Originally Posted by
DerFlammenwerfer
In order to incentivize marines to take and hold ground without blindly rushing the Hive as fast as they possibly can, and to make the actual game part of the experience have more depth than the TDM fest that it boils down to currently, it would be a good idea to have defensible phoron bore holes dotted around the middle portion of the map that marines must secure and construct drills on. Ideally there would be two groups of these, one more toward marine side and one more toward xeno side. These drilling sites would then periodically produce crates of solid phoron that can be sold by Req for a nice profit, or occasionally pried open by medical, science, and OTs to be used for the varying uses that each of those support roles has for it. Do not, I repeat DO NOT fuck with the current Req point balance to compensate, or it will make the marine-controlled mining sites less worth attacking by xenos.
On the other side of the coin, a Queen or Hivelord would be able to designate the construction some sort of spawning pool on top of these same boreholes provided there is not a drill located there already. The spawning pool would periodically produce burrowed larva up to a soft limit determined by the number of spawning pools currently alive and completed, and a HARD maximum determined by the highest number of marines playing by the time the dropships are ready to take off (with the hive's current population subtracting larva from that limit. The number of spawning pools that can be created is a minimum of 1 so long as there is a Queen (who can designate where hers goes at a distance while ovi'd) and an additional one for every living hivelord the hive has. Once the pool is designated by either the Queen or a hivelord, it requires a set amount of plasma to be stored in it before it completes construction. This plasma is to be given to it by builder caste xenos by interacting with it on help intent. If the queen is dead, however, no new silos can be designated until a new Queen evolves, though existing incomplete ones can still be completed as soon as the timer between death and a new queen being allowed to evo wears off.