Oh by the way, I think Hives are in a very good place balance wise just now. They make everything more difficult, but are manageable with decent tactics.
Yea, when I hear that people are getting to the point where they can shred them with a fleet I immediately think "ah, they're not hard enough!" but then I realize that the point isn't for them to be invincible death machines, and that they are succeeding in their goals of diverting significant player time and resources (and making it more interesting.
I'm really looking forward to seeing some matured ones cropping up
I'm really looking forward to working on them, looks like it's time to start implementing a few tricks here and there.
how do you know? Is the best indicator the mark level of their guards? If so, I've only met MkII equivalent.
They can only have guards of equal to or less than their mark level, yes; their guards won't always tell the full story as sometimes the hybrid hasn't had the need or chance to replenish their drones (they won't unilaterally drop them to replace them with newer ones, and they won't actively seek out a drone spawner until they're below half of their max subfleet size). Their modules are usually a better indicator because upon maturing they will pretty much instantly drop everything and go find an appropriate-level equipment factory and refit. The trouble there is that the different "branches" of classes (attacker, defender, builder) have different levels of access to the various modules. A defender (the first tier of that branch) can have a MkII forcefield, but an attacker (the first tier of that branch, exact same amount of maturity as a defender) can only have a MkI but can also have MkII machine guns and laser cannons. The builder branch tends to lack both, but can pick up construction modules from the construction factories and go around planting turrets and stuff (and, let's face it, even a builder with MkI equipment and a modest subfleet is a potential threat).
The most accurate way to tell what a hybrid is at the moment is to use F3 to turn on debug info and mouseover them, their description will mention their actual class and current mission, etc. It's a mild form of cheating but kinda necessary at least during the beta for bug reports concerning them. I think it's also a reasonable concession to players who are simply curious about the state of that game-within-a-game
