What Are Hex Trees
When I refer to hex trees, I mean the idea of having a stationary gardener on the map who builds a ring of trees around himself. He then sits and waters this cluster while spawning bots out of a small gap left between the trees.
Vulnerability
The gardener can't shot or chop. Also if you have it broadcasting even only every so often, it's just making a homing beacon for the other team to narrow in on. Scouts can swing right in and take out your gardener pretty easily.
Protecting Hex Trees
The best idea I have to protect these clusters at the moment is to keep some scouts camped out in your trees. Let them work on some heavy computations for you if you want but keep them close and watching out for enemies or incoming bullets.
The scouts should protect your gardeners at all costs. Your gardener should keep track of how many are defending it and spawn more scouts for self-defense.
Keeping It On The Down-Low
If you want your gardener to stay mostly covert, you can use mapping precision to relay small bits of information to your defending scouts. Meaning, instead of broadcasting a message, you can encode information into the gardener's coordinate precision. To do that you need to leave just a lit bit of wiggle room in there for the gardener.
The first scout defending the gardener that notices the coordinate signal can become a messenger. Flying off a bit to broadcast, as to not give away the cluster's position.
