The Hovel itself was not being used many times in the vanilla game. For granger it was far more useful just to run with wallwalking. It should be either kinda overpowered or it should have self-defense system, some sort of acid vomitting on the floor, or bees.
There's a number of ways we could make the hovel more useful, I think I posted a few ideas already.
1. Camouflage it. This is what we have with the booster on EDGE, of you make the hovel small enough and blend in with the creep background, it can be hidden amongst all the other creep in the alien base.
2. Hovel doubles the speed that the build cool down ticks down. Assuming it remains an S3 item and can only store 1 Granger, I doubt this would be OP in limited BP situations. Also would force aliens to make a decision if there can only be one. Do we put the hovel near the forward for fast rebuilding, or in the main base in case something goes wrong?
3. Make hovels able to spawn grangers. Basically a granger only egg that allows a granger to spawn inside of the hovel. Not only would this make them very useful, but also this mechanic would be good in public games, where the OM goes down and all the eggs on the alien team are used to spawn a billion newbie dretches.
Of course, any good 1.1 builder would make use of the hovel no matter how useless it is. Its a free barricade after all. It doesn't cost BP iirc.
EDIT: Also good work with the hovel art! I'm liking how fuzzy the aliens are turning out to be. <3