So.. what caste are the fodder enemies?

[Aspen]

If the hit-and-run enemies are supposed to be drones, I'm left scratching my head at what the generic ones are. Drones are usually like, the bulk of a hive.

[PDBskittles]

Runners

[reevestone]

Originally posted by Prints:

If the hit-and-run enemies are supposed to be drones, I'm left scratching my head at what the generic ones are. Drones are usually like, the bulk of a hive.

Runners, which are birthed from smaller four-legged animals like cats or dogs or whatever. Hoenikker comments on how Weyland-Yutani was intentionally mass-producing them, which is why there are such overwhelming numbers of them. There are relatively few Drones, because Drones are born form implanted humans which this hive had relatively few of compared to the overwhelming numbers of aliens born from small animals. It's distinct from the hive in Aliens (or most cases of the Alien franchise) where the overwhelming number or totality of a hive was born from humans and thus are Drones.

Everything else we see follows from one of those two. Bursters are a mutated variant of Runners and Spitters are a mutated variant of Drones that are speculated to be an evolutionary reaction to contact with humans (and getting sick of being shot). Prowlers and Warriors are older and more developed versions of the Runner and Drone respectively, and Crushers/Praetorians are particularly old Runners/Drones that are fed Royal Jelly to help them mutate and evolve into these advanced forms.

[Slap Happy Pappy]

Think Alien 3

[Grr. [SG CMD] Majah Lazah]

Originally posted by Prints:

If the hit-and-run enemies are supposed to be drones, I'm left scratching my head at what the generic ones are. Drones are usually like, the bulk of a hive.

Your Dark Horse fanfiction is about 25 years out of date. The names are just to delineate targets and little else.

[Delta_Assault]

Runners.

[Riftwind]

Drones are usualy the bulk of the hive, but in this case there would have been BILLIONS of colonists here to make the sheer amount of numbers we encounter in the game - and of course thats not possible. Smaller runners (from animals brought up from planet) makes more sense from a game perspective.
I personally would NOT want to go into a level with hundreds of drones and warriors instead of runners O_O