if i were to be a queen what is everything i should know

[Schall Meister]

all i see queens do most of the round is stay in the hive and give birth to the xenomorphs yet their giving orders without moving a muscle, now i know they can spectate, but i feel like theres more to it, anything im missing?

[ThePiachu]

Here are some videos showing how the game looks from a Queen perspective:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH1QnqsiAgg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwWmIVLm25E

It's easiest to give a Queen a go by playing a Drone and taking over when another Queen dies. Often the Hive can be in a poor state anyway so you might not do much more harm .

Generally, your job will be to wrangle the hive to something coherent. You can try coordinating attacks and retreats.

Early round you want to weed everything and whip the Hive to slash everything and break all the doors. You have 30 minutes to prepare for a fight. Get your T2s and T3s in order, etc. You want to give your Leader status to a Drone, give them Recovery, and maybe even watch another Drone to have more plasma for weeding.

Another useful trick is you can observe the various xenos using the Hive Status tab.

Beyond that it's mostly about figuring out how you want to fight the Marines - how you flank them, how you break them, etc. Once you deal with that problem, it's just about the Alamo - you call it down with the computer, you want to lock it ASAP, and launch within 10 minutes (otherwise the lock disengages). You won't be able to use any burrowed larva once you're airborne, so make sure you have everything you need.

[Butlerblock]

Never use recovery unless you're off ovi, or if there are a lot of important castes/xenos that are resting, however be prepared to put it back to warding, or if it's very early game and you're using it for drones, but switch to warding when marines start engaging often.

Never use frenzy unless you're charging in for a screech, or you're giving a leader that you know for a fact will wreck shit with it, usually in the form of a rav/hunter/warrior.

Be prepared to read chat really fast and find a xeno that's only being told by the number/caste, and be ready to hit that heal button and change to warding.

Don't over push, you're not invicible, even after you've screeched. If you don't have a lot of xenos following you on your screech, don't be afraid to back out, and please, don't run directly into a tank, you're going to be stunned for 3+ seconds plus 70% of your HP being knocked off by an LTB shot.

Being proud and confident isn't something that's frowned upon as a queen, xenos will more often follow your screech engages and orders if you show that you mean business, but be prepared to back it up with some robustness.

Don't forget to make leader roles, a lot of queens forget this, especially important because they get the same pheromones you use, with the AOE effect of it as well. However I personally don't give leader roles to castes that won't be hard engaging, or won't need it, such as crushers (most of their counters will ignore warding as well), boiler (pretty obvious, does not need any of the 3 pheromones ever, if it was going to die without warding, having warding in that situation would not have saved it) praetorian(preference usually, depends on how far back and safe the prae plays). Don't be afraid to give leader to a drone that needs the recovery early game, but remember to take away the leadership once marines start fighting the hive, because other castes generally use it better. Also don't be afraid to give leadership to a lone caste that is robust. A robust hunter or runner with warding can do 10x more than what an average ravager or crusher can do with warding.

Other than being a heal/warding bot, theres not much else an ovi queen can do, but there's not much wrong with that. But there's always morale boosts you can give, usually in forms of verbal encouragement, and they almost always help, even if they don't seem like it.

Also, probably the most important thing as a queen, your most important job is to ovi as quickly as possible. It's okay if you don't want to nest at your round start spawn spot, but you only have about 80 seconds to find somewhere to ovi, or else you're going to fuck up evolutions for most of the xenos (evolving as a larva takes roughly 100 seconds, so 80 seconds to get there, and a good 20 seconds to situate yourself and ovi, oving takes about 10-15 seconds.)

[Reuben Owen]

if you didn't get a drone/there's no drones around to plant your eggs, you can plant some 1 tile away/clear them while in ovi

use recovery/leadership on drones/carriers befoer marines attack to give them more plasma to work with, take leadership off and give it to battling castes, (as guard... or frenzy if you're feeling ballsy) after marines strike, praes are usually a good choice since they have a strong (recovery) pheromone of their own to combine it with

don't watch a xeno that has leadership unless you're healing them, since you can get bonus pheromone spread by watching a nonleader

constantly check your hive composition and if there's a caste you want more of/is lacking, announce it just say "Larvas go drone" or some such, say it every 5-10 minutes

if you're new at fighting type queen you still want to get close to the marines as possible before screeching... the most important part is to get off a good screech, even if you don't get any slashes of your own off your sisters should be able to, if you took a lotta damage to get off your screech immediately go back,d on't even try to hit the juicy spec let your others do that, even if you took no damage you should as a general rule, start to back off a second or two before the marines get back up

if your screech whiffed at all, immediately back off
either way after you screech switch to stunspit


if there's a tank nearby don't even bother going out there

stay ovi as much as possible, at least until you push out as many buried as you can, if there's no buried left chances are most of your xenos are evolved so you can spend less time ovi... but if you check hive status and you have like 1 t3, 2 t2 and 15 t1, might wanna get back on that eggsac

[FGRSentinel]

An important thing to remember is that, as Queen, it's your job to try to balance T2 and T3 roles. If 5-6 larva go Runner, don't be afraid to order them to ask before going Lurker, for instance. Most roundstart xenos can evolve to T2 without difficulty, but after some point you reach a point where the game limits evolutions to T2 and T3 to a number of slots equal to half the number of players at the lower tier. Each caste matures and gains the ability to evolve at different times as well. Runners reach maturity and evolution at 200 ticks to, for instance, the Drone's 500, meaning that a large number of Runners can, and often will, all go Lurker and lock the rest of the hive out of T2 slots for a good chunk of the game. Just about every T1 caste except Drones can be expected to do this if there's more than 4-5 of them at round start.

Likewise, "free evo" to T3 is nice, but it's still a good idea to set a limit until you have 1-2 of each T3, or at least the ones you expect to need. In the vein of the above, oversaturated T2 castes will often mass-evolve to T3 if they were roundstart xenos and you need to be able to say "no" to them when they try to pull this: if T2 and T3 are not oversaturated (using more slots than the hive can support evolution for) and there's no slots open, about one out of every seven players will be controlling a T3, two will be T2, and the last four T1.

[GoliathTheDespoiler]

When ovi'd you have two jobs, basically, that you'll have to put the most effort into:

1. Giving orders / watching over your babies

2. Listening to them and reading information from what they say + what you see.

Giving orders is ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY. A good hive needs a queen that leads, they won't just 'win' themselves, you need to coordinate all that robustness.

As for 2. It's really helpful you stay on top of what's happening, intel is your weapon, and your xenos can wield it. As queen you probably have access to the most information in the game, and have the most 'game knowledge'. You can see all of your xenos at any time, any place, no matter what. You can see EXACTLY what they see and more, you are the GOD of gathering knowledge, just don't forget to use it!

When deovi'd, you have 3 jobs:

1. Coordinate your babies to stay near you if attacking, or meet you where you're moving.

2. Be robust and NOT DIE. ESPECIALLY NOT DIE.

3. Infect shit up the WAZOO.

I'll go into deets in a bit in a edit.