Quick Look: Homeworld Remastered Collection

this game could really have used a total war style ui bar containing cards for all of your units, because it's super unnecessarily hard to keep track of where everything is

I am pretty sure they just rebuilt HW1 in the HW2 engine, because I remember the interface for HW1 being way different.

No Yes credit music :(

ho boi. people that play homeworld are not gonna like this. brad is not a HW player, there are many things he's missing out. but nice to see the game getting a looked at.

HW1 felt odd to be as they put it in the HW2 engine. But HW2, which i had never finish, really moved well in the remastered - even with its really dumb story - i was shocked that i enjoyed playing hw2 more than hw1 in this edition.

I really love that they made this package but man the lack of formations in HW1 Remaster is really bumming me out, if you launch the original game its quite clear how the ships holding their formations makes a massive difference in both the feel of the controls and employing advanced tactics. Playing HW1 original you can destroy the practice drones in the first tutorial mission very quickly due to scouts holding a formation and being able to stay on target and focus fire, that is impossible in this I hope someone releases a mod to fix it or Gearbox updates the game.

But overall it's a great package the inclusion of the original games working on newer versions of Windows keeps me happy but I hope it gets where it needs to be.

I had never heard of the term 4X and today I'm seeing it everywhere!?

it means games liek master of orion or sid meier's civilization

you could have moved the resource collector up and down :P are you really sure you played the training :) Bentusi was blocking it. (you should have made it before)

also, once the other ship left the resource controller would have moved...

also, you can have the resource controller "guard" the harvesters so it follows them.

there is also an option to only pick fighting using when drawing a selection box over everything. (without doing that you are picking up the harvesters too)..

you could have stolen those icon cannon ships attacking you.

I loved these games, It was the golden age of RTS

Does it have attack ships on fire off the shoulder of orion? I'll believe when I see it.

The term has been around for probably a good 20-25 years.

@ogto: yeah they should have gotten their resident professional homeworld expert to... Oh wait...

I haven't played Homeworld in a long time but I was almost going to write something uncomplimentary about this QL.

Because on the other hand there is this. But I really would recommend people also watch some more HW videos.

@brad Vertical movement is pretty essential. Later on you will be positioning defense satellites around your stationary ships, its very handy to do that in a spherical formation so you have protection from all angles. There is one map with a giant globe of defense satellites you need to penetrate. You will do a lot better if you get out of the 2d mindset!

Also, the battles get HUGE. Eventually you will have lots of squadrons and lots of different classes of fighters.

just do the tutorial brad...

Really glad they rereleased this. The only thing I have left from my original HW1 GotY box is the soundtrack CD.

Aww yeah.

I remember Homeworld 2 had this weird dynamic difficulty that adjusted each mission to you depending on how many ships you would bring into it from the previous one. This made some later levels really difficult from the very start and eventually I figured out you should just scuttle your entire fleet at the end of each mission so that in the next one the computer would really downsize your opposition.

Hmmm, ok. I feel like I need more of an inherent love of space-ship-stuff to get into this...or an appreciation for the original. This is definitely high on the list of 'quick looks to sleep to'. That isn't a knock on the quality of the game, just the atmosphere. If there was a demo, I'd probably check this out.

Brad... doesn't know what ambassadors are, does he?

USE THE ALT KEY!!!! IF YOU WANT TO LOOK AT A SHIP ALT-CLICK!!!!

I love these games.

Yeah, the biggest disappointment of this game is the HW1 remaster. Its redone in the HW2 engine, and while it looks great, the UI is very different and ships behave very differently. Formations are pretty broke and now you have to repair and salvage ships one by one, instead of just 'selecting' what you want to salvage/repair.

There is also some other funky behavior.

For example, support frigates, with 'repair' abilities, now has to attach to ships like a barnacle to repair them, which is hilarious for such a large ship.

I need to buy this.

I found the UI and controls in HW2 to be far superior to the first so despite some weird camera funkiness with the stationary mothership I loved what they did with the HW1 remaster. It's actually playable now instead of the archaic mess that the original was.

Homeworld 1 had a great punch-in-the-gut effect when you found out your civilization was wiped out while you w'ere out running errands (and the evil Galactic Empire was blowing up helpless colonists to "Agnus Dei"), but... I dunno. Nostalgia-Goggles aside, I really didn't like it when multiplayer games had factions which are just re-skinned versions of each other. (I think the Kushan and Taiidan had...what, 2 or 3 unique units between them?)

Also, Homeworld: Cataclysm was my favorite Homeworld. *Runs*

How to find every unit of one particular ship type 101: bring up the tactical view, double left click on that type of ship you want all of ---> done.

Kind of reminds me of how it works in most other RTS games.

Yeah, gee, how could I have possibly made it this long without managing to grasp the most basic aspects of diplomacy. LRN2POLITICS NOOB

I was kidding, but arranging for a meeting on neutral ground... err space... doesn't make for interesting video gaming.

EDIT: Actually, now that I think about it, maybe that could be a way to design an unorthodox mission in a military space game. Hmm...

@majorelint: They did and it causes problems not present in HW1.

@majorelint: You are correct! HW1-Remaster is in the HW2 engine. Although I didn't get the chance to play the original games, that caused a great number of mechanics to be altered or straight-up removed!

Like in HW1, the bullets were physical entities that might accidentally smash into an unintended target. Now it's RNG/dice rolls.

Formations/squadrons no longer function as they did previously, and tactics (aggressive vs evasive) that alter ship behavior on the fly are removed, too. It's different from "aggro vs defensive vs passive" in Remaster, but tl;dr, tactics options trade firepower for survivability depending on what you selected.

Homeworld looks like what I thought Eve Online looked like before I actually saw Eve Online gameplay

@tuxfool: regardless i still chuckle at people's expectations for levels of gameplay prowness in... well, pretty much everything on this site. 90% of the time they succeed in showing off a game's features while still being entertaining; s'all i could ask for.

Lost interest as soon as Brad said you were stuck on one plane.

salt

Brad does a good job showing what a newcomer to this game can expect. It's an old game (well, a remake of) and does a terrible job of explaining things to you. For instance, if it were a modern game, there would be a tutorial at the beginning of every level saying "Steal enemy capitol ships!!!"

If you are interested in learning more about this game, youtube as always is a great place to go. If you can find the vod's, Totalbiscut did some pretty good streams as well.

Brad, come the fuck on...

Can't you pause the action to issue orders and cue up build orders in this game? Or am I misremebering?

Brad let the carrier get away.

Needs more web and scrams.

you are not stuck in one plane

@marblez3: You are not stuck on one plane. Its a 3 dimensional map. However to make it not fry your brain trying to wrap your head around it you can most of the time imagine it as a single plane (things are ahead or behind or to the left or to the right)... they will a lot of the times be way below or way above your plane though. Even as Brad speaks you can clearly see that his squadron is on one plane, while the resource collectors are below him.

There are a ton of reasons to move to different planes; however as Brad said he hasnt had to do so, thats because when you click on something to attack or harvest that is in different plane then the yautomatically move there (as you would expect) otherwise it would be a nightmare of a control scenario.

One good reason to move to different planes is patrol squads. You want to intercept enemy ships way before your fleet is in danger, since for every lost ship thats one less you get for rest of the game. So you want patrols way out there covering the dome, and not just near your ship and then taking a long time flyign to intercept.

Probes is something you send to different planes.

I remember that mission... I think its like Mission #3 or 4... the game hasnt even gotten hard yet. its basically still a tutorial introducing mechanics/ships.

coolest spaceships ever

This really makes me want to play Nexus: The Jupiter Incident...

Argh... if Brad only paid attention during the intro. There are humanoids, and it talks about how their "oracle" got intergrated into the mothership's mainframe. So she is human/AI hybrid basically, which is explains the calm voice.

Why not play both?

Let me quickly throw in Haegemonia: Legions of Iron here if anyone is old enough to remember it, some HW players should.

@duxa: Oracle? Karen S'jet is a dang scientist my friend.

I feel like Brad should have paid attention a bit more - maybe my nostalgia for Homeworld is colouring my perception, but still, he got some details wrong. The ancient alien stuff mentioned by Brad is infact not ancient alien stuff; the Kushan find the wreckage of an ancient starship on their planet, but it isn't ancient aliens; it's their own ship. This is the whole basis for the story. Obviously the whole more than one plane thing has been discussed - but sufficive to say, Homeworld is a deep game.

Oh, Brad.