Just a thought I had, drone " tax " is inherently negative because it also taxes on your evolution, but if you could evolve from lets say,
A drone towards a warrior/lurker/spitter within the first 15 minutes of the game (The Major Boon, only for drone), akin to the Queen’s Boosted building.
Would it encourage more people to at least, not AFK in hive and contribute a little to hive building?
Or is this unneccessary, this is a team game and people willing to take up drone and forfit their chance at a T3 is the spirit of the game and this just streamlines CM to be more combat focused.
I play on low-pop, so I frequently don’t see many builders, wanted some other opinions on this. You can still go defender at 7 minutes, which might be needed to help with certain survivor holds.
Why not make drone not only do this the first 15min but make drone always do it? Afk in hive happends all round, it will not fix afk in hive becuase not everyone like to be a drone at all. But if it encourage just one of the afk xenos its a win. Maby they want to go healer drone and make a garden where it want to evo futher, or build defences before it can go warrior/spitter/backliner lurker? Personally late in the round as larva i would go garden drone and make fruit at frontline while i wait for warrior evo.
Being able to upgrade into any T2 sounds fantastic. We could probably expand it a little bit past the first 15 minutes, maybe even set it to end eh, 2 minutes after marines land? But the first 15 is a great starting point anyways. It’s just QoL, with no real negatives.
I’m really in favor of this! It would make the xeno early game alot easier to manage. Additionally, it would put less pressure on new queens to build the entire hive.
I’m going to reach out in coding chat about our policies for balance PRs and hopefully have something up shortly!
God, this would be absolutely huge for rounds when the Hive just needs a drone and I take one for the team because once there’s other drones waiting through larva evo again SUUUUCKS