I have noticed something that presents a problem to new players who start out as UIT Players. There is no Hive Skirmish Option in UIT Space. Was working with a new player last night who had not even known about the Hive Skirmish since they had stayed in UIT space and were afraid to enter Grey Space. This puts the UIT players at a disadvantage since Serco, Itan and Corvus all have the Hive Skirmish that can be taken locally. Also in doing a Queen Skirmish last night I noticed that the Overseers did nothing to protect the queen, just watched the Queen. Even when fired upon they just sat there until they exploded. No fighting back.

UIT space is too small to have a 3-system dynamic hive which isn't at any of the starting systems.

Easily solved, give UIT more systems.

Did not mean a three system hive. Only suggested good areas to have the skirmishes.

Have the covus hive expand to azek or something

I've seen Hive Skirmish evolving along with the rest of VO. It started entirely in Grey space with the Sedina hive, and expanded out to Itani and Serco space because the Grey hive was being overhunted. I really don't see the dynamic hive staying in nation space at all once universe exploration opens up, because the Serco and Itani based hives actually voided the original bot sector information, and trips up newbies who go there and either can't find bots, or run into huge swarms of Assaults in sectors that should have been collector-only.

And you can find HS missions in UIT space, but only at TPG and Orion stations when the Latos hive presence grows sufficiently large (since they both have stations in Latos, and HS missions show up at all stations of the faction that offers them). Actually putting a dynamic hive in UIT space would not only void a lot of their newbie hunting grounds, but result in absurdly hard hunts for HS missions since they'd be split up among all the different factions. Making a change is only good if it solves the problem, and adding a UIT dynamic hive not only fails to effectively solve the problem, but introduces a new one.

In my opinion, the Sedina hive just needs a slight adjustment. It currently sends Queens to Odia first, Sedina second, and Latos third. Have it fill up Latos first, instead of last. That way, some stations in UIT space (TPG and Orion) will have HS missions on a regular basis, thus making the UIT newbies aware of HS missions.

In the long run, once the expanded universe opens up, the hive should move out of nation space almost entirely, aside from low-level basic bots on resource runs. Transports should take over from the current system Queens, Queens should be found rarely, and Leviathans should -never- appear inside nation space. The monitoring and military might of the nations in their own space ought to keep the hive mostly outside, or at least in unmonitored space.

Orion and TPG are not part of the UIT, and the greyspace hive expands out from Sedina. The only reason the bot lists on sector mouseovers are wrong is because they're static and the dynamic hive is.. dynamic. :P