With the upcoming underground diversity dev item possibly bringing antmen hives, and me stumbling upon the
wikipedia article for ants, I thought I'd start a thread about what I feel they should be like. So, time for a nice session of speculative biology. Feel free to contribute, comment, criticize, or drink to get the images out of your mind.
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. Six legs, three distinct body segments. (IIRC, the middle bit is called the thorax and the hind bit is called the abdomen.) Can either stand on the four hind legs or crawl on all six. The front two have rather crude fingers, no opposable thumbs or anything but still quite useful for grasping stuff. An almost, but not quite, utterly inhuman face, with antennae, huge compound eyes, and a mouth with both large, powerful mandibles and and regular flat human teeth behind them.
Society:Real ants communicate with pheromones, and real men communicate with speech. I think pheromones would be more suitable for antmen, with some screaming and screeching to communicate very simple and urgent ideas, such as intruder warnings.
Antmen are not ruled by the queen, who just lays eggs, but a hive mind. Individuals are specialized for their tasks. Most antmen are workers, who gather food, tend to the larvae, dig tunnels and so on. Soldiers protect the hive from enemies, hunt for non-vermin creatures and help the workers. Each hive has a few winged reproductive females and drones, who take to the skies every ten years, mate, and found new colonies. Most die without succeeding. The females that live become queen antmen of their new colonies. Antmen share food by digesting it into a liquid and regurgitating it, and hives have specialized honeypot antmen for the puropose of storing food. They are bloated, with athropied limbs, and cannot move on their own.
Antmen can enslave, tame and breed most other creatures, and farm plants. They don't make their own tools, but may use any they manage to find.
If the old queen of an antman hive dies, the hive may request that some other hive send a new queen, or have any breeding ant take the queens place.
All tactical planning and abstract thinking is done by the (dangerously intelligent) hive mind, and antmen rely on cooperation for everything. Individual antmen are unintelligent, and do not survive very long if separated from the hive.
Interspecies diplomacy:As antmen communicate with pheromones, it is fairly impossible for them to speak with most other creatures. Elves are an exeption with their ability to empathise with any creature, but almost never visit the underground antman hives, and really have nothing interesting to say anyway. Antman hives might have useful trade goods to barter, but communication problems (and elven ethics) prevent bartering. Antmen treat other species, sometimes including other subspecies of antmen, mostly as food, cattle or slaves.
Antmen are not very expansionist, and do not spread beyond their ability to sustain themselves. Their acts of warfare are limited to sending out hunting parties to gather resources and defending their hives against intruders.
Movement:Antmen can carry several times their own body weight with ease, and climb walls and ceilings. Run faster than dwarves, especially in small, tight spaces. Recieve a speed bonus when crawling, but lose use of their hands.
Combat:Individual antmen are small and weak, and easilly dispatched by even inexperienced dwarves. Workers can't even defeat a dwarven child. They make up for this with perfect teamwork. Antmen hunt in groups, can hide in very small crevices and make very little sound. Even a few antmen soldiers are a match for an unarmed dwarf, and a dozen can ambush and kill even a large number of trained soldiers. They don't use their eyesight much, and rely on their sense of smell to locate prey. Hunting parties seldom run away, and tend to fight to the death when outmatched. Gatherers and messengers usually try to avoid combat altogether, and will try to flee from enemies.
Antmen fight mostly by biting their target with their mandibles, and scratching with their sharp, strong chitin feet. They can also hit their opponent with any object they pick up, be it a rock or a shortsword. Some subspecies have acid-secreting glands, and some can even shoot the acid from a distance.
Antmen defend their hives very effectively, defeating almost anything with sheer numbers. Merely killing the queen is not enough to permanently destroy the hive, although it will temporarily stop the production of new antmen.
Architecture:Antman hives mostly consist of long, winding tunnels connecting larger rooms in a seemingly random fanshion. They are often dug in natural caves or deep unerground, in chasms. Antmen can also build walls from almost any materials available. Some subspecies use their saliva as a glue in construction, and some can even use silk produced by their larve to weave webs. Antmen can also form temporary structures, such as bridges, out of antmen grabbing each other.
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Topic: Xenobiology! How do antmen work? (Read 7257 times)