Subscribe to download
Southern Hive Queen and Fog Queen

It always bothered me that the Southern Hive Queen and the Western Hive Queen were identical. Why doesn't the Southern Queen look like her subjects? This mod creates two new characters, the Fog Queen and the Southern Hive Queen using assets from the vanilla Hiver body textures copied onto the Hive Queen texture.

The Hive Queen in the Royal Valley is replaced with the Southern Hive Queen.

The Fog Queen is only for a playable character or as a resource. The Fog Hive Queen is either canonically dead at the start of the game or never existed so there is no where to spawn her without changing the lore and I wanted it to be as lore friendly as I could.

-----------------------------

I just released patches for the new races to be compatible with

SprendiX's mod Military Craft

Blubb's mod
Animation Overhaul

And AGO's mod More Combat Animation


-----------------------------

Theories on Hivers:

Hive seem to be deliberately a mystery, most people agree that fogmen are infected with a brain parasite that they succumb to after they leave their hive, then... things happen (possibly exposure to the Queen's pheromones keeps the sickness at bay or the withdrawal of not being connected to the hive leads to risky behavior) that ends with madness or infection. Whether it is the Western or Southern doesn't matter, when they get sick they turn blue and are overcome with an unending hunger. That the endless flood of fogmen in the Fog Isles are all hivers that were booted from their respective clans.

I made the Fog Queen mostly as an idea that the fogmen are a fallen hive that used to rule somewhere around the Fog Isles. That they've always been blue but the parasite blocked their ability to benefit from pheromones and the resulting madness caused a coup that the Fog Queen barely escaped from with her life. Fogmen have their own culture, they worship the consumption of all humanoids (even their own kin), they follow a hierarchy, and defend each other. Those don't strike me as the actions of a mindless horde of zombies, that's a broken social structure of deeply disturbed individuals.

Maybe the "parasite" is the result of cannibalism. In the real world humans that eat other humans wind up with prions, improperly folding proteins, that infect the body and slowly cause it to fall apart ending in madness and death. Most vertebrates don't have the enzyme required to digest protein from their own species, that's why cattle that are accidentally fed cattle protein develop "mad cow" disease, have to be put down and the body burned so it doesn't infect others that eat the meat.

I posit that hivers tell one another that if they leave the hive they will become fogmen as a way of getting them to stay in line and not ask questions, sort of a bedtime story "Always love the Queen or you will turn into a fogman!" They don't keep a written record of their history, have a fairly poor oral history, and are required to work for the Queen nonstop until they drop dead. That doesn't foster any level of higher thinking and debate often ends in exile. A society like that would be prone to rumors becoming "facts."

Probably not canon, but I liked the idea.

Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk.