Offspring investment strategies vary markedly between and within taxa, and much of this variation is thought to stem from the trade-off between offspring size and number: larger offspring can have increased competitive ability, but this comes at a cost to colonization ability. Such competition–colonization trade-offs (CCTOs) may support coexistence of alternative strategies, but it remains debatable how this is influenced by landscape structure. We extend the CCTO model to incorporate spatial structure of the environment using an agent-based model of alternative reproductive strategies in ants. Varying life-history parameters had a marked influence on coexistence conditions and yielded evolutionary stable strategies for both modes of reproduction. Nonetheless, we show that strategies can coexist over a wide range of life-history and environmental parameter values, and that coexistence can usually be explained by a CCTO. However, we also demonstrate the importance of the interaction between dispersal and landscape structure: dispersal can limit the success of low-dispersers through kin competition, and enhance coexistence conditions for different strategies in spatially structured environments. These results indicate that the CCTO can influence metacommunity structure in species with alternative life-history strategies, but spatial structure of the environment is also likely to hold an important role.