My homeworld2 has shipped

Post by **XMEN Gambit** » Fri Sep 19, 2003 7:13 am

Don't know when it will get here, they estimate the 26th. But it's only coming from Kentucky, so I'm thinking it might get here sooner. Of course I could go pick it up at Fry's today... Heh. <img src="http://www.xmenclan.org/xmengambit.gif"/> XMEN member Card-carrying DTM OKL Fish-napper Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained.  The Tao of Programming

Ambush Bug · Post by **Ambush Bug** » Mon Sep 22, 2003 5:22 am

I've got my copy now, straight from the local GameStop. I must admit that I had originally grabbed the leaked full-version .ISO with crack off the net before I bought my copy (I was impatient), and while I played that I wasn't sure if I would like the game enough to actually buy it. There were some quirks that had me seething at times. Turns out, HW2 has grown on me. Mostly because I've finally got some of the strategy down and I'm not getting my ass whupped by the computer so badly any more. <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/smile.gif ALT=":)"> Thus, I bought it. Thus starts the review! Story: This is, for me, the largest disappointment with the game. I'm halfway through it, no mention of the Somtaaw folks at all in-game, and only one mention of them in the strat-guide (which I also bought, btw, having heard about the ginormous difficulty of the SP). The story has changed, and without spoiling it for those that haven't bought the game yet, it's taken on a more religous tone, which doesn't seem to jive well with the setting. The backstory on the Bentusi does conflict a little with the HW1/Cata story, which was annoying to me. That said, the plot is gripping enough to keep me playing, which is more than I can say for a lot of games. Voice: GGAAAAAHH! What happened to all the unique voices for each unit that was in Cataclysm? That was my favorite part! I especially miss that garrulous old dude that ran the Processors in Cata: "We've got guns! Let's use 'em!" and so on. Or the ramming frigs: "Owww, my head!" All the voices for the ships are the same in tone. So far, only the Marine frigate has any really cool lines "The bridge is ours!" and "Light resistance." Not much humour in any of the lines, which I found disappointing. Fleet Command (Karen S'Jet) is the exact same actor, complete with her cold toneless delivery, which I can handle. Fleet Intelligence, however, doesn't stack up to the old cougar than ran FI in Cata, though. FI this time around is pretty deadpan, whereas the old warhorse that was FI in Cata really made you care about what you were doing. "Kitth's Blood!! More of them coming out of hyperspace! Blunt that attack at any cost!" The worst part about the single-actor ship voices (everybody but FI and FC, that is) is that you can't tell them apart during battle. Highly annoying when you've got a big strike group. Even though ships will say "Frigate taking damage" or "Hull breach on carrier!" or something similar, the words kinda run together in a big furball of a battle. Basically, the pilots and commander-voices in HW2 are too professional for their own good. Cata's voices really brought you into the game, and these guys are ho-hum-we're-gonna-die-but-we'll-be-calm-until-the-end. Blarrrgh. Performance: Let me put it this way: I'm upgrading my machine for this game, which should tell you that I like it pretty well, despite the flaws I've listed above. Currently, I'm running: 1.1 GH Athlon T-bird 512 MB RAM GF2 Pro 32 MB XP Pro SB16 This machine gets about 45 fps average in T2, with weather turned off, and skies set to skybox only, but all the texture and model detail cranked up. However, in HW2, in a large furball consisting of more than say thirty ships ('ship' includes a single fighter squadron of 5-8 ships), my framerate can drop to five. Also, framerate gets worse the more stuff you have on sensors, in sensor manager or no. In Cata, if you ran your game in sensors only, your framerate didn't take a big hit, even if you loaded up on a bunch of CPU opponents. (Of course, going out of the manager could knock your machine to its knees) This is not the case in HW2--your framerate is the same both in and out of sensors manager. You will want a big beefy machine to run this game well. If you've got a setup like mine and you want to play against the computer in skirmish battles, be advised that you should try setting the unit cap to the 'low' setting and see how that goes. Single Player: Here's some free advice for making your singleplayer game as easy as possible: try to complete your objectives with as small of a fleet as you possibly can. There is no difficulty slider in the game. Instead, the CPU scales the enemy fleet up or down depending on how large your fleet is and how much cash you've got in the bank. Example: In one of the later missions, if you've maxed out your fleet to the unit limit, you will face something like eleven carriers, thirty destroyers, and an even dozen battlecruisers, not to mention the virtual cloud of fighters and corvettes. (Note: Your max fleet is something like a fifth of the previously mentioned enemy numbers) Battlecruisers are some bad-ass ships, friends, and when there's just one, you've got a real menace on your hands that will eat frigates for breakfast, destroyers for lunch, and motherships for dessert. (A single 'cruiser can easily handle two or three destroyers by itself) A dozen of them, if they get in range of your mothership, will roast it in one collective volley. To say that the odds are stacked against you is an understatement. The game is pretty 'normal' through missions one and two, but when you get to the three the difficulty goes up a big notch. You hit mission four and BAM, suddenly things get a whole hell of a lot harder. I've only managed to complete missions one and two and one of the later missions on the first try (this includes losing more than 3/4 of my fleet in the attempt)--every other mission I've had to restart multiple times and plan for the little surprises the computer will throw at you. However, the SP game is quite the workout for your tactical skills and your logistics//fleet planning. To say that combined arms are a must is an understatement. You need to mix up your ship types to keep the enemy off-balance--concentrate on one type of ship and the enemy wil adapt with the appropriate counters and cut through your fleet like a chainsaw. You have been warned. Devote big hunks of time to the singleplayer. Multiplayer: Actually, vs. CPU. Despite the framerate problems, the CPU opponents are quite satisfactory. The 'easy' opponents aren't anything like the 'easy' ones in Cata--they'll probe you, scout you, adapt to your ship builds, hide carriers from you, and try and disrupt your resourcing ops, as opposed to the Cata 'easy' CPUs, which just sat there like a lump and perhaps sent a fighter wing to be destroyed every five or six minutes. 'Standard' opponents are much harder and more aggressive. The computer doesn't start cheating until you select 'hard' opponents, though, and the means by which they cheat, according to Relic, is that their harvesters bring in more RU's per load than normal. No CPU opponent, again according to Relic, has knowledge of where your ships are save by actual sensor data. If it can't see it, it can't adapt to it. (This unlike Cata, where all CPU opponents save the 'easy' one would make a beeline for your command ship right at the game start.) Thankfully, you can set computer opponents to be on your side in the larger maps. If your machine can handle the extra load, try loading up a 3v3 map called 'Crimson Bond' with you and 2 CPUs vs a trio of CPUs. Much fun. Ships: Well, ships are much more specialized this time around. Unlike Cata, where you could send in a set of hive frigates and be reasonably sure that they'd do well against any type of opponent, you have to really custom build your fleet for the task at hand. And you have to know what each ship is good for and set the appropirate tactics and number for your strike group. Thankfully, target aquisition is much easier, too. If you've set your fleet into a strike-group, they'll auto-pick the most appropriate target when the fur starts flying. You can still reach in and force your ships to attack specific targets, but you don't have to for the most part. It's not quite set-and-forget, but it's close enough to keep you from having to be a micromanaging expert just to have a chance at winning. The ships are each quite useful, though you do have to know when to use each one. Send them against the wrong target and your ships will take longer to kill it, or even worse, get flayed alive by it. (Frigates vs Destroyers == baaaad idea.) Logistics: The big point in HW2 is that research isn't free, unlike the last two games, where all it cost you was time. Now it costs you RUs as well as time, and there is a LOT of research available to you. It's very inadvisable to research everything under the sun right when you get it--research not only costs, but it doesn't take terribly long for each subject, either. Having more than a few items in the research queue (yep, one at a time, just like the Beast, but you can line 'em up) will drain your coffers very quickly. There aren't any crystals this go-around, but one of the cooler features is that your workers can now harvest debris left over from capital ship battles. Pop a destroyer and there's something like twelve or thirteen hundred RUs lying around in scrap metal that they can just pick up and take into the mothership. I haven't figured out how much 'cruisers leave around, but I'm sure it's a lot. You will need a lot of workers. You could get away with six or seven in Cata and still build a big fleet if you hit a good ore vein. Not so in HW2--I usually have at least sixteen harvesters out and about. Granted, these little fellows only bring in something like 150 RUs a trip, but they're much faster than the Cata/HW workers, and your mothership can handle ten off the little buggers all by itself. Unit caps are done by hull-type. X number of fighter squadrons, Y amount of destroyers, Z carriers, and so on. There's no SU pool like in Cata, so your massive worker fleet won't count against your total ship numbers. Interface: Both good and bad here. Good stuff is that you don't have to go away from the action to build or research, which is handy when you've got furball going and you're trying to bring up reinforcements. Bad stuff is that there's keyboard shortcuts for just about everything, and memorizing them is going to be a pain. Good stuff is that you can specifucally select ship squadrons for launch from your carriers with CTRL-click--bad stuff is that telling carriers apart is difficult without ship names, so it's not entirely impossible that you'll get them mixed up when the action gets going. I don't know if you can assign control group numbers while they're docked--I'll try that later and see. Right-click orders and moves are handy, but can be cumbersome at times. There are times in the singleplayer where you want to forgo the right-click move option and use the M-key movement disk instead. Vertical movement selection is a bit wonky--it Cata and HW1, it was easy to zoom in and out and rotate around your intended destination while you were using SHIFT to select the height. In HW2 this is a bit more difficult and clunky unless you use the mousewheel to zoom. Still serviceable, yes, but annoying at times. You can turn off build-queues now, which is kinda nice, but when they're on, you can only see the top item in the queue for each production ship. I can see why they did this--when you play as Vagyr, you'll have scads of carriers and their queues can take up a lot of screen space even with just the top item showing--but it would still be nice to see what all is next after your current item. CAPLOCK no longer toggles the tactical overlay--instead, it selects all ships. This annoyed me to no end until I got used to it. The nice thing is that there's several layers of overlays now--none, ship icon overlays, only, and ship icons with spheres of effect shown. This is a godsend for when you've got multiple hyperspace fields, gravwell fields, fire-control areas of effect, and cloaking fields all bunched together. If you turn on everything, the screen gets mighty cluttered that way. Sensor view is now a combination of Cata and HW1. Your ships display the blue sensor sphere (which I never liked), but where that sphere intersects the main horizontal plane of the map, there's an outline showing where the sensor takes effect. Kinda good, kinda bad. I liked Cata's wireframe sensors better. A tip for getting rid of the build-menu--hit the R key twice in a row. This brings up and closes down the research menu. Much faster than hitting CTRL-B to turn off the build menu. There are pips to show you how many ships are in a strike craft squadron (good for selection in the heat of battle), but these pips don't light up to show you how many ships are still left in that squadron as they are destroyed. That would have been a nice little feature to throw in. Overall: Graphically impressive, quicker gameplay, more recon required in MP, brutally difficult singleplayer, better skirmish mode, decent plot, and tactically interesting. For you Homeworld series fans, buy it. If you're a first-timer to Homeworld, buy Cataclysm and play it first so you don't get totally overwhelmed.

Post by **XMEN Gambit** » Mon Sep 22, 2003 5:40 am

Thanks, Bug. Good write-up.

Post by **XMEN Gambit** » Wed Sep 24, 2003 5:39 am

Got my copy in yesterday, played it last night. First 3 missions were easy (well, okay, I was concerned a time or two on the third one), but the fourth kicked my butt the first time. Now I've got to go at it again. <img src="http://www.xmenclan.org/xmengambit.gif"/> XMEN member Card-carrying DTM OKL Fish-napper Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained.  The Tao of Programming

Ambush Bug · Post by **Ambush Bug** » Wed Sep 24, 2003 9:30 am

FYI: I tried assigning group numbers to ships that were still docked, and when I did it, it looked like it worked, but when I launched the ships, pressing the group number would select the ship my fighters launched from instead of selecting the fighters themselves. Hope they fix this in the patch.

Post by **XMEN Gambit** » Mon Sep 29, 2003 7:00 am

Whew. I'm on mission 13 now, I think. I found <a href="http://firingsquad.gamers.com/games/homeworld_2_review/" target="top">this review</a> linked to over in the HW2 forums, and its opinion seems to be that the single-player game is insanely hard. I, and many posters in that thread, disagree. Challenging, yes. But so far the only mission that had me reloading over and over was one where you have a half-dozen battlecruisers (with support craft) to fight simultaneoulsy. (I did finally beat 'em, but wow. I blew through about 100K RUs on that mission.) HW2 has defined SO much more clearly which things are strong against which other things. You just have to keep these relationships in mind and manage your building queues accordingly, target the right ships first, manage the tactics of your groups correctly, and so on. The reviewer had issues with ships "disobeying orders." Well, when they're set to "defensive" or "aggressive" modes, they're going to go get into trouble - read the definitions of the modes! If you just want a ship to retreat, period, you have to set it to "passive." Takes a few tries to remember stuff like this, but it really does work together cleanly when you understand the system. <img src="http://www.xmenclan.org/xmengambit.gif"/> XMEN member Card-carrying DTM OKL Fish-napper Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained.  The Tao of Programming

Post by **XMEN Gambit** » Tue Sep 30, 2003 7:27 pm

Finished it. There's a really good way to finish the final mission that I found posted in the HW2 forum, and I gleaned one little tidbit of info (a single word, really) out of there that was the real key and helped immensely. I'll tell you if you ask, but I won't just throw it out here. All in all, it's a good game. There's good and bad things about it when compared with the other two. My biggest problem is probably that the HW, Cata, and HW2 stories don't really jive on many points. The story, while intriguing, used some cheap outs, and darnit I like a good story! Gameplay is solid, the strike groups are great, the division between the rock-paper-scissors elements is much better defined. Graphics are a LOT better, music is a little better (it was excellent to start with), and the voices are okay. (Bug, I think Karan's voice is actually a different actress than in HW, but it's tough to tell by the manner of delivery. <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/smile.gif ALT=":)"> ) Multiplayer and mods could make it a great game, but right now, it's no game of the year, especially with Deus Ex 2, Half Life2, and Doom3, and so on due by Christmas. Looks like "Year of the Sequel, Redux," again. <img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/laugh.gif ALT=":lol"> It will be interesting to see what they do with a patch. I don't know that it needs one, but the whiners will probably get their way and nerf something. <img src="http://www.xmenclan.org/xmengambit.gif"/> XMEN member Card-carrying DTM OKL Fish-napper Though a program be but three lines long, someday it will have to be maintained.  The Tao of Programming

My homeworld2 has shipped

My homeworld2 has shipped

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Re: My homeworld2 has shipped

Re: My homeworld2 has shipped

Re: My homeworld2 has shipped

Re: My homeworld2 has shipped

Re: My homeworld2 has shipped