@maudlin27 said in Kennel and Hives:
Kennels are good for getting reclaim from unpathable areas (e.g. if a plane crashes somewhere your engis cant reach but in a safe area), while in team games, kennels benefit from being able to assist teammates high priority targets that would be out of range from a hive.
Nobody uses kennels to go reclaim a plane like that and I just gave like 10 reasons why mobility is at best net neutral if not net negative for kennels. Your reason does not make it worthwhile when kennel drones die when gifted, die to ints, die to arty, and die to bombs and then take 2 minutes to rebuild while you have no way to spend the mass you are now floating in storage.
Maybe you get lucky and lose 0 drones. Great. Now you only float mass for the 2 minutes it takes to get back to your base and assist your own stuff.
I also think its good that factions dont all have equally effective units (provided they each have things they're better at), so while I agree overall a hive is better than a kennel, the same goes for various other things as well (e.g. UEF has a better shield and PD than Cybran).
Cool. Hives have absurd advantages to kennel even when costing the same. Kennel being like triple inefficient to hives in aggregate is stupid. Either make kennel cost as much or give hives as many handicaps as kennels have to face.
Cyb PD has tradeoffs with UEF PD. It never misses, it doesn't overkill reclaim, and it's cheap.
Cybran shield has upgrades which allow it to abuse recharge since you spawn an upgraded shield with max hp instantly. This is part of what allows hives to abuse hard in staying alive as you can pop down tons of low level shields and instantly upgrade them with hives to keep them alive. Ever see a hive supported t2 arty base? They're very fun to break.
The hive is strictly dominant over kennel, the one advantage of mobility carries as many if not more negatives as positives.
An alternative to making them more mass efficient could also be to make them significantly quicker to build vs a hive - i.e. then they would have another niche advantage where they're better if you're about to overflow mass.
This doesn't resolve anything. You don't make BP to deal with sudden gluts of mass, you solve that by putting it into consistent resource generation. Making more BP to deal with reclaim is a noobtrap that causes you to end up with 400 engies and nothing to power them. If you just mean garbage scaling, I'd still make literally any other form of BP or just not scale like shit in the first place.
You make more BP to get MORE reclaim faster but by the stage of kennels that isn't a factor anymore. And even if it were, I’d rather not lose all my reclaimers to a random int flying by one shotting all of them.