not understand deception. IF you can get them to listen to you, it would probably be fairly easy to convince the hive to ally with you.

"Art": Antmen hives are lined with weird looking sculptures and engravings. But don't be confused - antmen don't do it for the aesthetics. This is communication, they're writing system, and every line conveys information. This is something no other race is ever likely to decipher, unfortunately, because its super dense and super complex information. Some, at least, appears to be "maps" that contain the information an ant needs to travel from one part of the hive to another it has not been to, or even to other far away hives.

Special Castes: I don't think the ants even need an overclass, a group of planners or "intelligent" ants. They just understand, individually, how to do things, and they naturally agree assuming an idea is communicated by another member of the colony (which makes them very weak to any creature that could pass itself off as a member of the colony and start spreading disinformation). The only special "thinking" caste, would be the class that handles diplomacy with other hives. They're intelligence and history has allowed them to realize that avoiding mutually destructive conflict allows better survivability - thus arose a small class whose sole purpose is to defuse potential conflict with other hives. These "diplomats" are as close to "outcasts" and "deviants" as ant society contains, since so much of their brain is wired not to best understand their own role, but to understand and consider the roles of others. Other ants generally deal with them as little as possible - it is found they can have extensive detrimental effects on the colonies cohesion if allowed to mingle unchecked, since they often replace old ideas with new ones. They, of all the ants, have the most potential for creativity, empathy, and innovation. Which isn't saying much. If any ant ever were to decipher and figure out the language of another race, it would be a member of this caste, and they'd never be good at it.

[Armok]

Another possible idea, described one caste at a time, and based of some stuff abut real ants:
The "story" is that just like real ants, the difference between casts except drone and queen is determined by the amount of food they are given as larva, like regular ants and for obvious reasons, size increase whit more food, but intelligence however is optimized in the middle:
1) small workers, about cat-sized, in intelligence similar to a real ant.
2) mini soldier, about 40% bigger than the small workers, intelligence of a cat or dog. Poisonous.
3) basic worker, in difference to the previous two can walk upright and is about dwarf sized, about the intelligence of a really dumb human  (IQ 50-70ish), can communicate like GlyphGryph described.
4) smart worker, about 20% bigger than a basic one, and the intelligence of a normal human (IQ 90-120ish), for each smart worker there are 5-20 basic one, and smart workers are often found leading basic ones. The smart workers are culturally mostly equivalent to the basic workers, most of the decision-making of the colony is made by smart workers. they also corresponds to the workers of GlyphGryphs description. these also do crafting tasks the basic workers cant.
5) intellectuals, basically like the diplomats of GlyphGryphs description, but they also do some science and philosophy, science, and engineering related tasks. human sized whit usually upright walk, the most anthropomorphic of all the castes. IQ 100-130ish, but whit much more emotional intelligence and creativity than the smart workers. It is always anvilicius one should sympathize whit these and dislike the other castes. These are the only ones anthropomorphic enough to let someone not familiar whit insects glimpse the gender distrubution.
6) Soldier, the size of a large brutish human, is surprisingly fast killing machines, and about human intelligence (IQ 80-100). Walks upright or on all 6 legs varyingly.
7) supersoldier: the size of an elephant, about the intelligence of one to. in fact it' a lot like an elephant in all ways except for the natural armour and mandibles that can cut thought a tank. and it it spits acid. Can not stand upright.
Queen) the size of a building, the intelligence of cat or dog. Basicaly the machinery idea.
Drone) about a metre long, cat/dog level intelligence. only one purpose. brightly coloured wings.

When you see an elephant-sized ant coming towards you, spitting acid, covered in super fast anthropomorphic soldier ants, and whit a catapult on it's back throwing operated by a MENSA ant-woman, showers of smaller poisonous ants at you, then you know you are dead.

[Aldaris]

Large soldiers aren't always effective, while the majority of the new underground is wide open, a lot of it consists of narrow winding tunnels that an elephant just doesn't work in. Also, there is little use in making so many of the ants intelligent, the big idea is to make them inteligent as a whole, but not much so on their own. Most diplomacy would be done in groups, so a surface or dwarf diplomat would be talking/writing with 5 cooperating antmen.
Also: A thing to consider: Will antmen use copper or atleast bone/chitin/leather armour?