(January 13th, 2025, 00:57)T-hawk Wrote: Hive is average overall but easy to play. Beeline Industrial Automation, adopt Police/Planned/Wealth, use the support and industry to field lots of terraformers, terraform with forest, ICS plenty, build Human Genome and police units for drone control, ramp up with recycling tanks and eventually boreholes. Hive's upside is less than University/Morgan/UN running Free Market, but it has a solid floor that you can't go too badly wrong with drone or planet problems or the penalties of the bad factions (Sparta industry, Believers research) or getting attacked (perimeter defenses, industry to get out counterattackers.)
Agree that Free Drones are the only worthwhile faction in the expansion. And yeah the Pirates are entertaining, and easy because the AI can't manage to attack you.
Yeah, I'd agree that the Spartans are the weakest faction. The Believers can at least rely on zerg-rushing weak units or probe teams to try and close the tech gap. Spartans are just kinda painful because of the industry penalty. A slight increase in morale isn't really worth it when your bases can't keep up, and if your bases can't keep up good luck fielding military units.
I'd still say that none of the factions are horribly balanced however, some take more time to get used to then others, but none of them are cripplingly bad in my opinion. The Morganites I find quite hard to play, but when you play them right they give the University a run for their money at running through the tech tree, and are the most flexible when it comes to getting any victory/ending. Heck, as Morgan you can also make friends with your nemesis Deidre since you can run green economics. He might be the only one that can makes friends with his nemesis come to think of it?