Hive

Basic Information
The hive is an offensive alien structure available from Stage 3 that can be placed on the floor, ceiling, and walls.

Hives shoot out an insect type attack damaging a nearby human. The insects the hive shoots out are completely immune to all sources of damage. While the swarm has a base damage of 50, it benefits from human body modifiers, meaning it can do double damage if hitting from above at the humans head. Subsequently it will do heavily reduced damage if hitting from below, or against armoured targets.

Additionally the firing rate of the hive is highly variable; another swarm will be fired every 5 seconds, however once a swarm hits the target and returns to the hive it will always produce another swarm. This means if a target is hit adjacent to the hive, swarms can be produced as fast as every 0.5 seconds. This correlates into greatly increased DPS with decreased distance to target.

Hive placement strategy
Hives are very large so care should be taken when placing them that your team are not blocked by them. This is especially noticeable when placed on ceilings of choke points and base entry.

A lot of build points is required to build the hive, and in a majority of cases they are vastly inferior at base defence than both the cheaper acid tube, and the trapper.

The a strong advantage of the hive is their increased range, using them in a large open base to prevent jetpackers is a viable strategy.

Hives should always be placed high up so they are less vulnerable to damage and they deal increased damage to humans.

If the hive is combined with a trapper it has the capability to do very high DPS as the swarm will return to the hive very quickly for another one to be produced. The trapper also prevents the hive swarm from being kited.

Hive counter strategy
Due to the insects style of tracking, moving repeatedly in a circle makes it very difficult for the insect attack to catch and hit you.

Hives are very large and so easy to shoot. They also cannot fire upon you without direct line of sight, however insects will follow you behind walls once the attack has been fired.

Game mode and QVM Variation differences
Tremulous 1.2 GPP
 * bounding box reduced 70x70x50 -> 40x40x40
 * sense range increased 400 -> 500
 * fires at attackers regardless of range
 * repeat reduced 5000 -> 3000
 * no longer fires if the swarm won't be able to hit
 * fires from the top of its bounding box
 * can have more than one swarm active at a time
 * swarm changes
 * damage increased 50 -> 80
 * no longer do locational damage
 * movement speed increased 240 -> 320
 * lifetime reduced 15000 -> 3000
 * no longer die from hitting a wall or being more than 6000 units from their hive
 * target the nearest human instead of chasing the same one until death