The Mothership is standing by
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Although Homeworld Remastered Collection is classified as real-time strategy, there are some elements that set it apart from its brethren. The 3D camera and movement add another whole axis to worry about that some may find disorienting, and the fairly strict strengths and weaknesses of the units may lead to defeat if a cohesive unit strategy isn’t considered.
These tips are geared primarily towards online multiplayer gameplay, but can also be applied to campaign or vs. the A.I.
Camera and movement:
- You’re in full control of the camera, so if you’re not careful it can be easy to suddenly find yourself disoriented. Use the arrow keys to pan the camera instead of holding the mouse on the edge of the screen. This allows you to quickly snap the camera in another direction and lets you still use the mouse to control your units.
- Pressing spacebar brings up your sensors manager, which allows you to see a representation of all resources and units, both friendly and enemy on the field, and issue orders and select units. If you’re plotting long-range attacks or movements, this is the screen to use.
- Don’t forget to utilize vertical movement. After pressing ‘M’ to bring up the movement disc, you can hold shift and move the mouse up and down to set which height you want to move as well as horizontal movement.
- Waypoints are your friend. Don’t wanna move straight through a minefield on the way to your destination? Use waypoints to plot around it.
Fleet management and resources:
- The most important concern while playing is to ensure you have a steady supply of resource units (RU). If you lose all your resource collectors to the enemy and you’re out of RU then you’re going to have to start retiring units to get enough money to build more. Your best bet is to build a few and keep them docked via the Launch Manager so that if an enemy takes your mining operations out, you can jumpstart a new RU flow.
- Make sure your resource collectors aren’t having to sit around with the cargo bays full waiting to land. Build multiple resource controllers and keep them as near resources as possible to maximize collector turn-around time.
- Researching and building ships takes a ton of time and RU. Find which ships fit your playing style and research their technologies first so you’ll have a template for the fleet you want in your head before you start the game. If you try and research and build every ship, you run the risk of having an unbalanced attack force and being overwhelmed.
- Spread ship construction between your mothership, carriers, and shipyards. This can make the difference between getting the jump on your enemy and getting caught with a meager force.
Combat:
- Unfortunately, Homeworld Remastered Collection uses the Homeworld 2 engine, so you have to baby your units a little more than fans of the first game may remember. Setting formations is very important, otherwise your ships are going to head full-speed towards the location you command them to. Ships in formation together will advance towards their destination at the speed of the slowest ship in their flotilla.
- Use the right ships for the right job. A flight of interceptors isn’t going to take down a heavy cruiser, but you don’t want to send a heavy cruiser to take out a single frigate. Using the group command, I suggest you split your main fleet(s) into subsections that you can split off for specialized attacks.
- Make sure you use those carriers for what they were made for. Docking fighters and corvettes to a carrier and hyperspacing to your destination is the best way to carry them into battle to support the rest of your fleet. While in hyperspace, you can hit the “auto-launch” command and when your carrier appears at its destination it will immediately disperse your fighter and corvette groups.
- Have a few units that can make repairs on standby either ready to jump in, or guarded by escorts. Make sure if your fighters are getting hammered to press “D” to have them dock with a carrier, mothership, or support frigate, they’ll touch down and launch fully repaired.
Advanced tactics:
- Your fleet will exit a hyperspace jump in the same orientation they entered it in. You can use this to arrange your units in a square and jump in surrounding your target. This will expose less of your units to the enemies firing arcs and allow you to disperse the maximum firepower you can.
- Hide your Mothership by either moving straight up or straight down and away from your starting position. Most players will only send their probes in a straight horizontal path to search for others and you can evade that search pattern by moving into an unorthodox location.
- Minelayer corvettes can be used to deny resources to an enemy. Even if you don’t plan on setting up operations in an area, send a few minelayers to saturate it with mines. That way when an enemy comes to use it, their resource collectors will be destroyed.
- Salvage and capture every thing you can. Every ship you salvage or capture is one ship the enemy doesn’t have and one ship that you didn’t have to pay for. When playing Kushan or Taiidani, I typically designate a carrier with salvage corvettes docked along with four to six frigates as escorts as a quick strike capture force. You’ll want to use around six corvettes per unit to capture ships the most efficiently. The marine and infiltrator frigate serve the same purpose for the Hiigarians and Vaygr and only require a light corvette for fighter escort.
