@Spy_Emanciator said in Hives Need a Nerf vol. III:
Ok well since this topic has been hijacked several times over, i'll reguide the focus back onto the fact that while ecoing, losing some build efficiency using hives vs engineers is not a big trade off if your completed goal adds more income to your rates. So when you look at the possible curves players can pull off ecoing, Cybran is simply out of balance as they will never lose that race. Add any overflow or throw style play (which happens often when players intentionally lose their front position and fall back). No engineer clumping, and to the range of hives, once 4-8 t3 fabs can be completed, the hives can then just sit on a quantum gateway and keep their production value in use. Not to mention as stec did in the example, your eco is so popping at that point that you can just quickly build more hives in new positions to eco more. I just can't imagine doing that as a seraphrim player under any conditions with the 33% Build buff gone.
It's true that you can generally spam up more buildpower quickly, but the main bottleneck when ecoing is always going to be mass. Assisting nukes is an exception but nuke assist has already been nerfed. Sitting on a gateway keeps hives active but doesn't give a speed increase once you use all the mass in storage. Once you get out an SACU they generally either assist the gateway go build something, in either case they spend more mass than they generate so you won't really hit a buildpower bottleneck after that.
You can generally get around engie pathfinding problems with good rally points and assisting them on each-other. They can move around and start construction (hives can only assist/reclaim). You can drop engis on the map for reclaim or move them out to build sams without having to risk a ras com. Hives have some advantages (shield upgrading with Hive assist is expensive but fast and good for arty wars) but so does engie spam.
And I watched the replay, Stec got so much eco and stuff because he balanced his power well, he got reclaim, and didn't do anything but eco for the first chunk of the game. He was in air slot but was very delayed on T3. If you hadn't suicided your first two strats and had killed his one asf with your 5 before it shot down your strat, you could have completely destroyed his base. Even at minute 20 you had much more air and could have sent some strats or corsairs and destroyed his entire mass fab/pgen grid.