Well I think that it is inefficient. It has large weapons and intensive eyes that are only good for combat. If a queen is in combat then things have gone wrong. The omnivorous thing is good for overall effectiveness, but the queen is a "bottle neck" that needs, and can be provided with, intensive nutrition. We can use feeder drones and such and rely upon them for-
- I wonder if using the plant-eating is actually a technical requirement of a forest queen, can we have clarification on that?
The environmental tolerance is nice, but could be expensive. Her guards are expensive, and I.R. is probably less of a factor in an underground lair, where she will likely be stationed.
She is explicitly cruel to outsiders, with no mention of whether this includes children of other queens... She is heavily specist, which, well, year, humans are terrible and need to be broken, but complete extinction seems wasteful. They are clearly well-suited to slavery and we could probably keep some as pets in some sort of nature preserve. Who knows what sort of exciting new biologies we could develop by studying how they work! Complete destruction of everything non-hive, while fun, is just inevitable stagnation and boredom. I am not above going a little overboard in the spirit of revenge, but we really should leave ourselves the capacity for preservation of diversity.
So, It really doesn't suit my tastes, that said, there is a popular move towards "forest queens be useless", and that is pushing for technology more than good queening, so I can see that it would be useful in that regard. I prefer to make a queen a good queen, capable of defending a forest without being too energy-hungry or having anything short of our fastest-generating digestive process. but it does have value if one is looking for something else.
I think that Darters and Bows are comparatively weak while we have terrible eyesight. We have splash damage that works, and a massed-fire tactic of all of our workers firing would be effective, but it would introduce inefficiency, we would have fewer workers in total, likely for only a single ranged attack. It certainly could be worth it, but considering that our workers actually work, making them too impressive is sort of awkward. We will keep having to designate worker workers and combat workers. Really, given the poor eyesight, I feel that Darters would be more of a "charge" than "ranged" by inflicting a sudden attack immediately prior to engaging. I do not really want to just get long-range eyes. We could likely get some sort of hivemind-mapping that could be used to transmit target data at a distance... I guess we will probably need eyes at some point but they just feel ickily archaean...
I think that wasting a die on a forest queen would be good, assuming that we will be putting more effort into refining our wood digestion. It should only take a couple of revisions to get X.E.D.S. working and maybe another to get some sort of honey production? We can research ways to improve our forestry. We HAVE researched ways to improve our forestry, like, two full designs, it is pretty much our "thing" at this point. Also, terain advantages, a queen designed to support forest combat should act as a defensive bonus. We are severely understaffing that front and in no mood to reallocate resources so a fortification over there would be advantageous. If their fort holds then we will stagnate and eventually lose ground. Novico, while good for learning more about biology, is pretty much egregiously bad as a food queen, with a lot of energy expended on making it combat viable when a queen, especially a food queen, should never be in the presence of the enemy.
Also someone called themselves "Novico", which might confuse folk down the line somewhere.
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Topic: Hive Race: The Hive (Read 37613 times)