The New Main Combat Unit

Improving crops is not a high priority; we can study it later when we have more free time.

As the Swarm grows larger, it will soon step into the limelight and face various challenges.

Therefore, what Rowan urgently needs to do now is to first determine the main combat force for the foreseeable future.

Now another question arises: which organism should be chosen as the template?

If we still use the ant template, it's not impossible to replace its advanced enemy detection system, add a powerful heart, change its feeding system, and enhance its mobility. However, there is a very serious problem that cannot be solved.

That's their Exoskeleton Armor.

Exoskeleton Armor not only makes ants incredibly strong, but also enhances their defense.

The exoskeleton can be both its strength and its weakness.

While exoskeletons offer many advantages, they also limit the size of ants. If they want to continue growing larger, they need to molt constantly.

For example, the giant among them— the Super Giant —needs to molt twice to reach its full size. And that's only when it's only twenty or thirty centimeters long. If it were someone like Rowan, he couldn't even remember how many times he pupaed and molted before he grew to sixty centimeters in length.

Shedding skin is a highly energy-consuming and risky process.

The solution is simple: extend their larval stage. Simply add genes to allow the larvae to grow to the appropriate size, then mold them all at once, thus eliminating the hassle of constant molting.

But how much time and resources would it take to grow a larva to more than half a meter? Keep in mind that larvae have no productive capacity whatsoever, their fighting ability is extremely poor, and they even need Worker Ant to help them eat.

Perhaps in the future the Swarm will be able to raise such baby insects, but given the current size of the Swarm, it simply cannot afford to raise even a few.

Swarm rely on overwhelming numbers; what use can a few large Soldier Ant possibly be?

Aside from the ant template, what about other templates like the Small Dinosaur, the Fat-Tail Rat, Long-Face Beast? They don't have the limitations of Exoskeleton Armor, but their combat power is disproportionate to the energy they consume.

Leopard template? That's alright, but with the resources of the Swarm, you can't raise many of them.

Rowan needed troops that were both powerful and inexpensive to produce.

After much thought, he came up with the idea of Transport Bug. These units, modeled after Cliff Spider, naturally became auxiliary units due to their fast movement speed and high carrying capacity.

In reality, these creatures are quite formidable in combat, having distinguished themselves in numerous battles. Their piercing attacks are veritable harvesters of small combat units.

Their multi-jointed Walking Leg can traverse various obstacles and have extremely strong gripping power, allowing them to walk on smooth, mirror-like rock cliffs as if on flat ground, meeting the needs of most harsh battlefield environments.

Although they also possess Exoskeleton Armor and undergo a molting process during their growth, Rowan can modify their genes to remove the exoskeleton from their main body, retaining only the Exoskeleton Armor on their Walking Leg.

At the same time, their main body is not without any defense; Rowan will add genes such as tough skin and steel-haired protection to enhance their defensive capabilities.

Moreover, they do not hunt alone. When hunting, many of their kind will assist each other, so minor losses in defense should not cause too much of a problem.

In this way, their bodies will no longer be restricted by the Exoskeleton Armor. Without the main body structure, the exoskeleton allows for greater mobility due to the reduced load.

As the body grows, it only needs to periodically replace the Exoskeleton Armor on its Walking Leg, greatly reducing energy consumption and risk.

At the same time, Rowan would add a small venom gland to the end of each of their Walking Leg and hide a stinger. In this way, their attack power was not reduced, but greatly enhanced.

In addition, Rowan added Echolocation System to them, allowing these new Spider War-Bug to locate enemies faster and more accurately in the jungle, thus better utilizing their capabilities.

Furthermore, Rowan will modify their diet, changing them from carnivores to omnivores. This is something he's wanted to do for a long time, but unfortunately, he lacked the ability back then. Now, he has finally succeeded.

In addition, they will also be given dormant genes and tail fat genes.

In Rowan's vision, these new Spider War-Bug would maintain a size of around thirty centimeters. A small portion would normally eat omnivorous foods to sustain themselves and maintain the Swarm's daily vigilance. The majority would either eat soil or simply hibernate, waking up only during wartime. Only in high-intensity warfare would they supplement their diet with meat to replenish their energy.

The tail fat gene allows them to carry more supplies in certain situations to meet specific wartime needs.

Rowan originally wanted to add an optical cloaking system to them, but after researching, he found that the system was surprisingly expensive. It essentially adds a special nanostructure to the surface of organisms, so it's equivalent to a full-body modification and consumes an astonishing amount of energy.

After some thought, given that Spider War-Bug will be the main combat unit for the foreseeable future, facing swarm warfare, it seems unnecessary for them to be stealthy.

Finally, Rowan created a modified Spider War-Bug template, adding Optical Stealth System, and produced it in small quantities as a supplement to special operations.

With the main combat units determined, among the remaining auxiliary units, Super Giant modeled after ants should still be produced, and their size can be further increased to half a meter to one meter.

Spider War-Bug are ultimately not strong enough defensively. If they encounter an opponent that requires a head-on confrontation, they will still need some "heavy infantry" to hold the line.

With the ground forces largely dealt with, the next step is the air force.

This is a new unit that the Swarm is about to build. They have no prior experience with it, but fortunately, Rowan has seen a lot recently and has a general idea of what to expect.

For now, the Air Force only has three available templates: Flying Insect Gene, Flying Beetle Gene, and Flying Bird Gene.

First, the Flying Beetle Gene were removed. Their body structure resulted in extremely low flight efficiency. Rowan suspected that they evolved the ability to fly not for combat, but simply because their clumsy bodies made walking inconvenient.

However, their flight capabilities are the most technologically advanced, and Rowan believes that their time to shine will come eventually, just not now.

Secondly, the Flying Bird Gene was also discarded. It comes down to the old adage – cost-effectiveness. Perhaps they could easily eliminate a Flying Bug in a one-on-one fight. But the cost of a bird that is 30 centimeters long is enough to produce more than ten or even dozens of Flying Bug that are about 10 centimeters long.

A single bird is no match for ten Flying Bug. It might be able to wipe out most of the Flying Bug, but if ten birds were to fight a hundred Flying Bug, they might not even have the chance to fight.

Although their flight capabilities and endurance are superior, they are not needed for the time being. Moreover, Rowan has better options in the future compared to the flight and endurance of these birds.