I found myself having to choose between JA and HW2 this weekend, and chose JA. After reading this thread, I think I’m glad I did. I’ll still try the HW2 demo to see for myself, and will probably end up buying the game eventually. (I’m thinking of whoever basically said, “Good game, but not worth $50.”)
I honestly think that playing Homeworld 2 would be similar to having a session of self-flagellation. I have better things to do with my time. I am tired of playing games that are frustratingly difficult. That’s not entertainment.
Wow this is kind of depressing, Ive always looked at the HW series as the “one to top”. Ive tried a bunch, Hegmonia, Orb, and a few Im embarassed to admit to like PROJECT EARTH.
I remember going to the release party in downtown SanFran, I passed on the free cocktails and split right after the rep handed me my free copy. It was one of those games that had you calling your buds about it after 10 mins of play.
Guess Ill get the new fishing game for xbox. lol
i have a feeling its nostalgia for me… i have been waiting for it for so long i refuse to think that this game is not as good as hw1…
yes i do agree with Rollory, i actally had seen my torp frig chasing a resource collector far far away from the battle, but it was the end of it and i didnt care, and in that same mission (mission 7…) i lost all my strike crafts cause they chased enemy unites into radioactive dust and committee group suicide… speaking of chasing or engaging enemies, marine frigs have to be the most annoying of this problem, they are KOS and they have no armor to speak of, tho they have this long ass range attack, they still charge into battle as if wanting to board some bombers…
formation and tactics i have already ignored, completely pointless, but i still try to make use of the “good against” aspect…
well lets wait for the tool set to come out a few days later and see if the mods be better…
I never got into any of the HW mods, can you recomend any?
I feel like installing something.
Yeah I thought it was due out this week but it came out last tuesday I believe.
As for HW2, the AI sure isn’t that tough (standard difficulty) in multi/skirmish though it has some fantasticly fast build rates. 2v1 and we took him out fairly quickly in maybe 30 mins but he had 2 destroyers built in that time even with his miners being wiped out and bunch of fighters. Beautiful game though, simply stunning.
Is there any way to get back the list of ships currently selected, where you could click on something and select only that etc? The one you had in Homeworld 1.
You click on the icon stacks in the bottom area of the screen.
I think the name list was better here too. Bombers and gunships and pulsar gunships and frigates all look more or less the same at first glance. And telling the difference between elite bombers and bombers, or elite gunships and gunships … yeah.
If you’re talking about the elite bombers and gunships that you can get in mission 2, well, they’re considered a totally different class of ship, so they’ll have a separate icon.
I happen to like the current list better, actually. In Homeworld 1, you could not reliably send damaged ships home without pausing the game and picking them all out of the battleball. Now I just select the set of all bombers and shift-click all the healthy ones in a matter of seconds, leaving the heavily damaged wings selected so I can tell them to dock.
Yeah, that’s the problem. It clutters up the listing with an extra graphic to glance over to find the one you want.
The damage thing is a good point though.
I have not played the single player at all. Skirmish and MP all the way. But that said, I usually have no use for SP RTS games…the sole exception was Homeworld I. I was planning on starting SP tonight, but I guess I’ll just play more MP.
Formations: The new formations are useful. Here is a brief breakdown:
Fighter Screen- classic carrier formation. Fighters in front, corvettes, frigates in a line, then carrier and cap ships in the rear. After a large number fo fighters, the fighters start filling out to the sides, top bottom and rear. I use it in early and mid game when I still have alot of fighters.
Frigate line- Frigs first followed by caps, fighters sprinkled around- I dont use this at all.
Cap Line- great end game. Caps up front for long bombardments, then frigates, who nicely move up into firing range, fighters in rear and when combat is engaged do a very nice break and attack like something from RoTJ. It is a beautiful sight. And winning cinematically is always sweeter.
Stances
Passive- run boy run- you can still make them attack, but after that target they will go evasive and not return fire.
Defensive- good for formations. Fighters will break and attack but will not chase bad guys across the map.
Agressive- kill everything. All the time.
Cool things to use
EMP ability with scouts.
EMP knocks the ship out for 30 sec, combine this with a marine frigate.
Also works great mid battle…let the enemy engage and take out his big guns for 30 secs. It can turn the tide of a fight.
I’m also a big fan of Bomber/Gunship combo squadrons. The Bomber is your best friend.
As a disclaimer, I was a pretty avid Homeworld fanboy. Now I’m sort of an anti-fanboy.
I know several guys who work / have worked at relic, and I spent a good amount of time chatting with one of the ex-employed the other day about hw2.
His opinion is that the storyline has - get this - improved since the original design. That, to me, is absolutely horrific. If you’ve noticed the name of the campaign is ‘Ascension’ you might get the first hint that something is wrong - talk about an inaccurate name. Even impossible creatures, which was pretty shitty, had an interesting and somewhat consistent storyline. HW2 is just all over the place, and there are tons of things that don’t line up at all.
Plus there’s the fact that the entire campaign you’re just following someone else’s orders. You play an intergalactic errand boy, and your jobs often don’t make sense. Homeworld had a simple goal - return home - but that’s part of what made it work. You knew the goal from the beginning, and didn’t spend half the game saying ‘what the deuce am i doing this for?’
– spoiler spoiler –
The most infuriating part about the campaign is when makaan blows on through the gate to the Sajuuk. PLEASE explain to me what he’s thinking? He has one Core. You have two. He tries to keep you from following him. How does this make sense? To power on the Sajuuk he needs all three cores, right? How is he going to get the other two, pull them out of his ass and say ‘et voila!’?
The general consensus is that HW2 needed another 6 months to ‘polish up’. I think that’s pretty generous.
Not true. Try it. Having other ships in combat nearby (to trigger the “supporting friendlies” thing) may be a factor, but I have ships on “defensive” going into kill-kill-kill mode all the freaking time, even if they’re not being fired on to start with. And frigs/capships on defensive WILL move and chase hostiles that they’ve independently engaged, without orders from me. I have to switch the ones I want to pull out of the fight to F2, and then remember to switch them back to F3 when they’re ready to go back into combat. Major pain.
Why “good for formations”? In my games, any time I give a formation an attack order, it holds the formation long enough to attack and then breaks up all over the place. They most certainly do not hold their positions relative to other ships. (Frig wall and Cap phalanx in particular - haven’t done much with fighter screen because I don’t care about keeping fighters in formation, and it never occurred to me to try to use capital ships with a formation labeled “fighter” … hm. Thinking I’ll try my bombers in frig wall formation from now on. Might be interesting)
This is true. I’ve basically given up on building interceptors; all fighter slots go to bombers. Even if there’s enemy fighter cover, I send the bombers in regardless of whether they’re covered, and usually do ok. Gun platforms need to be taken out first though.
Boom. Nine years. Hard to believe.
Anyway, I recently fired this up and played a skirmish match vs the AI.
What a weird game.
First of all, it still looks amazing. Could have release last year and I wouldn’t have batted an eye at the graphics. Awesome texture work and ship design.
The pace of the game is almost the opposite of what Relic would later move toward (and that’s what I mean by weird). Ships move so slowly that simply getting a top of the line capital ship to engagement range can take five minutes or more. Because there’s no “terrain,” moving ships anywhere other than straight at your opponent seems foolish (it’s very cheap to create a patrolling grid of scout ships that can see the whole map, so hiding is very hard (and your mothership/flasgship moves so slowly that hiding is not really viable anyway)). It’s a quick arm-wrestle at the beginning to see who can secure the resources on the map and then outproduction wins.
Anyway, yeah. Homeworld 2. It’s making me think about picking up Sins.
I actually never got around to playing Homeworld 2. I will eventually, but I’ve never heard enough good things about it to jump into it, you know?
I’m surprised you let that stop you.
I only have so much time, and my short attention span doesn…SQUIRREL! runs away
Brian Rubin has not played Homeworld 2? I am both flabbergasted and appalled.
I am dissapoint.
rolls eyes Sheesus people, I’ve not played EVERY space game, just a lot of them. Why do you think I created my blog? ;)