Long ago, when the word 'Hiigara' rang only as a hollow dream, the kiith of Kharak never imagined they would walk the Path to Victory. But, when they reclaimed their Homeworld and proclaimed themselves 'Hiigaran', they believed they had reached their goal. How wrong they were. 150 years after Hiigaran landfall, conflict rages across the Galaxy... Path to Victory is a multiplayer and skirmish mod for Homeworld 2 that adds new units to both Vaygr and Hiigaran Races as well as enabling the Keepers, Raiders and Kadeshi as playable races.
Today I'd like to present two of the most important ships in the Raiders arsenal.
The Lord carrier is the center of every raider fleet. From the first moment you start ingame you'll be using your carrier to raid enemy positions or cover for your smaller capture ships. The Lord was never designed as a carrier but more as a mobile command base. While it can build and fight, it can not dock resource collectors and is really better used as an offensive weapon than a fleet support ship.
It carriers 9 small guns capable of dealing with fighters and corvettes. Beyond that it has a single module slot for either a torpedo battery or an ion battery below the bow.
The second ship is the Outlaw raiding frigate. This is the cornerstone of every fleet and essentially your 'pirate ship'. Armed with three small guns, four torpedo tubes and a boarding pod bay, the Outlaw can fend of any foe and even capture enemy ships.
The EMP torpedoes it carriers are best used in prelude to a boarding action. Fire the torpedoes, disable a ship, then move in and capture it while it's systems are out.
Wherever you see a raider fleet you'll see these two vital ships somewhere nearby.
Nice
When you capture ships the team colours and badges change don't they? I never really did that in defauly HW2, the campaign taught me not to when all the really good battlecruisers were not capturable :(
yep they do.
Capture frigates... useful only one time other than when the game requires you to use them because of your objectives. That time? When you rescue the SY (mission 3?), you can use the capture frigates to capture the second heavy missile frigate, which you can then turn around and use to kill the carriers while your strikecraft focus on killing other strikecraft and infiltrator frigates.
The utility of capturing will be increased over time, first for the raiders and later also for the vaygr's raider doctrine.
Finally the hiigs may get some capture options too but for now it's mainly a raider trait. The problem with capturing in HW2 is it just doesn't work like in HW1 and quite honestly it's easier to build a new ship than capture one. Most likely you'll loose the capture frigate in the process...
Right... the capture system in HW2 was a big let-down to me compared to the trusty salvettes that I loved in HW1. For the love of god, the least Relic could have done was allow folks to capture more ships than the unit caps like in HW1, if they were going to make it such an incredible pain in the arse to capture ships.
Yeah... not sure how I'll be getting aroud that one but something has to work...
Okay - i found a temporary workaround for the corvette capture 'issue'.
Raider corvettes get repaired by 30% when capturing ever 3 seconds if they are below 50% health. This allows you to actually survive long enough in combat to capture a ship. However focused fire on the corvettes will bring them down despite the repair 'bonus'.
There might be a better system but for now this works quite adequetly.
Wow... that's pretty neat that you got that to work.
I also just got cataclysm acolyte style ship linking working. Sadly it only works in one direction and you can't unlink - but it works xD
Hmmm, have you taken a peek at the coding for the external docking in Complex? It would achieve essentially the same effect, but if there are any transformation animations, you'd have to figure out some way to play them while one ship docks to the other. But, you would be able to undock them.
I got it all working as intended.
Could even get unlinking working but don't want to (balance reasons and some other).
No, the unlinking would be good I think... if the ships are linked, they should be slower, but have extra effectiveness against capships (and lesser against strikecraft), and then you can unlink them to make them faster, and extra effective against strikecraft (though lesser against capships). Or... are you talking about bigger ships linking? In which case, it would still be good to let them unlink... perhaps they fire one weapon when linked, and another when not.
The drone linking is one way due to game engine limitations in some regards - but more for a very simple reason: Linking drones lowers your drone cap.
So instead of 12 drones, you can get 12 linked drones (which is like 24 single drones).
They gain different bonuses when linked in different ways - but the main gain is you can build more drones. Unlinking them would really not add in any way as you'd be hurting yourself - and the game has issues with it.
The only time you don't want to link is when your enemy has many anti-corvette weapons. It is worth noting that linked drones are roughly comparable with frigates. They have less armor but have around 5x the armor of a normal corvette with about 3x the damage.