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Homeworld?

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Posts

  • darleysamdarleysam On my way to UKRegistered User regular
    edited April 2008
    I tried Homeworld again recently.. just can't play the damned thing. I want to love it so much, I try, but I just can't handle the controls. It feels so cumbersome and imprecise trying to select units and issue orders, having to react to incoming situations but not feeling able to get things sorted properly.
    I'm well aware it's pretty-much just me that has this problem, since everyone else seems fine with it.

    darleysam on
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  • BakerIsBoredBakerIsBored Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    darleysam wrote: »
    I tried Homeworld again recently.. just can't play the damned thing. I want to love it so much, I try, but I just can't handle the controls. It feels so cumbersome and imprecise trying to select units and issue orders, having to react to incoming situations but not feeling able to get things sorted properly.
    I'm well aware it's pretty-much just me that has this problem, since everyone else seems fine with it.

    Spacebar is your friend :)

    Very quick way to select ships and get what you need to get done.

    My only gripe with these games, is that not enough people play them online anymore :P

    I still have my sound track CD for HW1... music was epic. (last battle anyone? :) )

    I also really like Cataclysm, but HW2 I beat, but didn’t like how everything auto grouped, I like having control of everything :)

    Dreadnaught here.

    BakerIsBored on
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  • ronzoronzo Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    mcdermott wrote: »
    I'm with scarab here on difficulty. I played through HW2 as soon as I got it and didn't even realize there was any controversy over it's difficulty system until I checked the internet after already having beaten it. Yes, it was challenging, as was HW1 and HW:C, but there weren't any parts that were impossible or far and away harder than the rest.

    The idea you need to scuttle your ships before certain missions is just silly, I ended every mission with virtually every possible ship I could have built, built.

    I've not yet completed it, but this was my experience as well. I've played through a majority of the missions, and never found the difficulty to be particularly absurd. And I never felt the need to scuttle my fleet, either...though yes, you generally did have to try to either (A) have an extremely balanced fleet or (B) be willing to throw some ships away on suicide runs to re-align your forces. Usually B, for me at least.

    Plus, any difficulty introduced by the AI is more than offset by the fact that you can pause the game to look around and give orders. At any time. For as long as you feel like. Which, at least among RTS's I've played, is pretty unusual.

    I think HW lets you do the whole 'pause, give orders, unpause' things because the AI can give seprate orders to every ship instantly, like cordinating mutliple bomber strike, or easily fighting two fights at once

    ronzo on
  • mcdermottmcdermott Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    ronzo wrote: »
    I think HW lets you do the whole 'pause, give orders, unpause' things because the AI can give seprate orders to every ship instantly, like cordinating mutliple bomber strike, or easily fighting two fights at once

    Exactly. But my experience with other RTS's is that that was just an imbalance that you were expected to "deal with."
    Plus, they actually were good for capturing capital ships, but yes, they required you to basically destroy the entire enemy fleet, or at least the fighters/bombers, before capturing any ships.

    True. But generally by the time I've actually destroyed enough of their fleet to make a capture possible, I probably don't need their damn ship. The only real use is that, IIRC, the Vaygr have some capital ships a mission or two before you have the ability to build them yourself. Still, not really worth the trouble.

    mcdermott on
  • Tim JamesTim James Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    I'm working through HW1 now in my backlog and halfway through the missions. It's been delayed by Company of Heroes multiplayer addiction.

    The game ages fairly well if you enable graphics card level anti-aliasing, but desperately needs two things:

    1. An option or tweak to extend the draw distance. Probably a design decision; Relic just loves to confine your view.

    2. A fast-forward button. It's kind of retarded that if you want to harvest all the resources at the end after all the enemies are defeated, you have to let the game sit there for 10 or 20 minutes. I want to take a tour without cheating, so I want to get all the resources, but I usually go read a book while it's finishing up. Sorry guys, but that's just silly.

    Other than that, very neat space opera and pretty good tactics and strategy once you get the hang of it. (Reminds me of CoH in that way, actually.) I didn't know Adagio for Strings was in the opening sequence, no wonder it sounded vaguely familiar. Thanks.

    Tim James on
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  • EgoEgo Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    I mostly play multi-player. Homeworld had the standardly disappointing multi-player that goes along with most RTS games, but it's single-player was really captivating and well done. Great flow. It's one of a handful of games that I've ever bothered to finish. Probably the best overall single-player RTS experience ever.

    Actually homeworld multi-player was redeeming in one aspect: telling someone about the 'access' cheat.

    Ego on
    Erik
  • noluitnoluit Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Best thing about Cataclysm: getting a group of multi-beam frigates and watching them cut through fighters and bombers, like... things that cut through fighters and bombers.

    noluit on
  • TechBoyTechBoy Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Tim James wrote: »
    1. An option or tweak to extend the draw distance. Probably a design decision; Relic just loves to confine your view.

    2. A fast-forward button. It's kind of retarded that if you want to harvest all the resources at the end after all the enemies are defeated, you have to let the game sit there for 10 or 20 minutes. I want to take a tour without cheating, so I want to get all the resources, but I usually go read a book while it's finishing up. Sorry guys, but that's just silly.

    It's an old game, the draw distances were probably the best they could do at the time. Or maybe enabling more would have been way more than any computer at the time could have handled.

    In Cataclysm, the option to speed up time was implemented. In HW2, once you finish the mission goals you auto-jump out and all remaining resources are simply given to you, so Relic definitely agrees that making you harvest everything at the end in realtime was a dumb design choice.


    I was such an ion whore in the Homeworld series. As soon as I could, I'd research ion frigates and just pump out as many as I could. Same with Destroyers and Battlecruisers. I'd just build as many as I could, put them all in the wall formation, and have them focus fire on anything in their path. It was like magnifying the sun on an ant x50.

    And when I hit the unit cap and maxed out the number of ion frigates I could build, I found out that capturing units with scavengers doesn't count in the unit cap... ;-)

    TechBoy on
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  • KesterKester Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    TechBoy wrote: »
    In Cataclysm, the option to speed up time was implemented. In HW2, once you finish the mission goals you auto-jump out and all remaining resources are simply given to you, so Relic definitely agrees that making you harvest everything at the end in realtime was a dumb design choice.

    I'll agree that it from a design perspective it was a bit silly, but I wonder if it didn't add to the atmosphere of the game. Homeworld really succeeded in putting across the utter loneliness of space, and I think having 20-30 minutes of absolute peace at the end of each mission helped that. I'd not encourage them to do it again, but I think it was important in establishing atmosphere, even if unintentional.

    Cataclysm and HW2 have nowhere near as much atmosphere as the original, which may be to do with this. On the other hand, it could be because "You are not who you thought you were, everyone you know has been killed and you are alone in the universe" has more emotional resonance than "OMG aliens are infecting people" or "You have to find some magical thingamy to power a giant mystical device before someone else does" ;-)

    Kester on
  • Spiffy MageSpiffy Mage Registered User regular
    edited April 2008
    Jebu wrote: »
    The music was especially gorgeous. I should really try to track down the soundtrack one of these days.

    They have it linked on their forums here. Seeing how relic has never asked for it to be removed, I'm going to go out on a limb and say they don't mind having it out there.

    As for the actual games, I was disappointed that HW:C didn't get much of a nod in HW2. The story was fairly well done and it gave the some interesting characters. HW2 felt a little jumbled compared to the first two, but still enjoyable.

    Spiffy Mage on
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