Hello!
This post will be a fairly detailed rundown of everything you need or want to know about Hive, starting with the most important information and ending with the least so you can stop reading whenever you'd like.
A Quick Tour of Hive's History.
Image of Hive from May 2021
Hive was originally titled Project Exor, a game like Factorio where you'd develop a colony far into the future on an alien world. The game was extremely over-scoped with way too many features and paths for one developer to maintain. Even though I did start with that goal in mind, It completely changed. What was originally a game with only 15 structures and a web-like research tree, is now a challenging tower defence colony sim with over 30 structures and several locations to fight for. It's nothing alike its original plan, but has developed into its own unique game with what I consider to be a pretty cool adaptation of the colony sim genre.
In development since January 2020, Hive has undergone many iterations, fixes and improvements. Below you'll see how the game has changed visually before diving into its mechanics.
Image of Hive from August 2022
The Mechanics of Hive
Upon starting the game you'll have a choice of ignoring the tutorial or playing through it. While it is possible to understand the game without it, you'll probably make quite a few mistakes if you don't!
When starting a map, you'll be given a mission brief. This shows you almost everything you need to know about the map. You don't have to read this either, but you can always open it again later if you want to know more about the dangerous enemies in that region.
Enemies
There are a lot of enemies in Hive. A lot of them are more or less the same such as the Desert mite and the Grasslands mite. However, every creature which isn't a normal mite is different on each map. Let me explain.
- On Haven Forest, Baxmites will explode on impact, damaging many structures in their radius.
- On The Sleek Dunes, Baxmites erupt into stone-like spikes that fly in all directions damaging things they come into contact with.
- On The Violet Grasslands, Baxmites inject grubs into buildings which deteriorate their health over time. These will go away naturally and do stack if more Baxmites attack. There are ways to remove them quicker...
While I don't expect you to remember any of that, the point is to show you that each map is a different experience. What works in one zone, may not work elsewhere. The Sleek Dunes will force you to spread out much further and the Dense Tropics will offer you safe spaces where enemies rarely appear. I don't want to spoil every enemy and their capabilities, but each map has their own Queen. Queens are the ultimate threat. They come out of Hives when you destroy them using a catapult, or capture them with a Hive Extractor. They all have unique abilities, but that comes with the passive defence that they do not die upon impact with any standard structure like other mites.
Structures
My aim with Hive was to make as many structures as possible feel important regardless of your time spent in that playthrough.
There's room to disagree, but I have tried to meet this goal as best I can. There's always a benefit to forgetting Hunter's Shacks in favour of the more productive Silkboar Pens, but many other structures do not follow such a linear progression path. Although the research tree suggests going further gives you stronger structures, this is not necessarily the case. Researching allows you to combat situations more effectively.
An image of the research tree with outdated art from earlier this year
Basic Defence unlocks the Wooden Tower. This is a cheap, quick to construct, low health tower which fires brittle stone arrows capable of killing small mites and overwhelming larger ones. Its place in the world is up to you, but traditionally it will do well as an easy defender early game and a first line of defence late game. Their purpose shifts from taking down enemies, to thinning the herd or weakening stronger mites later on. This concept echoes through half of Hive's defensive structures.
Four of the defensive structures are designed to damage enemies directly, targeting whichever one comes closest first. The rest, are for more creative attacks.
For example, Web Towers slow enemies down, Gas Towers put Hives to sleep and kill all mites in a huge radius, Chemical Sprayers weaken enemies reducing their health and damage output and Stitching Towers will fix your structures for you at a massive discount compared to manual repair.
Every structure has its pros and cons. Gas towers are expensive to run, web towers require crops harvested from late game agriculture and stitching towers are cheap as long as you don't lose track of your wood production.
Agriculture & Boosting
While you can speed the game up to 2x or 3x, sometimes things need to be done faster. In Hive, this can be achieved by feeding structures and the (imaginary) colonists inside them. The game will handle the distribution for you, but you need to keep stocked up. All food will be evenly distributed among structures where possible and will provide a percentage boost to its productivity / speed. You can achieve a maximum of 100% boost on most structures.
Like the structures, I wanted farms and agriculture to be useful at every stage. You can progress through the agricultural tree separately with an Organic Research Centre structure. There are 3 alien crops to unlock, each providing a specific boost to every building that accepts it. To get 100% boost, you can't just unlock the best crop and call it a day. You'll need all 6 food sources to reach that goal. Animal Product, Fresh Goods, Wheat, Crete, Fynx and Morro.
Boosting structures is not at all necessary and the Agricultural Tree can be ignored - you won't be able to use web towers or grow your own polymer though. Hand picking polymer throughout the map can get tedious late game when everything is on the edge of collapse!
Progression and Achievements
To beat a map in Hive, you must escape it by fuelling your dropship. This is done by capturing Hives with Hive Extractors. Doing so will cause an angry barrage of mites to come knocking at your door(s) and thus will require some foresight before you go kicking them around.
The difficulty of the game gradually scales and it will get harder the more you build and the more you disrupt them. They are aggravated by your presence and will attack on sight if you build too close. Unfortunately for you, they appear to enjoy settling near important resources that you need to mine.
Winning one map unlocks the next. Although that implies each one is harder than the last, it's not necessarily true as they provide their own challenges. For example the first map, Haven Forest, is pretty straightforward and has all resources within reach. The next - The Sleek Dunes, is much larger and resources are far apart with a staggering lack of wood but an abundance of stone. What was plentiful on Haven, may not be elsewhere. You'll need more foresters and you'll need the towers to protect them. That might not be enough for you and you will want to speed things up. But food grows slower in the Desert, so you'll need more farms too. The mission brief will make you blissfully aware of these issues so you can plan ahead.
There are 30 Achievements in Hive. They're all pretty straightforward, except maybe one. Pay attention to who gets in your rocket on lift off.
Boring Stuff
Here's a bunch of boring facts about Hive if you're curious
You can save and load in Hive so don't worry about losing hours of work. This is standard for any game, but I thought I'd reassure you as the game is fairly small and its an important feature. You can also name saves the same thing if you wish. A bunch of stats are shown too, such as enemies killed, time played etc.
There are a bunch of awesome music tracks to listen to for each zone in Hive and a special track when you have beaten them all.
Hive will only be available on Windows and Linux (maybe Mac later) and also only available in English. Apologies for this, but I don't want to risk using Google Translate for other languages and messing it up. Please do not purchase Hive if you find this inconvenient!
Further Content:
I'm not sure what comes next for Hive, that depends on its success. However, if any game-breaking bugs are found, or I've made any minor mistakes I'll try to get that addressed as soon as I can. Please let me know where you can.
Thanks for reading, please share Hive around if you think there are others who enjoy this genre!