Hives are enormous airships that carry many smaller Stinger units inside. They deploy 5 of these 1/1 Stingers when they arrive. Spreading out your attack power can help a lot in some cases. You could kill 5 1/1 frogs or something in one turn and still have all your Stingers. You could patrol a bunch of Stingers to clog up the airways for opposing fliers. You could kill a hero with 4 hit points and not waste the 5th point of damage as overkill (have the 5th Stinger attack something else).

Hive is also a pretty durable threat. Losing individual Stingers isn’t a big deal, and you can replace them for just 1 gold each. Opponents really need to destroy your Hive itself, rather than the Stingers; Stingers can’t function without the coordination from the Hive command ship. A Hive has 6 hit points though, 2 more than a Void Star, so it’s tough to kill. Hives also have resist 1, which makes them cost more to target.

Both of these airships are expensive to use. Hive’s effect stacks if you have a second one, so you might even want 2 Hives so you can have a whopping 10 Stingers, but that costs a total of 12 gold and 2 cards in addition to having to build your Future tech II building. That said, remember that your Future hero has the Promise of Payment spell. You can promise to pay for a Hive or two even a turn sooner than you can actually pay for it, then the opponent is faced with taking down an armada they probably aren’t prepared for.

With such air superiority, you might be wondering why you should bother going to tech III with Future. These tech IIs are certainly capable of winning the game, so you don’t have to reach to tech III. In general, the jump in power to tech III can help you break any stalemates that might have developed, and it can reduce the number of turns you need to win. In this specific case though, your tech III can help you cover what might be a weakness of your gameplan.

One potential problem with an air superiority strategy is that you’re basically engaging in a race. You have to be sure to actually win that race. You can fly over enemy patrollers, but they can also attack under your fliers. If your opponent has particularly strong ground units, or if they can easily kill some of your units, they might end up winning that race.

Here’s something that can change that math: