Australia’s national science agency CSIRO and the University of Western Australia have used Age of Empires to simulate ant warfare, to figure out how to help native ant species fight their invasive counterparts.
“Ants are one of the few groups of animal species in which warfare resembles human warfare, in terms of scale and mortality,” researcher Samuel Lymbery said.
Using the game, the research team built armies and battlegrounds of different sizes and shapes and watched them fight, then mapped the results.
They actually used AoE2, fwiw. It’s debatable whether the game was actually helpful when they also ran tests with actual ants or if they’re just (very successfully) using the gimmick for publicity.
It would probably be better if they could simplify the game down to just circles with the same unit AI. And then they could have various environments programmed as drawn in like water, vegetation, and what not. Don’t know if that would change anything, but they could probably simulate larger group dynamics with this.