- Fixed bug where Border Skirmish mission usually wouldn't show up in the station
- Hive expands outward from bastion (queen) sectors
- Queen shield recharge rate depends on strength of its subordinate sectors, and Leviathan shield recharge rate is tied to the number of live Queens
- Fixed bug where Military Trident turrets (with swarm missiles) would only shoot one missile while controlled by players

So, can someone explain how this expanding hive works? I mean, how will it be different?

Definitions:
Hive: all the bots in a greater infestation. There is only one Hive currently, centered in Sedina and expanding into Odia and Latos.
Stronghold: the place where the Leviathan is.
Leviathan: the caterpillar-looking thing. Blow it up and the rest of that Hive follows.
Bastion: sectors outside the stronghold containing a Queen and a large number of other hive bots.
Queen: the beetle-looking thing. Blow it up and that Bastion will be abandoned.
Settlement: a hive-infested sector other than a Bastion or Stronghold. Inflicting enough losses on these will cause them to be abandoned (regardless of whether you're on a mission or NPCs are present).

Previously the Hive expanded to nearby asteroid sectors from the Stronghold, each new sector beginning with one observer and upgrading through 3 stages of Settlement to a Bastion. At each stage the Hive either upgrades or abandons that sector (for a few hours) depending on whether the Hive or closest human faction lost too many ships first. Thus there was one mostly-contiguous growth of hive-infested sectors and it rarely made it into Odia or Latos.

Now, new Bastions are spawned in random (for now) asteroid sectors within the systems the Hive is allowed to expand into. The same growth of settlements now occurs around each Bastion. More importantly, the Queen and Leviathan's shield recharge rates are now dependent upon how much infrastructure they have. In the case of the Bastion-Queens, it is determined by the number and size of the infestations that grew out of it (or infested sectors that were closest to a given Bastion at the time of their original Bastion's destruction). The Leviathan's recharge rate depends on the number of Bastions. This is all in order to create a bit more depth of gameplay with the Hive, making it impossible to go straight for the Leviathan or even a well fortified Bastion-Queen.

In the near future, the four Queens in the Stronghold will be incorporated into this scheme; the Leviathan's shields will depend on them too and their shields will depend on something (maybe the number of lesser ships in the sector), and the existence of all four for some period of time will be a prerequisite for new Bastions being spawned.

Hot Damn. I guess its back to hiving for me.

~Crello~

And if you ram the queen just right...

yeah those fancy shield mechanics sound interesting .. but if you can still just knock them out with a bit of rammage they are kinda pointless.

So, what shields issues are you guys talking about, specifically? We changed a bunch of stuff, just wondering if there's still some exploits out there that we forgot. Thanks.

get a rag and load it up with concs
drop large pile of concs next to levi (not too close so they don't blow up immediately)
snuggle with levi and wait till some bot gets close enough to trigger the mines
after a few tries the shield was usually gone.
this also works with other caps

sometimes just ramming into it was enough.

dunno if this still works but it did a few months ago.

I've also seen the observers aroudn the levi knock out the shields

We've changed a whole lot of stuff in the last few months, with respect to shields and so forth. If people find stuff that still works, currently, please let us know.

still works. this is how the levi looked like after blowing myself up on it with two concs.
http://home.arcor.de/famscheffler/ven/dump0058.png.jpg

my explosion seems to deal a whole lot of damage

also all the bots were busy far away from the levi most of the time.

/me wonders who came up with the idea of attacking a Levi with conc mines....

dunno but you used to be able to kill queens with the old zoom away warp and a moderatley heavy ship. youde ram it and insane speeds and essentially be a GIANT rail pellet. though ive seen people hump hac's just right to down thier shields effortlessley. and if you ram the head on the queens enough youll down the sheilds.

makes me wonder, what if you used tons of conc mines to send a moth full of samo (or something else heavy) flying into the levi at say 30 kilometers per second?

you'd get a spinning horseshoe of a hive bot spinning off into the distance. with some amount of damage on it.

And no target pole in sight. :(

I guess this would fall into the vaguely the same category.

A few nights ago while doing border skirmish a Serco HAC spawned and was destroyed by an Itani terradon that had collided with it.
The HACs shields were already down and still had ~90% armor. The HAC decided to combust when the terradon's nose prodded into it at a semi high speed. I'm not sure how fast the terradon was moving but I'd say it was somewhere around 80-90m/s.

The terradon survived the incident although it was spinning a whole lot afterwards

Ramming speed!