Right, had a chance to play plenty of hivelord and drone over the weekend and I'm more confused than ever. Long ass text coming.
Other than in some rounds having a queen with PTSD or the one who micromanaged literally every single xeno every single minute to the point where she told us when to fart and when to breath, I saw some pretty conflicting info.
For example, normally you start doing your 2x2 walls, or blockades from 2 walls, 2 doors on repeat. But it seems like the game was literally no designed to do this. What I mean by this is marines simply walk in after destroying them with ease. This is even worse when either we are on low-pop or when people are unwilling to join the xeno side and we have 100 vs 15.
I saw hivelords get around this problem in a few ways and here is where my confusion comes. The confusing part is that it..works. And yet we are not allowed to do these things for some reason. I copied the other hivelord and all we got is yelling from queen. In practice the usual layouts fell withing minutes, but these 'meta' designs DID NOT. And yet, queen kept b*tching about it. I don't get it. It's pretty black and white if it works or not. If it does, why do queens feel like doing the same old same old if it doesn't work?
For some specifics:
- Instead of building your usual 1 tile wide walls with doors, we built around 3-4 sometimes 5 wide walls. It's more like a room of walls. The idea was to block off C4s and/or force wasting mortar. In practice marines never get through it. So it did work. We forced a flank, marines got wiped. Queen b*tched. You tell me why.
- Spamming sticky resin and resin nodes. Instead of weed gets destroyed by 1 hit, it can withstand 3. This is to slow down marines also. Aka we had more time to regen, and in one specific round, marines had 2 flanks. We wasted at least 10-15 minutes with these defenses with ZERO xenos manning them. We fought off the other flank, rotated behind an killed these too. Have those defenses not been there, they would have walked in and surrounded and wiped us. Xenos were still mad for wasting 'resources', yet it was pretty clear why did we win.
- Spamming fast resin with frenzy pheromons. Just had to observe it for 5 minutes to see a massacre. Perma killed enough marines to push and separate them. Queen literally said after killing 20 marines..to stop using fast resin.
I don't get it. You might say we would have won without these defenses, but I'm 100% sure those specific places would have fallen without them. I talked about this with some ancient xenos and they all told me that a) queen is an idiot and b) this is metagaming as I am abusing the walls. Well is taking 3 shotguns with a macro not abusing the game? If devs don't like it why do they let me build so many walls? Also regarding the queen, some of them said to the builders that great job, so not all of them were against it, they saw it did save the hive. But I feel like some queens are just too stuck up to do things their way, even if they contribute almost zero to the round.
Need my answers or I won't sleep for 10 days.