I believe I understand what you are trying to do. You have to divide to the trails with the counters and give the ants a looping exit path so they won't stack up.

So, your path would go ENTRY TRAIL, DIVIDER, COUNTER, PATH TO RANDOM POINT THEN BACK TO COUNTER.

I made a quick example if you are more of a visual learner.

https://ad.gamersky.info/@steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3432259592

Thank you for your post. Yes, I came up with that solution as well, however this can get stuck, if there are too many ants looping around.

https://ad.gamersky.info/@steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3432374353
(The outer loop was just for getting enough ants to show my point.)

Of course you could try to make the loop big enough and at some point the production of ants probably won't be high enough to actually fill it up. But you would still have to make this kind of loop at any point you want to use it.

But yes that works. It would be nice to have an actual gate for this though.

I like that there's inherent problems with the options available. If you design away all the problems to solve there's less space for player creativity. That said we could use a blueprint system so it's not as repetitive.

Big yes to blueprints. And I agree with what you say, however it should be possible to solve it in a way, where I don't have to check every now and then, if something is stuck. And I wasn't able to find such a solution for this problem yet, with the given tools. Unless you unlock something way back in the tech tree? I couldn't see anything though.