I’ve been working through ideas to improve the single-player gameplay. The most recent change is to make AI opponents “vindictive”.

The gameplay involves flood-filling areas of the map with your colour. If you stop colouring or you are hit by another player before the area is completely full, your colour will drain away. You won’t be able to start colouring again until your colour in that area is completely drained away.

With this new change, an AI player that is hit while colouring will chase the player that hit them, until they can start colouring again.

This adds more choice and risk/reward tradeoffs to the gameplay and makes the one-player game richer and more challenging.

• You can interrupt an AI opponent when they have almost filled a large area of the map, but then the vindictive AI will make it difficult for you to fill areas of the map until they stop chasing you, allowing other players to get ahead.
• You have to choose between slow progress filling in small areas of the map or risk filling a large area in the hope that no other player will hit you before it is full.
• You can make AI opponents collide and start fighting each other, giving you the opportunity to capture some points.

You can see this in action in this screen capture above. The player controlling the red bee manages to start a fight between the green and yellow bees controlled by the computer.