Homeworld 2 appreciation thread

[WarLocke]

This game definitely needs more press.

Therefore, I'll start this thread for any discussion that may take place.

In the hopes of jump-starting some (more?) interest, I'll supply some screencaps I've taken (unfortunately from the demo :( ); note that these were taken at 800x600 (resized to 600x450) at the default settings for my rig (most everything set to low or off). The only change I made was to turn off NLIPS (Non-Linear Inverse Perspective Scaling), which makes the game scale all ships by the same factor, truly showing how small fighters and corvettes are compared to the capital ships.

Screen 1: A squadron of attack bombers screen my carrier's starboard side as my strike group leaves the protection offered by my mothership and her gun & ion platforms.



Screen 2: My strike group has encountered the enemy forces. One of my interceptor squadrons, short one fighter, engages an opposing corvette squadron.



Screen 3: When I broke through to their resource operation, I was shocked to discover that the enemy had two carriers! After a protracted furball, I managed to reduce the opposition's fighter/corvette coverage enough that my bombers could focus on his production facilities. Finally, the first carrier is destroyed.



Screen 4: My forces had moved out before I had the resources to begin frigate construction, and my carrier had no frigate facility, so I resorted to qeueing up several from my mothership and sending them across the map as they were finished. During the later stages of the battle, one of my torpedo frigates makes its presence known to the enemy's second carrier.



Now, this was a quickie skirmish game against an easy computer. Besides the second carrier, it had kept to building fighters, corvettes, and a few gun platforms. If it had produced frigates, it would not have been such an easy fight. The full game includes even more ship types (minelayer corvettes, destroyers/dreadnaughts/battlecruisers, etc.) and would have allowed me to shoot some Hiigaran-on-Vagyr action, dangit.

Overall, I think HW2 is a must-buy. It was done by mostly a new crew, so there are some noticable differences in gameplay, though. For example, HW2 feels a bit more 'RTSey' than Homeworld did, because everything happens just that little bit faster - you produce ships faster (and in 3- or 5-ship squadrons for strike craft), they move faster, and they're more fragile. Homeworld was a very conservationist-type game: there were rarely enough resources to go around, so throwing units away in a battle of attrition was seldom a wise move. That type of gameplay seems to be easier in HW2, due to the quicker game speed and abundant resources (at least on the maps available in the demo).