Patched Gameplay 0.7 - Private Release news

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Homeworld 2 Patched Gameplay v0.7 - Private Release.

Guess what, time ago I decided to start something of mine only.

But besides that, I have felt the need to improve (well, that’s the aim at least) the Homeworld 2 gameplay still keeping it as close as possible to the original.

There are some aspects of the original gameplay that I find wrong and incomplete, so I've tried to fix them following what deduced while playing and testing stuffs. Some new features, some more depth have been added, still I used only what there was already.

There aren’t shining new ships nor spectacular scripts, useless to say that I have no skills in modelling and I know very few of scripting but it’s so even because the aim of this little mod is different. I hope the name I’ve chosen can help you in getting it across. Patched Gameplay is not full mod but a patch that wants to improve the game but without creating a new Homeworld 2.

Just some hints to play it:

- Be careful, there’s a new gameplay asset.
- Explore any old stuff because they may hide something useful.
- Play it with a friend if you can. Human players are much more creative and smarter than a cpu (although we are slower) and furthermore I haven’t worked on the AI so I’m not sure it can exploit all what is offered by the new balance.

Changes are all listed in the changelog, few and basic ones actually but they really had weight.

And if you want to know more... (if not, skip to the very end)

Expected changes.

Introduction:

I don’t want that someone may think that changes are randomly made, without a purpose, so I’m going to explain you every choice I took in Patched Gameplay. Yet a description can make you better understand how the gameplay have changed and how to play it.

Chapter One: Capital Ships’ Overpower.

Homeworld ships are overall resistant, they can absorbe a good amount of damage before dying, and I enjoyed this feature. An element that wasn’t carried forward in Homeworld 2...with the only exception of Capital Ships. A choice with apparently no weight that have created a ground imbalance between this class and other ones, making many ships not so very useful and so leave-able. It’s something that I never got used to, for two reasons. First of all because the gameplay greatly suffers from it of course, but there’s an other deeper one. I find it an overrated valuation, the principle they seem have followed is “more mass a ship has more health it gets” in conjuction with “bigger the ship is thicker can be its armour” and this sounds very wrong to me. Among many things, something I really like of Homeworld is its armour idea “bigger the ship is thicker is its armour” and this they should have followed in my opinion, and so given Capital Ship less health than what they did. Just consider that, since a bigger ship needs bigger systems, only few space of its hull can be used for more layers of armour in relation to a ship of the class immediately below. The difference between Frigate and Capital Ship class in Homeworld 2 is bigger than in Homeworld but yet those healths seem very exaggerated to me.
I could have brought back the old Homeworld toughness for all ships, as I said I like the endurance of Homeworld ships, but I also like the Homeworld 2 idea of discontinuity, having fragile ships, and so I decided to keep going following that way. I think that’s a very interesting concept, that also makes
you realize how crude the war is. A ship can easily sink if you sent it in the middle of the battle without care, and its crew with it.
And so I did it, Capital Ships are no longer movable bulwarks. The game is much more balanced, Capital Ships’ excessive power have finally ended. They are now more the extra value that makes you win, not the only power that effectively you need to.

Chapter One, Part Two: the Battlecruiser matter.

The Battlecruiser is a ship which I want to talk about separately, because I think it deserves special attention. I remember a criticism in particular, in some people opinions the Hiigaran Battlecruiser was made only to be nice and not to be the ultimate Hiigaran warship...I have to dissent. The ship design is very balanced, elegant and studied in every detail, even combat-wise. Weapons have been put in excellent positions, assuring great coverage. It has a lower firepower in relation to its Vaygr counterpart but it’s worth the features it has in exchange, it’s not weaker at all. But this isn’t a praise (although I
wanted to express my opinion), I decided to start with a criticism because I have a new one, that concerns both Hiigaran and Vagyr Battlecruisers this time. I want to use it for justifying the specific cut to their healths (yes, health again...otherwise this would be chapter two), that is the widest of this patch. The criticism is actually composed of two parts that converge on the same subject: health of course.
Following that concept of (to use other words) “soft hearth enclosed in a tough shell”, their shapes are way too thin for having that amout of health, they are rather slim even following the idea of mass they decided to follow. Still, there is an other reason that have made me think of reducing their health, the
concept of Battlecruiser. Well honestly I have to say that first I decided to increase the Battlecruisers’ speed in exchange of the health cut* but then it carried out quite nicely that, because it’s not a big mass that grants you a big health, the ship can go faster since it has less heavy mass to carry. And this exchange perfectly applies to the definition of Battlecruiser, that, even if wooly, can be driven into the general expression “Combat vessel with the same firepower of a battleship but that sacrifices armour protection in exchange for speed”. I’ve always thought that the original stats were more fitting for a
theorical “Battleship” so the all the balancing issue (that had top priority of course) makes perfect sense also in an other way and so becomes the second part of the Battlecruisers’ health criticism. I never got used to the idea of slow Battlecruiser that Homeworld 2 carries though. In my opinion a ship with the
term “cruiser” in its name should be fast (/faster than something) by definition and the Homeworld 2 one (even if Battle-) isn’t at all.

[*All Capital Ships gained at least some speed.]

Chapter Two: Little Digression.

Before continuing I want to spend some more words on naval classification; since the topic was introduced in the past chapter I prefer to close it. According to my own Homeworld 2 classification, the Battleship is the most balanced between the existing big combat capital ships and other ones rotate around it. As already said, a Battlecruiser has the same firepower of a Battleship but it sacrifices armour in exchange for speed; while a Dreanought has the same health of a Battleship but it sacrifices speed* in exchange for firepower. Concluding, Cruisers are destroyer-sized capital ships that sacrifices firepower in
exchange for speed. This last class may seem senseless but it fulfils a specific role: border patrolling; to help you in getting the right idea, immagine it as a ship meant to hunt heavy-armed pirates in wide blue water.
Our naval classification (refered to real ships) is very dispersive because it changes following the warfare advancements, that follows one other rather quickly. It doesn’t take me by surprise that there are more definitions for each class, a specific period produces definitions according to the new-formed warfare and to the out-of-date descriptions. Since the Homeworld enviroment is in a state of stagnation, in which new discoveries have almost no influence on warfare, I think that an indipendent Homeworld classification should be set, still keeping the most stable definitions from our past classifications. The most fitting period for ships’ classification is the one that rotate around the first half of the 20th century in my opinion, since it’s the most stable one with more classes, and for this reason I took the definition of Battlecruiser coming from it.

*mobility is a more correct term

Chapter Three: Subsystems’ Overtoughness.

Even subsystems are provided with an impressive health, they can absorbe more than twice the damage a frigate does, still being big the same or sometimes even smaller in size. This thoughness can easily be referred to the health of the ships that carries them, Capital Ships, in a sort of principle of coherence.
Their health reduction was hence a necessary step to keep consistency with Capital Ships’ health reduction. Still, it seems that Homeworld 2 subsystems are built according to a different structure in relation to ships and this seems to proven by the existence of the anti-subsystem bombs upgrade, that have been removed because no longer necessary and only gameplay-wise potentially overpowered. Principle of coherence or not however, I’ve always found their health way too high in comparison to existing ships; I simply can’t see how a different structure can so effectively reduce weapons’ effectiveness when they are built with the same materials ships are built with so their health was reduced even for this reason*.
Only some kind of weapons can effectively destroy subsystems though, and they are always plasma boms and few other, always mounted on strikecraft. Attacking subsystems with frigates and Capital Ships is still not advisable nor useful but it’s now more fair and balanced.

[*that also justifies the Capital Ships’ health reduction, for that sort of coherence
principle between them...nice circle!]

Chapter Three: Forward Defence.

The way of playing changes in different ways. Modifications explained in chapter one and three affect for istance the way of defending and attacking production ships, carriers in particular. The new fragility of both Capital Ship class and subsystems add the need to move the center of the fight far away from your
producing areas, if you don’t want to see your production ship easily screwed up with a single decisive breakthrough attack. As result the defensive line has to be moved forward, more distant from what you want to keep alive than what you’ve done until now. The defensive perimeter becomes harder to defend with slow ships since the range to cover becomes wider, allowing bombers to perform hit and run tactics for istance. A fast incursion of few squadrons of bombers can easily harm your most important production facility before the arrival of friendly reinforcements. If a strike-group of bombers leap over your defence
with few losses, it can easily head for your Shipyard and destroy its hyperspace inhibitor, and so allowing enemy capital ships to jump directly on its back. Always keeping few interceptors can so reveal very useful, as platforms become more important to counter these possible annoying incursions. Hyperspace Inhibitors also acquire more value, becoming (more than what they already were) an almost essential
component of all your Motherships and Shipyards. Monitorating entry paths with probes becomes also very important, especially in large maps. Yet, sending lone Capital ships to your enemy is easier, but don’t expect them to survive long.

Chapter Four: Slowed Building and Bigger Maps.

Homeworld 2 suffers from an other bad illness, the “throw all what you build to your enemy”
one. It doesn’t matter what you do, who has the fastest building wins. The gameplay reveal itself quite annoying, rather the same thing as soon as you understand the map you’re playing, not so entertaining as it should be. Of course, keeping a costant building must be important, but if building is too fast this means that you’re death as soon as you lose some time in doing something else. Thinking is not worth the time you spend on it, so you can just keep building and sending RUs to the enemy without care, that’s better. You focus on build tabs and sensor manager and that’s all.
For this reason I decided to drop the building rate, to allow the player to think more, to make use of tactics, of cloacking modules also, to enjoy his ships fighting. And having a slower production makes you also take care of your ships, since it takes more time to build them. You could not be able to replace the losses in time; you must choose what to build to have a balanced fleet.
Anyway there’s still a chance to reach the almost same level of building speed you had in Vanilla, through the second level of manufacturing upgrades but it takes some time and RUs so it’s not something you’ll do any early.
Something else that can help in solving the remaining sickness is actually a bigger map. Having more distance between groups of RUs provided asteroids breaks the fight, allowing you to have more time to orginize your attacks, to arrange your forces in case of defeat. Controlling multiple resourcing pockets becomes harder because of the wider distances, cloaking becomeas also more useful, since it’s harder to check the entire map ships for enemy units.
In any case, Vanilla maps are quite small on their own. And now that Capitals Ships can move faster, that you need more space to effectively control the battlefield and to protect your resource pockets, they become even more smaller. For these reasons Patched Gameplay is provided with new, bigger maps*.
It needs them.

[*It’s my pack of maps actually. There are two versions for each map in it, a large one and a small one. Large versions are really huge actually, so play small versions if you don’t like such kind of maps.]

Chapter Six: All What Don’T Need An Entire Chapter.

The following is very short paragraphs, poor discriminated things not worth of being widely discussed...

Chapter Six, Part One: Artificial Intelligence.

Changes will come out more in human vs human matches.
I haven’t worked on the AI yet so be aware that it may not act as it should. It may do some craps sometimes, like making fighters approach close to a capital ship but not attack it*. I’m not saying that’s broken, just it’s not able to exploit all what offered by the new balance. I simply miss the skills to change this but I would come to it in the future.

[* they start to go back and forth like crazy and you can destroy them all without any effort]

Chapter Six, Part Two: Dispassionate Advise.

I suggest you to play Patched Gameplay with a friend though, AI’s occasional dismay or not. Human players are much more creative and smarter than a cpu, although the AI doesn’t need time to act so it may do faster.
And if you don’t have any, join Tungle or Hamachi anyway. The community is still alive, Homeworld 2 players are just very shy...

Chapter Six, Part Three: Campaign.

Unfortunately, the Singleplayer sucks the same. Early and middle missions in particular, they are just boring. You can do whatever you want to the gameplay but it’s hard to make that Campaign shine without acting directly on each level. I would like to restore the difficulty of the unpatched version* in the near future and also add other enemy units, some tactical elements as well.

[* Homeworld 2 version 1.0]

I hope I managed to realize my intent, making Homeworld 2 more balanced and entertaining...

Mod here: Divshare.com

Update: Version 0.8: Divshare.com

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</xml><![endif]-->Have fun!

[ My MapPack, that has not been added to Patched Gameplay yet: Divshare.com ]
Ah, the win condition script isn't functioning yet.