Ant Legion Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Build an Ant Empire and Lead Your Legions to Victory

Ant Legion is an anthill building resource management and strategy game from 37Games, much like Lords Mobile but with much, much tinier fortresses. You’ll be maintaining your anthill, training little soldier ants in alarming numbers, and you’ll be doing things like nabbing cookies on the ground and swarming predatory insects to death. After all, a single ant is only a puny insect, but anything will go down if there’s several thousand ants slowly ripping it to pieces.

Ants are the most numerous species in the world. Creating their grand civilizations long before mankind learned how to crack skulls with a big stick. Ants are eusocial animals that know their purpose and commit themselves to it. Even as mankind took over the world, ants can instill fear in them through strength of numbers.

Certain colonies can be millions strong, a veritable tidal wave of insects and biting mandibles, organized and capable of proper and terrible war, as opposed to mere hunting and fighting so common in larger, more barbaric creatures. You are the one chosen by your Queen to handle such affairs, and we hope this guide helps you do her and your ant nation proud. Long live the Queen! Long live our anthill!

Hatch eggs, evolve specialized ants, establish colonies, build and underground empire and defeat your enemies! In case you need help with all that, then be sure to read our comprehensive Ant Legion beginner’s guide for some useful tips, tricks and strategies!

GENERAL TIPS

As with every game, Ant Legion has a few quirks that set it apart from games in its genre, which naturally affect how you go about playing the game. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you play.

Elites Over Cannon Fodder

When training troops, it’s usually a good idea to just train the most expensive, powerful type available to you. When sending troops out to do your bidding, you’re usually saddled with a number limit on how many troops you can bring to more offensive operations, determined by the strength of your Specialized Ants, of which you are limited to 5 in a team every operation.

What use is cheap cannon fodder if you can’t bring all of them to drown your enemy? So keep your soldier habitats upgraded and focus on the new ant tier available once you get them. Besides, you get quite a lot of cheap t1 reserve troops simply by playing PVP, as they give you 500 mooks every time you reach a rank threshold. You’ll have no true shortage of reserve troops as long as you play Arena matches.

Mover Ants: Like Logistics Trucks With Legs

According to the game’s rock paper scissors, Mover Ants are beaten by all other types of soldier ants. Now one would think this means they’re worthless, but their job isn’t combat: A mover ant can carry more supplies than true soldier ants can, making them invaluable for foraging trips outside the nest.

Since you can only build them from a single structure though, you’ll often find yourself supplementing them with t1 soldier ants early on (at least if you don’t want your anthill or main combat force to be vulnerable, since higher tier troops can carry slightly more resources, but you might need them elsewhere to do more combat oriented tasks), at least until you have enough mover ants to fill your expeditionary force.

Don’t Hesitate To Speed Up

The best time to use speed-ups is when you still have your newbie shield up over your anthill, specifically the point when certain upgrades start taking an hour or longer. You generally want to make as much progress as you can before it inevitably goes down, so by the time it does go down, you’re already too threatening to be bullied.

Sure high level players will still beat you by then, but at the very least you’ll make yourself a more difficult target compared to the others around you. More importantly, this helps you catch up to your allies, so you can help them out more effectively with stuff like wars and assaults on predator nests. Besides, you’ll get a lot of them in the future anyway.

Upgrade Your Nurseries First

Nurseries are pretty high up in upgrade priority, for one simple reason: Nurseries allow you to train more troops in a single go. The more and better nurseries you have, the bigger and faster your army will grow. This is especially important once you unlock higher tier soldier ants, since they can take a while to train and you want to make the most of your offline time as they train in your sleep.

Join An Alliance

Alliances are this game’s guild system, and as with any online game that has them, it’s usually a good idea to sign up for one. Alliances not only allow your alliance members to help you speed up construction and upgrades of structures, it also relocates your anthill to the Alliance’s location.

Getting an Alliance before your newbie shield goes down means it’s much less likely for other players to attack you, considering they now risk being counter-attacked by the rest of your alliance! It also opens new tasks for you, enabling you to attack Predator Mounds as a group.

Do Your Quests

The game has a way to ensure you don’t get stuck and confused: Your chapter quests are basically a way to keep track of your progression throughout the game. The tasks aren’t there just as some daily busywork (You have your dailies for that!) but to point you in the right direction and make your little anthill nice and strong.

The reward for doing this isn’t just the pay you get, since most of these quests involve leveling up your base and getting a bigger army, all necessary to keep yourself safe from other players.

Aim For 10-Rolls

The Hatchery is the game’s gacha, allowing you to get Specialized Ants (essentially your army’s command squad) using different Eggs as currency. Always go for the 10-rolls, since they only cost 9 eggs as opposed to 10 if you were to be impatient and do single rolls every time you get a new egg.

You’ll need to save all the eggs you can get, as a lot of your army power comes from Specialized ants: Not only do they provide a good chunk of CP themselves, they also increase the number of ants you’re allowed to take during any mission your army undertakes.

Rock, Paper, Ants

While it’s a good idea to strive for an evenly built army of ants, the way leveling your habitats works makes things a bit complicated: Your habitats have different upgrade requirements, ensuring that at any given point, you might have one of them making units a tier below the rest of your army.

Keep in mind that this is true for your enemy too: If you ever want to attack someone, take note of their army composition and build your attacking force to beat it. Always scout your enemy first before attacking. As it happens, Melee beats Ranged, Ranged beats Haste, and Haste beats Melee soldier ants.

Little Friendly Ladybug

Eventually, you’ll unlock the Merchant, an adorable ladybug who normally sells Speed Ups for resources. Once you can afford their wares comfortably, buying from them becomes a good idea. Once you buy an item from them, there’s a chance they’ll offer a Special Surprise for diamonds (Or if Ladybug Luck hates you, real money).

You can use the magnifying glass icon to check if it has a chance of dropping something you want, which you should always do so you don’t waste diamonds on anything you don’t want or need.

Split Your Armies

When it comes to hunting predators, overkill isn’t the most efficient way to go about it. If you can bring only half your allowed army and still beat the predator’s CP, then do so. That way, the other half of your army can hunt another predator, getting you more rewards.

This is important early on when you’ve only got enough Specialized Ants for a single full-size army, but two March slots. Things will get easier later on once you have 10 Army Specialized Ants, since that’s how many you need to have two full armies, taking up both March slots.

A STRONGER ARMY

An important aspect of Ant Legion is naturally, having loads and loads of ants within your army, just like a real ant colony. The size of your army correlates with the power of your Specialized Ants, which make up your command squad.

While you can only bring a limited number of ants to any one engagement, it always helps to have reserves so you can more consistently finish missions even after defeats early on, and to take advantage of your second March slot once you get more than five army Specialized ants. Here are things to keep in mind when it comes to keeping your army in tip-top shape.

Habitats Running

The easiest, most obvious way to make your army stronger, is simply to upgrade your Soldier habitats and make better or more soldiers. Every few levels, a habitat unlocks a new stronger tier of ant. Whenever you aren’t upgrading a Habitat, you should be training troops, so you can more easily sustain losses while bludgeoning your enemy with numbers the same way real ants do.

Again, keep in mind though that the number of troops you can bring to battles is limited by the strength of your command squad, so you’ll want to take the time to train stronger troops instead of weak cannon fodder.

Besides, you’ll get loads of t1 soldiers just by playing in the Arena regularly. They’ll act as your reserve troops in case of weird emergencies, like say a Predator Nest attack gone wrong which sent a lot of your crack ant soldiers to the Healing pools.

Specialized Ants

Your command squad is made up of Specialized ants (The ant equivalent of gacha game heroes), and the stronger they are, the more troops they can bring. There are three resources you need to power them: Shards, Breakthrough Fruit, and most importantly, Honeydew. Shards are needed to increase the star level of an ant, giving it a hefty stat boost.

Breakthrough Fruit is needed for both increasing the star level, and for getting past level thresholds for your Specialized ant. Honeydew is the most basic yet important of the three resources, being used for both star level evolution, level breakthroughs, and plain old leveling.

Both Honeydew and Breakthrough Fruit are obtainable by hunting predators on the overworld map, and Shards are typically bought from shops like the Arena Shop, handed to you from the Hatchery gacha if Lady Luck happens to like you, or from pheromone missions that involve fighting Specialized ants.

Eventually, you can unlock the Aid tab, which allows you to set a team of your five strongest Specialized ants as level standards. You can put low level ants below them, who will then copy the level of the fifth strongest ant in the group.

Fortifying The Anthill

Eventually, there’s gonna be some bellicose foreign ants knocking on your door to pick a fight. The Fortifications structure helps you give them a nice warm welcome. It creates traps, which work much like the rock paper scissors of ant types. Sticky Cobwebs helps against Haste Ants, Toxic Acid stops Ranged Ants, and Thorny Brushwood beats Melee Ants.

Upgrading the Fortifications structure allows you to unlock higher tier versions of these traps. It is typically a good idea to create trap types in equal number so you’re prepared for any sort of attack, shifting focus to a certain type only once the Scout Post alerts you of an advancing army, which you can now see.

Evolution Cave

The Evolution Cave lets you equip “items” (Really, they’re more genetic evolutions and cultural adaptations, but in any other game you’d recognize them as armor and runes just by looking at the UI) as a commander, which makes your overall army stronger in both combat and non-combat tasks. There are many kinds of equipment in the game.

But as a newbie, your main worry will be Gear and Genes, because that’s all you’ll have access to for a while. Gear essentially equips an improved body part to your ants, such as better mandibles for biting people with. Each gear item can be upgraded with Gear Upgrade Material, and tiered up with Gear Evolvers.

You have three slots for full sets, with Soldier Gear, Builder Gear, and Researcher Gear improving your ants’ combat ability, construction speed and cost-efficiency, and research speed and cost-efficiency respectively. Genes offer smaller buffs, having 4 slots per gene for every single body part of an ant. They can be upgraded with both Gene Upgrade Material and Genes of the same type, and evolved with Gene Herbs.

DAILY HABITS

Every login, you’ll notice a daily habit take shape. There’s always some tasks you need to keep an eye on. Think of them as basic maintenance for your anthill to keep everything in order, and the supplies coming in. Here’s what to expect once you get acclimated to the game.

Visiting Your Snail

For some odd reason, a snail moves into your immediate territory once you hit a certain level, and decides to be your friend. They provide various buffs, all of which can be upgraded. You can pay them a visit a few times a day, either watering them, feeding them, or helping them bask in the sunlight. You get rewarded either resources, Civil and Army Snail Points for upgrading the buffs it gives, or Snail EXP to level the snail up with, which unlocks new buffs.

You can upgrade the snail like any other structure, which increases the rewards you get for interacting with the snail. Of particular note is the Army Scale buff: Upgrade that when you can so you can get a boost to your overall army size, allowing you to deploy more ants to an expedition or battle.

Smelling Trouble

Once you have a Scout Post, you’ll gain access to Pheromone Quests. These are limited random quests spotted by your Scout Post. They can range from attacking a dangerous predator heading to your base, to rescuing ants separated from your anthill, all the way to simply picking up a cookie one of those weird two-legged giants dropped onto the ground, and even weird stuff like grasshoppers asking trivia questions. The best part? Pheromone quests not related to combat don’t require a march slot to do!

All of them have rewards, and these quests refresh every day. Keep on top of them, particularly the easy ones, and get their rewards. The Scout Post also warns you of other players scouting you or sending troops to attack you, giving you information about their army to help you prepare against them.

Empty Your AP

You have two stamina bars: The lightning bolt (Stamina) indicates how much stamina you have for rallying against predator nests, and the horn (AP) indicates how much energy you have for picking off single predators and gathering from resource piles.

While emptying Stamina is easier said than done (It mostly depends on how reliable your allies are when it comes to joining or starting Predator Nest assaults), you should definitely do your best to empty your daily AP ration.

Keep your troops busy by having them march to leaf piles, food depots, and having them pick fights with the local wildlife for rewards. Preferably, you’d want to go for gathering jobs last since they take a lot longer (upwards to an hour or two) to do than hunts (which take a few seconds to a minute at worst).

Doing gathering jobs late allows you to bring your best troops to keep your Mover ants protected since it isn’t like they’ll be doing anything else for a while anyway. Doing gathering jobs early means any troops you send will be tied up for an hour or even longer, so you’re forced to bring weaker reserve troops instead so the elites can be sent to fight elsewhere. Unless you’re willing to recall them of course.

Arena Excercises

The Arena, where you engage in various types of PVP battles, is your easiest way to get Honeydew to upgrade your Specialized Ants with. You get 10 tries every day, with each try charging decently quickly. Make sure you use those tries all up every day, so you can upgrade your Specialized Ants more quickly than by simply grinding predators in the overworld.

You can inspect the armies of your potential opponents by tapping their player avatar, which lets you see what tier of units they have available to them. You can’t bring your actual army to the fight, so you’re given a large army consisting of your highest tier available units, which is yours to adjust depending on your Specialized ants’ specialties, at least in Queen: Legion War.

Win or lose, you also get a stipend of Arena badges every fight, which you can use for the Arena shop. They sell shards for certain Specialized ants, which refresh every day. That being said, the higher tier ant shards are locked behind a rank threshold, so it’ll be some grind before you can get them.

It’s a good idea to buy the shards for the lower tier Ants anyway, since they’re a cheap way to get yourself an Ant with a high star level, which will eventually make it easier for you to get the more difficult shards and make your army stronger in general.

As for Specialized Duels though, those are only safe to play later on, as they only allow certain Specialized Ant types every season. You can’t just bring your first five ants to a fight, so jump in once you have either 5 of each Specialized ant type, or when you luck out and the season favors your current roster. The fights act more like Adventure Mode battles, so Duel Skills are more important here than a Specialized’s Army Skills.

Watering Peanuts

Once your Queen hits level 7, you’ll unlock the Peanut plant. The Peanut rewards you with loot once it’s been fully watered by other anthill commanders, and you can do the same to them. You can go around the map looking for players level 7 and above to water their Peanut plants.

You can water a set number of commanders’ peanut plants a day, but you can only water a certain commander’s peanut plant once per day. Watering a peanut puts you in the commander’s Help log, which makes it easier for them to find you and water your peanut back. You can also ask in chat for peanut watering, since they’ll be able to reach you via your chat avatar too.

4-Leaf Obligation

The 4-leaf clover button is the Daily Must-Dos button, which handily shows you which of your soldier habitats are idle, busy or ready, any quizzes you can take for free stuff, how much stamina you have for outdoor expeditions, and how many Arena attempts you have left, among other things.

Use this to make sure you’re constantly training troops and to keep track on whether you can do more stuff outside your anthill. The most important times to check this button are during the beginning and end of your play session, to grab your newly trained troops and to make it so you train new ones as you log off.

Donation Time

One of the first things you should do upon login is donate resources to your Alliance tech. Alliance tech gives its members various boosts, such as improved ant power or resource gathering… If the tech is unlocked. You can donate 1000 of a certain resource 20 times, a total of 20000 resources in a single burst.

Not necessarily 20000 a day considering your 20 donation attempts can recharge fairly fast. This sounds like a lot, but a couple of days in and that’ll be chump change for you. It takes a lot to unlock an Alliance Tech node though, so do your part so you can benefit from it along with your allies.

THINGS TO DO

Apart from the dailies, there are other places to go. Less daily maintenance and more a goal to work towards, these tend to be more difficult. These tasks put your army through its paces, testing their strength and ability to fight, and therefore, their ability to defend their Queen and anthill. With proportional difficulty comes proportionally large rewards. Here they are.

Adventure Mode

Adventure Mode is a fairly simple battle mode akin to Specialized Duels where you go through stages and auto-combat Specialized ant squads with your own Specialized ants. Unlike army-based battles, you can bring civil Specialized ants to the fight. Ants use their CP to subtract the opponent’s CP, which acts as both their attack power and HP.

The way higher tier ants work here, they tend to have special abilities that you might not see in army fights, such as ants reviving themselves or commencing a last ditch attack after death. What makes a good army command squad doesn’t necessarily make a good adventurer squad, so check their adventure skills before deploying.

You can get Ears of Wheat from winning, a currency used to buy supplies from the Expedition Shop. They sell Breakout Fruit, Regal and Superior Eggs, and Evolution Cave upgrade materials.

Dark Cavern

The Dark Cavern, unlockable at Queen lv8, is a test of your current theoretical fighting ability. There are many challenges that test each of your progression areas in a way that doesn’t affect your actual army count, and in a limited way which makes it easier to spot your army’s shortcomings.

For one thing, the Gear Challenge gives you a set number of t10 troops to fight your enemy, and the only way to boost them is via the gear you’ve equipped in the Evolution Cave. The challenges rotate every day over the course of a week, testing different areas of your progression.

Not only is this a way to get shards via the Exchange shop, this is also a good way to see where you are currently lacking: If you notice that your current progress in one or two challenges is much lower than in others, it might be time to give that area some love.

Events

As with any online game, Events are a useful way to power one’s anthill nation up. Being limited time events, they tend to have greater rewards to make up for the fact that you can’t grind them forever.

It can be anything from a human leaving a pizza on the floor and inadvertently causing all the ants to run after it, or various weird things like an event that lets you roll on a slot machine or simply gives you rewards for logging in and doing certain tasks. Always keep abreast of Events and participate in them, so you can make the most of their rewards while they’re active.

And this is the end of our Ant Legion beginner’s guide. We hope this helps. If you’ve got tips of your own, feel free to share them in the comments below!