The Hive

Why are people so tied to "hives"?  These large clusters of bases are supposed to provide mutual support during an attack, but in my experience, it doesn't work.  It is civil war tactics in a game where you are armed with machine guns.

Pros

• Short distances for trade
• Short response times for counter attacking invaders
• Short gathering times for war rallies
• Group attacking local rebel targets is easy
• Close clustering provides a time buffer from attack by enemies, as they have no place to land

Cons

• Hives are targets for players attacking to gather resources, which means you have to go further to gather
• Hive members compete for local resources amongst themselves
• Attackers have short distances, which increases the number of bases they can hit in a limited period
• Hives are easy to track down

So it is true that you lose some versatility when trading, but the principal component of the game is collecting resources, not giving them away.  With that in mind, the economics sways to the con.

Collective defense in this game is a joke.  We are all individual defenders, and rely on traps and hospitals to counterbalance the attackers advantage.  Hives provide a mechanism for rapid counterstrike, but a well disciplined attacker can avoid counter punches with good timing and a stock of fallbacks and deploy speedups to vary arrival time deploy.  If you are constantly deployed, you are very hard to hit  (if there is nothing in your base to lose).

Even with very large hives, I've seen a pair of attackers be almost unstoppable, with one planted in the hive with shields up, one constantly rallied.  When they attack, they ravage the farms (up to their warehouse limits), rally their troops for protection, and ship the gathered resources to the shielded partner as a bank.  Its almost unstoppable.

With small hives, you have a perpetual target on your back.  Large players randomly teleport around the board, or site to site hop into the middle of small hives to collect resources.  Unless you have several level 21s who can provide round the clock coverage, these kind of attackers are hard to dissuade.

Hives put too many men in the same foxhole.  Five men are a juicy opportunity, one or two is a waste of bullets.  In my opinion, a more correct strategy is spreading your bases around a region, approximately one base per screenshot.  How does this help?  You trade a little bit on group war rallying and trading speed, but you don't provide a way for attackers to quick strike multiple bases.  Being spread out tends to give you better access to local gathering resources.  Spread out hives make it very hard to locate an alliance, and that kind of secrecy is a big win.  All together, I believe this is the appropriate strategy for the future of Mobile Strike.