Overlord: Rise of the Zerg

Spring is coming again, and in the blink of an eye Zero has led the ant colony through two springs and autumns.

In two years, with zero planned expansion, the ant colony has grown from just one queen to hundreds of queens and nearly 100,000 ants of various types. The area occupied has also grown from the original one. A small mound to a large swath of land spanning both sides of the river, all while continuing to explore further out.

They domesticated aphids, and slowly began to domesticate earthworms. They are even making aphids and earthworms evolve in the direction they need!

Food issues are gradually reducing the constraints on their development, and correspondingly, their sphere of influence is gradually expanding.

After the cold winter has passed, as many as thirty earthworm training sites of various sizes have been built in the ant nest, and they are still expanding, and more sites are being built.

The ants are repeating what they did in the first taming field in various taming fields, trying to make the earthworms learn not to try to escape as soon as possible.

In order to observe whether earthworm larvae are easier to domesticate than adults, all the earthworms moved into the domestication field are newly born larvae, which makes the number of domesticated earthworms in the same batch of domestication fields larger.

The weather is getting warmer and the vegetation is beginning to sprout. The carefully selected aphid eggs that the ants saved last fall came in handy again.

These eggs are all selected by ants. They are either the offspring of heat-resistant aphids, or the eggs of aphids that are large and extremely productive.

As for the remaining aphids before winter came, they all entered the ant nest and became the ants' food reserves. Most of them cannot survive the cold winter and will freeze to death sooner or later. A few of them have to hide in the soil to survive. It is better to make some insignificant contributions to the ant colony.

On the contrary, the eggs they lay are well taken care of by the ant colony. In order to prevent them from freezing to death, the ant colony specially stores them in the insect chamber opened above the earthworm farm, which is deeper in the ant nest. The temperature is moderate, which will neither freeze them to death nor allow them to feel the warmth and hatch early.

The aphid eggs that came outside the ant nest hatched quickly under the warm sea breeze, and soon they began to spread rapidly on the newly born grassland again.

The "grazing" team of ants pays close attention to their every move. They will kill or remove the aphids that exceed the capacity of the grass blades, and always urge the aphids to eat and produce honey.

Those killed are basically aphids that are thin and eat very slowly, and they are the focus of ant colony elimination. As long as such aphids are found, they will inevitably be killed and eaten.

The aphids that are transported away to survive on other grass blades are basically strong, fat, large-eating and highly productive aphids. They are the treasures of the ant colony, high-quality mothers that produce offspring, and will not be killed easily. .

As aphids quickly spread over a large area on the grass, the ant colony's food reserves increased again after a cold winter.

At present, everything is on the right track. The second batch of expanded sub-hives have established passages with the "First Ring", and they are also connected by passages. The criss-crossing underground passages are spreading inside the ant nest, and there is a steady flow of people. An endless stream of ants shuttled among them.

It can be said that the "second ring" of the ant colony has been completely completed.

In terms of food reserves, the food in each nest combined is enough for the ant colony to eat until summer and there is still surplus. And with the increasing number of grazing aphids and the food captured by the ant colony itself, the food supply in the ant nest has increased. Accumulation will increase significantly again.

Everything is developing prosperously, and at the same time, Zero also believes that the time for the third expansion has come.

Different from the previous two times, because the outer area has become larger, the number of ants in the ant nest can no longer satisfy the flying ants who go out to carry the ants in the territory to the outer area to expand - that will make the entire ant nest group empty. . And food stocks don't allow for such a massive expansion.

This time the expansion will be carried out gradually. The ant colonies will first expand in the south. This is also the place that Zero attaches most importance to, not only because it is close to the unexplored forest, but most importantly, as the ant colonies With the gradual expansion, the other three directions will reach the seaside sooner or later. By then, the expansion in these three directions will come to an end.

Only the south still has vast land that can support ant colonies to continue to reproduce in large numbers.

Under Zero's instructions, twenty-five flying ants mobilized nearly 30% of the ants in the ant nest colony to carry a massive amount of food across the river to the underground passage on the south bank. They combined the five colonies drawn from the ant colony. Team, head to the south bank further south to establish a new territory for the ant colony.

Today's ant colonies are already familiar with the process of expansion. The queen ants in the ant nest have already laid half of the eggs to supplement the loss of the ant colony in the "second ring" before they set off. A few months later, the number of ant colonies within the "Second Ring" will return to its peak.

During this period, the ant colonies around the mother nest will briefly fall into a "weak period". In order to support the large number of newly born larvae in the ant nest and the expanded earthworm domestication ground, the number of ants going out to forage will increase greatly. reduce.

Fortunately, the flying ants took away a large number of ants, and the amount of food left in the ant nest was still sufficient to support the complete recovery of the ant colony.

When the ant colonies headed to the south gain a foothold, the number of ants within the "second ring" will also recover. After accumulating for a while, when the food reserves are sufficient, Zero will once again expand in the other three directions.

Zero's current plan is to complete expansion in all four directions within this year and initially establish the "three-ring" framework of the ant colony.

When winter comes, the ants will have enough time to connect them to the "second ring" and eventually enclose this land into the territory of the ant colony.

This is not an easy task, and the biggest difficulty lies in the storage of food.

The expansion in one direction in the south alone consumed more than half of the food accumulated last year. Even with the help of aphid pastures and the growing number of earthworm farms, achieving this goal is still a long way to go. Not to mention that the ant colony also needs to accumulate enough food to survive the winter before winter, which is also a huge amount.

Therefore, in the process of gradual expansion, Zero must find a way to obtain more food, or find the best of both worlds, otherwise it will not be able to achieve the goal of basically completing the third expansion before winter.

However, the plan still couldn't keep up with the changes. Zero finally had some ideas about his expansion plan.