Right now, bot mining beams don't heat up roids. Wouldn't it at least be marginally interesting if they did?

Yea, and I think it'd be neat to see some collectors mining the roids around stations. Especially around mining stations, I think. These collectors would have to be admired with that station's faction, and not aggro when friendly players were around.

This would be good, but then collectors AI should also be improved to move around to cooler 'roids. Something like they will only start mining 'roids that are cooler than 50 degrees, and will stop mining when the 'roid reaches 75 degrees. That way we won't have bots ruining all the mining.

Why shouldn't the bots be ruining the mining? The Hive is not there to "be nice". However, they aren't everywhere, and there are plenty of rich non-bot sectors so you can make money easily.

I agree with you on the "start mining at <50 degrees" though. :D

Leave it the way it is.

It's great to kill colectors with big cargoes because it's almost always an automatic win giving you some free mineral.

~Cpt. Overkill~

Err, bots should even have scanners (and some of the better, newly introduced rare smart bots that im proposing now) and be able to find heliocene and stuff, to ruin peoples mining of that stuff and smart lucky people can just jack the heliocene from the bots (make em be able to outmanuver good etc)

/me still stands by his orignal post

This is coming Soon. The hive bots will mine asteroids for the specific ores and minerals they need to construct more bots. The roids will heat up, and the point at which they stop mining a roid will depend on the availability of whatever its mining for. The collectors will have exactly the cargo they should, and will pass it on to transports (or directly to the queen in a bastion). A lack of a needed ore or mineral (either because its just not around or the roids are too hot), will be the cause of more agressive hive behavior (eg spreading into new systems/ attacking stations).

Some of this will probably be implemented before the rest, but rest assured, the Hive will really compete for resources before we're done.

shouldn't all of that have been implemented before introducing it to the public server???

I really like this idea. Just didn't make sense that they had beams with a '0' heat rate.

You could say any feature connected with a currently available feature should have been implemented before introducing it to the public server. But since all the features are meant to be interconnected, where exactly do you stop and do a release so the players can use what's there?

Realistic mining for the Hive is not right after what we have released on our priority list (which is all about maximizing fun per man hour), so it didn't really make sense to hold off. Right now I'm working on Hive related missions, which are just as much a part of what the Hive is supposed to be as realistic mining. So... should we wait until all the possible Hive missions are written before releasing any of it?

I get the impression that *most* of our community enjoys having new content as often as we can provide it, even if it is incomplete.

/me licks the bread crumbs left from the dev gods off of the ground.