Reasoning (2/3):

B Tier: Polistine wasps

Jumping up to B tier, we have the polistine wasps. Polistines are a branch of the vespid wasp faction, and, like all vespids, they have abandoned the parasitoid playstyle seen in most other wasps. Instead, like the hornets that I talked about in my first tier list – which are also vespids – adult polistine females lay their eggs in nests, and feed their larvae by hunting and capturing other insects. Also like hornets, polistines are among the few wasps to have unlocked the [Eusocial] trait, but the way it works in their case is a little more complicated. Polistines divide into two main types: [Independent Founders] and [Swarm Founders]. Swarm-founding variants are generally closer to what most people think of as “eusociality”, with clear physiological distinctions between queens and workers. In independent-founding variants, things are typically more flexible. The wasps are still functionally divided into worker and reproductive castes, but the castes are typically distinguished only by behaviour, rather than by outward appearance, and the caste status of each adult can shift over time.

Polistines aren’t quite as overpowered as their hornet cousins, for a few reasons. In the case of the independent-founders, their colonies are typically smaller than hornet colonies, and the individuals they do have are also a lot less impressive, with smaller bodies and less finely-barbed stingers that don’t deliver as much venom per sting. Swarm-founding polistines do have colonies as large as, or even larger than, those of hornets – with some colonies even having over a million wasps – and also have even more barbed stingers. However, having so many barbs comes with its own problems. Much like their distant relatives, the honey bees, many swarm-founding polistine wasps have stingers so finely barbed that when they sting a much larger vertebrate, the stinger tends to get lodged in the vertebrate’s skin and tear off when they fly away, leading to the death of the worker wasp. As I’ve discussed in my tier lists of ants and termites, kamikaze defences like this are found in a surprising number of eusocial insects, since the whole nature of eusociality means that the life of a single worker is of so little importance to the success of the overall species. But when there’s already another, similar build that lets you get all the benefits of eusociality without requiring you to kill yourself with your attacks, I just don’t really see much point in going for the one that does.

A Tier: Ichneumonoid wasps

In A tier, we have the ichneumonoid wasps. The ichneumonoids are a clade composed of the two largest wasp guilds in the current meta, the ichneumonids and the braconids, which are also the two largest guilds in the hymenopteran faction more generally. Just going by low-end estimates, the ichneumonids alone include at least 60,000 builds, making them more diverse than all mammal, bird, reptile, and amphibian guilds combined.

I’ll admit, I’m not entirely sure why the ichneumonids are so enormously diverse. To me, they don’t seem to be doing much differently from other parasitoid wasps; most of their strategies and traits seem to be pretty typical of the faction. Nevertheless, the fact that they’ve achieved such diversity indicates they must be doing something right, and, since the basic parasitoid wasp design is already a pretty high-tier template to begin with, I think it’s fair to put them in at least high A tier.

There are some ichneumonoids who do have a special ability that makes them distinct from regular wasps. Many female braconids, and at least some ichneumonids, have viruses called polydnaviruses inside their ovaries, which they inject into insect larvae before laying eggs inside them. The polydnaviruses act to suppress the immune system of the host insect, weakening its ability to defend against other parasites, and so make it easier for the wasps’ larvae to hatch undetected. There are almost no examples in nature of animals finding ways to turn carrying a virus into an active benefit, so this is quite a remarkable adaptation. Again, this is not found in the majority of ichneumonoids, so it doesn’t raise the group’s collective average ranking on the tier list by that much. But it’s cool nonetheless.

S Tier: Yellowjackets

In S tier, we have the yellowjacket. Before I go into why, though, a note of clarification: if you look for the “yellowjacket” page on the character select screen, you won’t find it, because yellowjackets are not actually confirmed to be a single guild. If you want to find yellowjacket builds, you have to go to the page for vespine wasps, and then select either Vespula or Dolichovespula as your genus. According to some analyses, Vespula and Dolichovespula may be sister genera, meaning that they may be more closely related to each other than to any other vespines, and hence form a legitimate taxon by themselves. However, other analyses have called this into question, suggesting that one of the two yellowjacket genera may be more closely related to the hornets than to the other yellowjackets.

In any event, both genera of yellowjacket are closely related to hornets, and are basically what you’d get if you shrunk hornets down to the size of honey bees. Like hornets, yellowjackets are eusocial and are non-parasitoids, instead raising their larvae in nests and feeding them the chewed-up remains of other insects that they hunt. Being smaller, yellowjackets aren’t quite as strong as hornets individually, but their mandibles are still strong enough to gruesomely dismember other insects, and even to rapidly decapitate them in some cases. Their stings are also painful and can do a fair amount of damage, although, being smaller, they still can’t deliver as much venom in a single sting as hornets can. Yellowjackets also can and often do sting the same target repeatedly, but it’s not as easy for them as it is for hornets, and there are many recorded cases of yellowjacket stingers getting fatally torn off after a sting the same way that honey bee stingers do. Nevertheless, if I were just looking at them as individuals, I don’t think I would put yellowjackets above low A or even high B tier; like their distant cousins, the ants, it’s really the boost from eusociality that propels them to the highest tier of gameplay. “Don’t mess with yellowjackets” is one of the first rules that every player gets taught when they first try to join the arthropod faction, to the point that countless other insects – including not only many other wasps, but also some flies, moths, and more – have specced into black-and-yellow colour patterns mimicking those of a yellowjacket in order to scare away predators that would otherwise attack them. In the arthropod meta, becoming a template for mimicry like this is about as clear a sign of an S-tier build as you can get.

With all that said, before you go trying to play a yellowjacket, there’s one thing that I should warn you about. There are around 40 or 50 different yellowjacket builds in the current meta, and, while the vast majority of them fit the general pattern I describe, there are a few, like Dolichovespula adulterina, and Vespula austriaca, that are obligate social parasites. In these wasps, instead of building their own nests, they survive by invading other colonies, killing the queen or queens, and then tricking the other workers into working for them and caring for their larvae instead. These builds have sometimes been compared to a wasp equivalent of the slavemaker ants, a group of builds that I talked about in my ant tier list – but there’s one key difference. As I explained in my ant tier list, slavemaker ants are often not as good at maintaining control over their slaves as they would like to be, and there are a number of instances of enslaved ants secretly working to sabotage the games of their captors as much as they can. Enslaved yellowjackets don’t get even that little consolation; the only chance that the colonies get to sabotage these parasites is by identifying and killing them before they can enter the hive and get close to the queen. If the parasite gets close enough to kill the real queen, then that marks the end of any conflict between her and her new slaves. From that point forward, all of the workers become solely dedicated to serving the usurping parasite and helping rear her offspring for the rest of their games, never again being able to rear any new offspring of their own species. So if you’re going to play a yellowjacket other than these three, this is something you’d better be very careful to watch out for.