So I just finished a three hour Homeworld Remastered game... Here's the ending.

[HafCoJoe]

This is a bit of a broken mechanic. If the enemy destroys your flagship, you cannot unlock a way to see everything on the map, meaning the enemy can warp into a remote location and sit there hiding for literally hours on end. We won in the end but JEEZ... Game time is listed as 3:14.38...

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Later...

[KerikBalm]

You played the original too?

In the original, such a thing would never happen... you could always see the enemy on long range sensors provided they were not cloaked, or did not have a special property assigned to them on a custom map.

The resolution was quite bad, and you couldn't tell if that single red dot was 1 ship or 10 ships.

At some point, it may show up as two dots or a cluster of dots... but... (if you were into the .big file editing, you could alter the "resolution" of these long range sensors)...

The speed could give away the type of ship... a fast moving dot or cluster of dots was likely strike craft, a slow moving one was likely capital ships.

Then you could build a sensor array, even if you lost your mothership, which gave you basically "perfect" resolution of 1 dot per ship -> still nothing about ship type (except for, if I remember correctly, Carriers, Heavy Cruisers, and Motherships, which showed up as 3d models, not red dots).

Of course, you could also use this against them if you find that they have a sensor array.

It still couldn't differentiate between a wall formation composed of destroyers and ion frigates ("Capital ships" by that games standards), or a wall formation of a bunch of scouts keeping pace with a ship that travelled at ~300 m/s (a defender fighter could be used to set the approximate speed). Then jumble up your capital ships, and send your decoy wall plodding towards the enemy, and you might just convince them that you've left your mothership ungaurded/don't have the resources for a hyperspace jump, and get them to commit their forces to an attack via a hyperspace jump... right into your mothership surrounded by a minefield and your capital fleet.

I really didn't like the resource cost of a hyperspace jump on the HW games... jumping a ship cost almost as much as building a new one (ie, frigate jup cost: 300-500 depending on distance IIRC, assault frigate cost: 575).

While ORB had many gameplay deficiences... I did like their hyperspace jump system... jump capable ships had an energy bar, and could only open a jump portal with a full charge, then the jump portal would appear in front of the ship and the target location, and grow larger and larger, until it reaches full size, and the ship is sucked through.... one could abort (no energy recovered) at any time during the opening of the portal (you could use this to decoy the enemy fleet into jumping to where your exit portals were forming, then cancel your jump, and proceed to attack another target closer by, and know that the enemy fleet can't jump to you - even better if they didn't cancel their jumps too, and you got them to jump even farther away... or you could have a portion of your fleet open jump portals hoping to get the entire enemy fleet to respond... then cancel the jump, and you still have most of your fleet with charged jump drives ready to jump somewhere else).

That system was much more fun than homeworlds: pay almost the full cost of your fleet to make blue windows swallow your fleet, and then some time later, blue windows spit your fleet out somewhere else.

In between, the enemy can only guess where your fleet is jumping too.

[HafCoJoe]

You played the original too?

In the original, such a thing would never happen... you could always see the enemy on long range sensors provided they were not cloaked, or did not have a special property assigned to them on a custom map.

The resolution was quite bad, and you couldn't tell if that single red dot was 1 ship or 10 ships.

At some point, it may show up as two dots or a cluster of dots... but... (if you were into the .big file editing, you could alter the "resolution" of these long range sensors)...

The speed could give away the type of ship... a fast moving dot or cluster of dots was likely strike craft, a slow moving one was likely capital ships.

Then you could build a sensor array, even if you lost your mothership, which gave you basically "perfect" resolution of 1 dot per ship -> still nothing about ship type (except for, if I remember correctly, Carriers, Heavy Cruisers, and Motherships, which showed up as 3d models, not red dots).

Of course, you could also use this against them if you find that they have a sensor array.

It still couldn't differentiate between a wall formation composed of destroyers and ion frigates ("Capital ships" by that games standards), or a wall formation of a bunch of scouts keeping pace with a ship that travelled at ~300 m/s (a defender fighter could be used to set the approximate speed). Then jumble up your capital ships, and send your decoy wall plodding towards the enemy, and you might just convince them that you've left your mothership ungaurded/don't have the resources for a hyperspace jump, and get them to commit their forces to an attack via a hyperspace jump... right into your mothership surrounded by a minefield and your capital fleet.

I really didn't like the resource cost of a hyperspace jump on the HW games... jumping a ship cost almost as much as building a new one (ie, frigate jup cost: 300-500 depending on distance IIRC, assault frigate cost: 575).

While ORB had many gameplay deficiences... I did like their hyperspace jump system... jump capable ships had an energy bar, and could only open a jump portal with a full charge, then the jump portal would appear in front of the ship and the target location, and grow larger and larger, until it reaches full size, and the ship is sucked through.... one could abort (no energy recovered) at any time during the opening of the portal (you could use this to decoy the enemy fleet into jumping to where your exit portals were forming, then cancel your jump, and proceed to attack another target closer by, and know that the enemy fleet can't jump to you - even better if they didn't cancel their jumps too, and you got them to jump even farther away... or you could have a portion of your fleet open jump portals hoping to get the entire enemy fleet to respond... then cancel the jump, and you still have most of your fleet with charged jump drives ready to jump somewhere else).

That system was much more fun than homeworlds: pay almost the full cost of your fleet to make blue windows swallow your fleet, and then some time later, blue windows spit your fleet out somewhere else.

In between, the enemy can only guess where your fleet is jumping too.

Heck yeah I played original! I know what you mean with the sensors array. I never played a lot of Multiplayer in the original (only the occasional LAN battle) so I'm not sure how the sensors array work in it corresponding to remastered. In remastered, sensor arrays only work so long as you have a mothership. If the enemy destroys your mothership and hides while he still has a mothership and his own sensors array, he can warp around just outside your FOV and hide for literally hours. Even if you 've destroyed literally all of his ships.

That design of hyperspace does sound really fun . I know why the kept it the way it is though. If it was like this in HW1 and HW2, the remastered game should have it too. And I agree. Though it could and probably would be funner with that style of warp, this version has its merits.

[KerikBalm]

Custom maps in the original multiplayer were awesome.... You could have players start with a kadesh mothership or a turanic carrier as their mothership - fully functional as far as being able to construct ships* and dock and refuel fighters.

* The ships it could construct were the standard ships a player could construct, starting with a Kadesh mothership didn't allow you to build swarmers or MultiBeam Firgates.

There was some bug where resource collectors could only use a docking port once to drop of resources, and then would just sit by the ship, waiting, so the work around was to give each player a resource controller ship, and make sure players used that instead of the mothership as the drop off point.

Not exactly what you'd use for a ladder game... but it was fun to have a 4 player game, 1 player starts with Turanic ships, 1 with kadesh ships, 1 with taiidan, 1 with Kushan.

To further add to that variation, I liked to make maps where a player had a sizeable compliment of interceptors with the property assigned to them that hides them from long range sensors.... so you could use them to attack an enemy resource operation by surprise much earlier than one could field cloaked fighters.

I also liked huge maps that made hyperspace jumps really required (like so huge a scout would run out of fuel crossing between resource spots)... and starting the motherships in one area, with carriers at other resource spots, the intention being that the carriers skirmish first.

As for ORB that I mentioned, the ship AI needed some work, the first few versions lacked some really basic functionlity for team play.

1) The travelling vs combat formation thing was nice in theory, but when you want to retread, it was stupidly painfull watching your ships try to form up in one big travelling formation. There was no UI to set formation size, so you'd need extreme micro, or you could edit a file (without breaking MP compatiblity) to get your ships to form formations of a certain size... which I did so I didn't have my ships trying to form into formations of 20 before moving in/out.

That editing a formation size file was needed, and gave a gameplay advantage, was poor.

There was more to the ship AI that was bad... but that was one of the worst aspects.

2) Allied players ships still collided as if they were ramming enemies.... allies sending resource freighters to the same asteroid base resulted in the exiting ships colliding with the entering ones, and trying to harvest the same asteroid as your ally just resulting in massive collissions that cripple your fleet

That was fixed... but damage to the multiplayer aspect was done, multiplayer was crippled by low numbers of people playing

3) No team-chat... seriously.... ......

If you wanted to discuss strategy with your ally in private... or anyone (such as in an FFA game) you had to do the ridiculous work around of using your ability to rename a ship.... you basically make your ship name a sentence, and tell the intended recipient to read it... so of course, you have to make sure only your intended recipient is within sight radius of your ship.

4) That ship renaming.... cool but also exploitable. Sure it was nice to give your capital ships (of which you couldn't produce nearly as many as in HW) a unique name.... but when you start renaming soe of your interceptors as Interceptor:T (the variant packing powerful anticaptial ship torpedoes)... and the only way the enemy can distinguish is to focus the camera on the individual interceptors (the icons were the same, though the 3d models were different, and actually allowed you to visually see how many torpedoes a fighter had remaining), I think there's a bit of a problem... they should have had a seperate way of displaying ship class, and ship name.

I didn't mind it so much as when used with capital ships.

I once came across an Alyssian Unarmed Carrier (default name: Triumph) with my first Malus Destroyer... but the player renamed it as "Glory" (the default name for the Alyssian armed carrier, which had double the EHP, and nearly double the DPS of a destroyer, on top of being able to just ram it and survive with minimal damage)...

I initially retreated... I thought i was ahead of him in reseach and economy... maybe was he rushing a carrier and thats why he couldn't put up much of a fight for the center spot... but then thought... wait a minute... the icon isn't showing a shield bar... and there's no way he could have a carrier at this time even if he was rushing one (if it was my 2nd or 3rd destroyer out, I might have believed it).... zoomed in on the carrier... it lacks the weapon turrets and additional plating of the armed varient... ahahah, clever... but I'm still going to attack...

It did buy him maybe 15 seconds....

An for my part, with the hyperspace capable ships. You couldn't just upgrade existing capital ships to jump drives, you had to build entirely new ones. So you could harrass with them, but were typically stuck to a slow frontal attack assuming that you had a sizeable fleet before getting hyperspace tech (at least until attrition + expansion results in your fleet becoming mainly hyperspace capable).

But I didn't want to harass with a lone destroyer... particularly as it couldn't jump again for a while, and the enemy may have fighters packing torpedoes by then.

So I'd just troll with my first hyperspace capable ship or two.... start to open a portal as if I was going to attack... and cancel before the ship jumps... wait for the recharge, do it again.... and repeat until I actually made it a real attack. (and if they fell for the tricks earlier, I could have attacked elsewhere with my main non-jump capable fleet and thus the enemy fleet would lack fighter cover)

I also liked the active/passive sensor system, where you could power down ships to hide them from the longer ranged passive sensors.

The ability to capture enemy ships and use them to advance your technology or unlock a ship your race normally couldn't build was also nice. Malus had the Interceptor:T variant (which required "antimatter torpedoes" research), and the anti-matter torpedo heavy fighters (in addition to the normal torpedoes of a lower tech level), Alyssian had only the normal torpedo heavy fighters. But if the alyssians captured a malus ship with antimatter torpedoes, they could build the alyssian inteceptor variant, and the heavy fighter variant with higher damage torpedoes.

Likewise, the Malus could capture an Alyssian cloaking ship, and then make their own cloaking ships....

Too bad that the cloaking devices were pretty much worthless. They didn't last long, could only be activated with a full charge (like the hyperdrives), were mutually exclusive with hyperdrives (no jump capable cloaking capitals - except the storyline Aldar ships), and ships couldn't fire while cloaked.

The cloak barely lasted long enough for your ships to get out of active sensor range and then power down to hide from passive sensors... and not even that long if they spent half their cloak time just getting into a 20 ship travelling formation.... junk. Nothing like the awesomesauce of HW's cloaked fighters.

Then the Alyssian destroyers were pretty much inferior to the malus ones. Malus destroyers could get all 4 beams on target relatively quickly in pretty much any scenario.

Alyssian ones could only fire 2 turrets at a ship above them... and the capitals always stayed "level" (its space.. with... pitch up!) to an arbitrary plane. So if a malus destroyer attacked from above, it would handily defeat an alyssian one... and the game was ussually decided around when the first destroyers were on the field.

There were some mitigating factors... a Malus carrier could only get 3 of its 6 beams on a single target, but an Alyssian one could get 4 of its 5 beams on a single target... if the target was above it... so the alyssian destroyers should attack from above, and their carriers from below.... *ugh*

Malus got capital killing torpedo fighters, alyssians got worthless cloaks and ships with tactical achilles heels...

If an alyssian payer survived long enough.. the top tier tech upgrades did get them 20% higher shield regeneration, which would make the difference in an even capital 1v1, and their fighters would be superior with a 20% ROF upgrade and a 25% missile damge upggrade....

But if they survived long enough for the high tier assault carriers to come out.... for some reason, a Malus assault carrier always won a ram against the alyssian one with most of its armor remaining... so... yea... poor balance.

Overall, HW was much better gameplay... but if I were a game designer, I would have incorporated aspects of ORB into a HW sequal.

To some extent they sort of did... they replaed the salvage corvette with the marine/infiltrator frigates of HW 2.... the boarding pods of the vaygr one are particularly reminiscent of the way you could capture enemy ships in ORB (not that its a particularly original concept to have space commandos...)

Edited March 4, 2015 by KerikBalm