It helps to have a few different supply pipes of the energy circles to feed to your queen. In this image i have supply pipes from around the map and my 4 original Ant workers (Only because i don't want these to die and have to wait for new workers to replace and lose efficiency)

In this image you can see my larva are being fed to different incubators by my small ants. I have divider gates splitting the paths to goto the different nodes. you might also notice some purple lines, this is very important and will be unlocked very early game. this is called an age gate, it allows you to sort the ants as they are older and close to the end of life, this gate takes them to the next chain of buildings that will upgrade them into the next form (Worker ants)

This set up is currently overbuilt and will be able to handle much more larva / Min as the queen upgrades later into the game.

!!! Important !!! Don't immediately send your small ants to a combiner making them into the Larger worker ants. It may seem logical to do this as upgrading them goes to 10 min of life instead of 5, But lets first use the 5 min to the fullest because 2 workers are better than 1.


I have a loop after the Incubators for room for the small ants to run around waiting for something to do.
In this image the red circle on the left has counter gates sending these small ants out to do jobs.
At these other locations i have old gates (Lines in purple) telling these small ants to come back to the combiners there on the bottom of the picture as they are near the end of life.

I also have a trash can there (Ants wont go into combiners if they are carrying items) as i don't have a proper setup to sort the ants yet if their storage is full.

Here is the same logic as before with the small ants, There are gate counters all around this loop sending these workers off to other jobs, and purple trails coming back as they get older to be upgraded into the next style of ant. (Currently making them into Inventors.

This is the most important aspect of how to grow your population. Use your ants to the fullest before sending them to be upgraded into larger / different ants.


Circled is a few old gates i have that sort ants based on age and send them to my next upgrading buildings.