I am actually interested how many people like those kind of core placements because from my own observations most people dislike those kind lf rounds (me included) or are just vocal about it.
i feel like forward hives, especially hydro hive, are more of a symptoms from people getting tired of fighting at a hellchocke for 2 hours till nuke or xenos win.
do i like them? no. do i get why its happening? yeah.
people do want to win and not be in a stalemate at caves
They’re more fun because they’re a change of pace and demand adaptability. I’d probably dislike it if such strategies were too common, but right now they are too uncommon.
The only real problem I have when people try this stuff are the toxic xeno players upset you aren’t powergaming the meta strategies.
Personally I see these forward hives as high risk and high reward, although they could honestly be played as a game winning strategy regularly if xenos can maintain the cohesion to actually fall back from such hives rather than treating them as make/break. There’s no reason to give marines easy movement out of the LZ’s if you don’t have to; the problem is xenos overcommit to it.
Treat it as a skirmish-in-force with fallback options instead and it’ll go way better.
Hydro-hive (or any colony hive) is extremely unique due to the fact that LV-624 typically forces the xenomorphs to wait by the beach/caves until the fog drops, meaning most combat is delayed until 30 minutes into the round, with the most you might see is some backliners, but even this is uncommon since trying to skirmish in the colony as a backliner is extremely dangerous before the fog drops as your retreat paths are limited and the marines have nothing else to do until fog drops but hunt you.
In virtually every other map, you can expect to see some major combat start fairly quickly after the marines land, easily within a couple of minutes of landing. But we’re all condition to wait a extra ~10 minutes on 624. So a hydro hive is a huge disruption.
Imo, Forward hives are fun if your marine team is good, as it can lead to using more of the colony more effectively, getting recovered faster, more mobility of fronts (less use of cades, higher desire to push and claim positional advantage), and genuinely super fun back-and-forth gameplay.
But that’s a very big if.
If there is 0 good marine teamwork, then it just leads to permasiege w/ full xeno numbers which is the least fun outcome imo.
If there is 0 good xeno teamwork (ie a bunch of xenos go and die for no reason) , it’s a xeno wipe or xenos do the boring thing and take it slow.
Hydro hive is necessary because how imbalanced LV is. If you get pushed to caves, chances are that marines will just AFK for nuke and you will have to contest colony anyway, attacking heavily fortified comms without weeds. With hydro hive at least you won’t give them a chance to fortify the comms, or at least just lose fast, without having to wait until marines nuke you.
Prime queen rushing hydro to ensure survs don’t have a chance to survive aswell as not having a backup hive or tunnel to ensure no comeback from xeno’s is available if they fail to kill talls in 20 minutes.
unless the map is LV which I have grown tired of playing in, I hate it. Yeah sure, technically you can do that but the entire point of the round imo is for marines and xenos to have a middle ground where they can fight it out and make use of tactics, maneuvers, fire support and what not to gain the upper hand. Having a forward hive just forces everyone to fight it out in one decisive battle in which if the area suits the xenos becomes severely one-sided, ending in a quick siege since the marines have no time before the queen walks up to the one cadeline to screech it.
I enjoy any rounds that provide some variety from the norm, the queen could put the hive in the fuckin chapel for all i care as long as its interesting
I once played as a rav on a chapel hive in Shivas, marines allmost instantly were about to enter hive and we successfully drew them out south, then queen showed up with a devious flank from the north and we won the game, it was funny
As a backline player, having the queen put hive in hydro (LV) or bar (solaris) or any other forward location effectively kills my playstyle of goofing off/capping/dueling scout in the backline and forces me to actually contribute to the frontlines.