You could just look at the alien tech point when the game starts, You can see a few animations that always happen at the start if you time it right, and if you know what you are doing you can check two or three tech point starts like this,
Proper fog of war would probably promote scouting and positioning. With fog of war you can drop buildings even though there's already something built there if you never had vision of it. And only when you see it it's canceled. It could even be a way to remove infestation: alien comm can only build where he has vision.
I'm not sure how heavy it would be technically though.
I'm in favor of removing all these sorts of things. There's another way that involves no res as well. Rallying the IP somehow indicates where the hive is and uses 0 res.
@AV_Ultima
"You only ever need to drop up to 2 medpacks"
Also, you forgot Veil & Refinery.
On Refinery, if you spawn in turbine or smelting, there is only one place where aliens can be. If you spawn in flow on containment, you only need one check to find alien base.
On veil, you only have to check cargo really. If it's clear, aliens are either in pipe or sub. If they are in sub, you will know this within 10 seconds and if they are in pipe, well, aliens are already at disadvantage regardless of early intel you have about them.
Same goes for summit and descent, you only have to check opposite end, if it's close spawn, you are going to know it pretty soon.
The preferred course of action is to remove all these unintended issues. The problem is that its a pretty long list that will probably quite a while and manpower to fix. Instead of UWE spending hours fixing all the visual, sound, and action bugs, they could solve the issue by revealing the spawns and move on to more important matters.
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Proper fog of war would probably promote scouting and positioning. With fog of war you can drop buildings even though there's already something built there if you never had vision of it. And only when you see it it's canceled. It could even be a way to remove infestation: alien comm can only build where he has vision.
I'm not sure how heavy it would be technically though.
On Refinery, if you spawn in turbine or smelting, there is only one place where aliens can be. If you spawn in flow on containment, you only need one check to find alien base.
On veil, you only have to check cargo really. If it's clear, aliens are either in pipe or sub. If they are in sub, you will know this within 10 seconds and if they are in pipe, well, aliens are already at disadvantage regardless of early intel you have about them.
Same goes for summit and descent, you only have to check opposite end, if it's close spawn, you are going to know it pretty soon.