TommyD and I came up with a commander strategy (we both love to command) involving quickly taking down a hive:

The Double Siege

When you have exactly 100RP's set aside, you can try this out. Basically, it involves getting your Marines fairly close to a hive (having them take a vent and enforecing nouse discipline is best - 'Apone, we can't have any firing in there!'). Then have them build and defend a turret factory, using the 'defend' command - they must not leave!. While they do that, upgrade to advanced TF immediately. This will take some time, so your troops need to stay around and make sure that TF survives. Then drop 2 sieges, fairly far apart (maybe 6 'feet'). Have your troops stop what they are doing and build build build on pain of death.

Both sieges will then start working over the hive area extra fast. Wioth luck, they will splash kill some aliens near structures, but most importantly they will take out the hive twice as fast, and even if the aliens break through they will need to kill both sieges. By the time they get both, the hive should be dying or dead. You can mop 'em up, recycle the equipment to get some RP's back, and carry on.

ps: someone might have come up with this before us, but we're taking credit. Neener.

Having experienced MonsE adopting this strategy first hand, it also seemed important to endlessly yell at the marines on the spot - or maybe that's just his standard tactic.

Can you really call what he does 'commanding'?

At any rate, just to drive the point home, in this strategy, it's VITAL to not attack ANY alien buildings on the way there, as he says, because any attacked building immediately issues an urgent call via the hive mind.  So you've got to just jog by all the resource towers and chambers you see, in order to keep the element of surprise on your side.  

Heh.  Apone.  Whenever the commander's mic starts cutting out when he gives orders, I always feel like giving him the 'What?  ALL . . AT . . . THE INCINERATORS?'

I'm just hypothesizing, but if a hive has alot of entrances to it, build seige turrets at each entrance consecutively... so that the first one finishes when the second one is only 75% done, when second finishes, third one is 75% done.  When the first one comes online and starts shooting the buildings all of the aliens flock to the turret.  When they are all killing the turret, the seonc one picks up where the first one left off and the aliens are caught off guard.  Then they kill the second turret but by then the third turret is online and mopping up.  The splash damage would also kill alot of aliens on their way from one turret to the next.

Well, I dunno if hives have more than 2 or 3 enterance, excluding vents. Otherwise, they would be terribly hard to defend from those crazy marines. But as for MonsE's tactic, sounds like it is very effective, and might end up a common one among public servers.

Wind... good in theory, but poor in practice I imagine.  A Turrets can only be built so far from the turret factory, and for all of them to be in range of the TF, you'd have to put it in the middle of the Hive room.  Which just screams "KILL ME!"  Plus, it's quite costly.

Yeah man that would cost alot. 3 turret factories. 3 upgrades to advanced turret factories. 3 siege turrets.=Quite Costly.

Tsk.

The inventor of this tactic was me.

It was first used on NS_Nothing with tommyd commanding.

The actual tactic is a bit more subtle.

You sneak up on an alien hive, whilst the beasties are busy giving you hell elsewhere. Then you build a turret factory and several turrets. IMPORTANT: You do NOT complete the turrets, but build them to the very last bar. When you have them all ready, you quickly finish all of them one after the other. This allows you to bring them all online at once without triggering the alien's "Hive under attack warning" or their hivesight.

I'm not at home right now, but I shall post the damn screenshot of me doing it when I get home.

I stand by my original statement. Stop trying to oppress me, you damnable Redcoat!!!

Well i did that before i even came here... though i didnt know what the explosions at the time were... it worked pretty well... even though it was 8-4 at the end of the game...

Nice strategy, works wonderfully, specially if you have some heavies to carry it out