Homeworld setting

I have unearthed the guidestone!

>tfw remember this game
>tfw played with such intense autism that had to capture EVERY single frigate or larger vessel
>Sort of want to show it to my wife but have the fear that would turn into another autism fest.

By the end of the game, just organizing my fleet was a major chore as they would just string out in a fuckhuge line.

Homeworld is my jam. It was my first RTS, and I bought the remastered version the moment it was available.

I wonder if it would be possible to run a SWN game set in the Homeworld Universe. It would need some serious refluffing, but it's OSR so the fluff is just extra stuff that can be ignored anyways.

Was it ever stated how canon was Cataclysm?
Also we need more horror RTSs, that shit was fantastic.

>Was it ever stated how canon was Cataclysm?
Homeworld 2 completely ignores it, and it was made by a different studio, so it's most likely non-canon

I'm pretty sure they mention the Somtaaw by name

The Somtaaw have been around since HW1, they're in the manual. So are the Soban, the Nabaal, and other kiith, which all began in HW1. But none of the game ever brings up the Beast, the Somtaaw bullying the Bentusi into giving all kinds of cool tech, or any of the events of Cataclysm.

Are the Taidaan, Kushan and most other races mentioned considered human ?

DoK shows Hiigarans as pretty much humans, no mention is made of anybody's biologies being really different from each other, one of the Taiidani was named Elison of all names, and what we see of Makaan shows the Vaygr as being human. So yeah, seems everybody is human, except maybe the Bentusi, although that's more from the "mysterious traders" thing they got going on.

We. Will. Not. Be. BOUND.

By cataclysm, the Bentusi are implied to be physically formless, some sort of energy/spiritual/cybernetic beings that collect knowledge as currency.

I thought they were just infomorphs basically

I'm pretty sure the Bentusi go out of their way to not be known to anyone else. They roll up as a single, massive ship, trade as a single, massive entity, and leave as a single massive ship. Even the Hiigaran diplomats who landed in the Bentusi trade ship got the trading module too fast for any individuals to have passed between the corvette and the trade ship.

Played Homeworld at release. Discovered it from a demo version I found in one of the sample CD's they used to put in game magazines. Shit fucking rocked.

Did they fix the janky-ass control sytem that stopped me from playing the original?

>The most elegant mass 3d movement maneuvering in a video game.
>ever
I can't even tell anymore if you're retarded or this is just bait.

They exchange the Ion Cannon tech for RUs, though. I never knew what would happen if you didn't have enough RUs (300) to pay them.

They also must have some sort of physical body or something the Beast can get at because they were scared shitless of the Beast.

I just remember trying it out a few years ago and being very frustrated by the controls.

Weren't they just permanently wired into the tradeship? Like Kushan did with mothership, well, that wasn't completely permanent but still.

How about some motherfucking maps

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This shit still makes me tear up
>tfw YES were too jew for the remaster

they can be a little odd at first. but once you get used it it its pretty good and intuitive.

You should also check Homeworld: Cataclysms manual and Homeworld 2 manuals for additional lore.

Yes, they're basically a bunch of cyborgs who wired their entire race into their spaceships.

>Dat text on Iifrit Tambuur'sa
Dayum!

Even the lore is....tired. Like in HW2, trying to be deep does not mean to be deep. Merely to be tired and pretentious.

Fake mysticism, yeah.

They were afraid the beast would consume their knowledge, their stories. They didn't fear death, they feared losing access to their information/memory.

They were afraid because the beast didnt need to use their organic parts and so just left them there while the rest of the ship was taken over by beast.
In other words, it would be like your body had been taken over, but your brains and eyes still remained yours, so you could see what was going on yet unable to affect it.

>Damn, I had no idea this existed. I haven't played the original game, got introduced to the series with the remastered version.

If anything, a reason to hate Gearbox even more. The remaster was garbage, didn't include Cata, and they didn't even bother including the manual

>tfw you have this manual in actual print somewhere

The nostalgia

>didn't include Cata

Wasn't that on account of the sourcecode being lost though? I mean I suppose they could have rebuilt it from scratch, but still.

many suspect gearbox being lazy and not wanting to work that

Barking Dog is now a Rockstar Vancouver. Therefore the originals are lost. However the code could be probably be reversed off the disc, but it would take more effort, and remasters are usually done by third string teams anyway. Plus theres also some issue that Rockstar owns Cata even though its Homeworld.

Either way, we will never have a remaster of Cata. Probably for the best considering it would have been just as fucked as HW1 was in the remaster

I mean I don't doubt that but remaking an entire game from scratch is a lot of work though. At least the HW1/2 remaster had the original assets such as music and whatnot to work with.

same

It's ironic that this thread even pops up, I was discussing this with a friend just the other day; I love the Homeworld setting, but I have next to no idea on how to make a TTRPG game set in it. The only thing I could see would be being part of the war effort either from the exodus from Kharak or the events of the sequel, but even then it's like, okay sure, you at worst have an interceptor and at best a heavy cruiser, or perhaps I'm just lacking ideas.

A campaign set and focused on scavenging shit in the deserts back on Kharak and shipbreaking and artifact seraching would be neat though.

>but I have next to no idea on how to make a TTRPG game set in it.

I actually tried one once, a long time ago. I used a modified d20, scavenged a bunch from Spycraft, and wrote up custom classes for each character, including tons of artwork of things like personal weapons, armor, etc.

My group was lukewarm, and my GM at the time thought most of my ideas we're uninspired (specifically my weapon ideas) and that they did not reflect the setting. My attempt to run the game was hampered by players who did not care, did not want to be there, and did everything possible to make the experience as painful for everyone as they could. It didn't help that I was new to GM'ing, and following the advice of the group GM's at the time, which was, always "if you care enough about something, you can't expect anyone else to run it for you - YOU have to do it."

I buried the idea. It requires a group of people who are familiar with the setting, know the details, and actually want to do it, and are not immediately in full "disdain for plebs" mode at the idea of playing in a setting based off a video game

any RPG that could be played whould be, in my >opinion should be MUCH smaller than the games
one destroyer should be the biggest thing you would get IF you can get it
a game of scarvaning and exploration
a somtaaw survey corps
exploring undiscovered places of the universe
a mercenary fleet
that kind of things would make it both big enough to hit the fleet battles and small enough to be managable

It depends on whether you want to play pilots or bridge crew.

A Corvette can be run by 3 people
A Frigate likely by a dozen, maybe twice that.
Capital Ships like Destroyers and Heavy Cruisers get up into the tens to maybe a hundred people.

im just saing it because it feels better to scavenge some age old carrier to your scrappy fighters/corvette and 2 or 3 frigs thatn just getting it out the door
it like getting your own new home, you get me?

plus its a matter of keeping the number of ships low ish before you have to break the calculators

Carriers are relatively big, and because they have PAA's, they become something that could fund its own pirate group if it needed to. In the Hiigaran post-landfall time period, a Carrier formed the basis of an entire Kiith Fleet.

Also, anyone itt who is not familiar with Homeworld SHipyards, should be - read the descripts, it has tons of lore fluff in it.

shipyards.relicnews.com/

>they didn't even bother including the manual
What. The. Fuck?

You think that's bad?
Check out what Deserts of Kharak is doing.

pdf where

shipbreakers shouldnt have been turned into a homeworld prequel, it felt a lot stronger as its own thing

Don't tell the feds, omae

You're a saint, user

>that upside down Destroyer
Gets me every time

I'd totally a play a campaign about bunch of colonists that got on the expedition thinking they'd be settling their birthright, only to get popped out of cryo-sleep months early, told that their home has been burned, and they're about to receive rudimentary tactical training in order to sweep whatever the salv. 'vettes are dragging in.

During the megalith-centered iteration of HW2's development, that was actually the destroyer design they were going for.

I really like this design.
Hell, i loved most of the HW1 designs, Qwaar-Jet in particular, but for some reason all of the HW2 ships just look so... flat.

Well, the design aesthetic is literally flat. Hiigarans are side flat, while Vaygr are tall and long but vertically flat. Even the Progenitor ships are flat. Every big ship draws design cues from a sword blade or something.

The HW2 hiigaran battleship i really like for somre reason, maybe because it is infact flat, i mean rellatively speaking offcourse.

Never really liked the taiidani frigates and capital ships comepared to the Kuushan, did like their corvettes and fighters though.

...

That video, that story, that script, that voice acting, that world-building, that music, dat everything. It's art.

Why is there no Galactica-tier series spinoff

Taidan destroyer a shit.

Hey neat. I found a thing.

fistsofheaven.com/interview-artist-james-nicholls

Nice, here have some god-tier OST in return

youtube.com/watch?v=2VlgYgN8qos

>Akhar checked over his rifle again as the skiff flittered across the Fleet Foundry's immensity, hurrying towards the stricken, bug-like ship floating against the surreal backdrop of the Ion-illuminated nebula. Intellectually, he knew that the Fleet Command's attack AI sub-routines had fried every computer on the ship, after trying their best to open every airlock at once and turn all of the corridors into nightmares of spallation. But it still felt somehow wrong to bring something so *hostile* inside the sacred Mothership itself. Hell, his graduate thesis at Tiir Science Academy had been on theoretical fusion engine designs, so he knew full well what would happen if anyone left alive somehow managed to put the powerplant into overload.

>He glanced at his wrist terminal. The anti-personnel gun platforms had established a full perimeter around the ship. Anything that tried to pop out and take a shot would be instantly reduced to a bloody mist. Or maybe shrapnel. He wasn't entirely sure they were fighting organics - maybe even "humans" - again, though if they were anything like the burners of Kharak and their pirate conspirators, you could hardly call them human. That the ship had airlocks seemed to be a good enough indicaticator, though he couldn't help but notice the complete lack of windows. A map of the ship's interior began to render on the terminal as sonic probes on the ships surface vibrated a rough sketch of its bulkheads and corridors. As far as all the eyes pointed at it could tell, there was no movement inside.

>A pop-indicated the hunter-killer drones were ready to start their breach. Once they had completely swept the ship, his team would begin their insertition. It was a brazen, headlong rush of a strategy, but Fleet Intelligence needed info on whatever it was they were fighting out there *yesterday*. He looked away from his terminal towards the nine other people strapped into the skiff. Mostly Fleet Security sandheads, along with two popsicles like him. Danala had been on the team when they'd taken the Devils' destroyer. He knew he could rely on her to have his back. Shalah was fresh out of basic, though Akhar knew he'd been popped because of his run in the Desert Scouts. Something to bond over, assuming they - or anyone else in the fleet, for that matter - made it through this day alive.

>Akhar was suddenly pressed into his straps as the skiff came to an abrubt halt. A warning indicator flashed in his suit's HUD. Wordlessly, everyone looked at their terminals. Something inside the bug had taken out a hunter-killer drone. On his map, a dozen dots converged on their fallen bretheren's location. A video feed popped up. Body parts, tattered vac suits. And then, the enemy. A gun-wielding arm reached around a corner and began to blind-fire, only to withdraw as the volley was answered by the massing drones' own. Pinned down. Nothing to be done as two of the drones flew around the corner and saturated the hall with kinetic rounds. The feed clicked over to the flanker's guncams. The shredded, broken thing floated there, red blood pooling in spheres around it. The feed went dead - some sort of sick psy-op trick. Danala said a short prayer over their suit comms. One of the sandheads chuckled.

>One minute later, the sweep was done and the all-clear was given. Everything inside was dead. Just like in the Ion Array frigate when Medine got a pirate's knife through his faceplate. Just like when one of the Devils' engineers that had been hiding in the vent had almost gotten the manuevering thrusters back online and crashed an Assault Frigate into the cryo storage section. Akhar checked his rifle again. The skiff began its final approach, sidling up to looming insect. A darkened cargo airlock opened cavernously above him. Several other craft began to arrive, unloading men and equipment to begin tearing apart the battered hulk piece by piece. His team unstrapped, did a final cursory check of their kits and suits.

>"Alright," Akhar said as he deactivated the safety on his manuevering pack, "we're go."

There was a story somewhere where one guy got woken up and told he was the very last member of a Kiith from Kharak - not only was his old clan-state dead, but he was suddenly the "president" of it, and his whole family was dead too.

So, he vowed vengeance, got himself a Frigate, and started hunting bounties against unreformed Imperial Taiidan

So what was it about Remastered that made so many folks angry?

They changed the gameplay, and Gearbox has a lot of nasty baggage aside.

It's in the Cataclysm Historical brief.

Primarily, it balanced the first game against the second, as a means to provide cross-game multiplayer.

The first game and the second game, despite having the same mechanics, work in very different ways.

The remaster was also buggy as fuck, because remasters are cash grabs done by no-name dev teams who usually do mobile game shovelware.

They didn't fix the bug in 2 where the AI would start with ships or resources equal to yours at the beginning of the level - so if you have a massive fleet, the level is harder then it would be normally, and its actually possible to cheese the game by retiring all your ships at the end of a level and gimping the AI in the next

And, no Cata.

The best thing about it was that it revitalized the series, and led to a sequel (of sorts) in Deserts of Kharak. Whether that means we'll get more Homeworld games from now, who knows. But Gearbox is likely on its way out anyway.

They ported Homeworld 1 to the Homeworld 2 engine. In the process they changed how combat worked, since in HW1 the ships shot bullets and impacted other ships, while in HW2 shooting things is a special effect and the RNG determines how the ship got shot and how hard. Also they threw out fuel for fighters since the devs never really liked it, even though the players got attached to it.

Six months later, they basically rewrote the HW1 Remaster to go back to the old style combat, but I never checked to see if it was any good since I was playing Deserts of Kharak and had fun, but it was a shit first impression.

Hrm. All right, thanks. And yeah, I'm bummed about the lack of Cataclysm - that game had top tier voice acting, and that's one thing (among many) I missed in Homeworld 2; all the units feel so dry and detached.

In a way, Cata is the Fallout New Vegas to HW1's Fallout 3, and HW2's Fallout 4.

HW2 wasn't a great game when it came out - it was lacking in every way that made the first Homeworld and Cata great. Its the reason the series died.
(Which makes what the remaster did - converting and balancing a great game to a shit one - all the worse)

Cata was a straight improvement in every possible way on Homeworld 1, and the only real issue with it is that the Campaign is easy mode compared to some of the nightmare levels of Homeworld 1 (to say nothing of the bullshit in the campaign levels of 2)

Noice, user

are there mods or other ways to reduce the micromanaging? like "everyone fighting in that area, repair when hull gets low"

Keeping in mind that Homeworld2 was basically Sierra sticking their executive meddling dick into Relic's Dust Wars project and announcing that it needed more bullshit newage spiritualism and then taking the project out from under them.

Oh yeah, the Cata campaign wasn't nearly as ridiculous as watching a Kadeshi needleship trundle up and obliterate my mothership, or trying to maneuver my fleet around a shitload of roaming asteroids that can gib frigates, or having all your launched strike craft immobilized straight at the missions start by a gravity thingy because you weren't prescient enough to keep them docked.

Cata seemed to focus more on the storytelling aspect, which I guess fits your analogy spot on.

Also, dat Beast reveal.
youtube.com/watch?v=nDcELUCroDs&hd=1

"Yeah good, now after the random as fuck spider ships show up around Hiigara, I want fleet command to yell "Bring sajuuk to bare" so many times that the words stop making sense. I want to suck all the drama out of the event and make it laughable.

Welcome to Karos

Give me your ships

Kharkh is burning

NO FUCK YOU
THOSE ARE MY DESTROYERS YOU LITTLE SHIT
COME BACK HERE

Also to make it TT related I made a shitload of rules for including Homeworld ships in Battlefleet Gothic last year, but then the generals died and I became sad

The Qwaar-Jet is probably the best ship ever designed. Remastered was fucked completely. I wish they had put more effort into it and made it work on a flat base RIGHT from the get go.

While we're one the subject of why HW2 was terrible - it did one thing that was unforgivable. It took the ship-capturing mechanic from HW1 and made it worthless
>HW1
>if you attack a ship with a wing of strike craft in evasive, the ship will target them, and only switch to Sal'vettes at the last moment.
>As long as you have the requisite number of sal'vettes, capture is instant.
>The ship being captured can't fire on the sal'vettes once its been captured.
>HW2
>Marine Frigates immediately become the focus of fire for every enemy ship the moment they come into range.
>Capturing takes time, which means Marine Frigates are taking fire the whole time
>Ships being captured can fire on the Marine Frigate the whole time.

>wah wah the AI wasn't as retarded as a wooden door knob anymore
This is a good thing.

It's still retarded, just not in a fun way. Unless they patched it, moving Marine Frigates in range makes literally all of your other ships untouchable because the AI won't attack anything else.

>tfw your multilayered plan to capture the Qwaar-jet from the nebula in Cata succeeds, and it stays in your fleet throughout the entire game.
>tfw when it rushes to front to take up guard for Taiidan colony ships, still takes several beast missiles, and doesn't give a fuck
>tfw it gets eaten by the naggarok, and goes down fighting.

To be completely honest, I should NEVER be able to run a train on the ball of ships at the Bridge of Sighs. Capturing literally 50 of them was fucking ridiculous when i figured out how to do it for the first time.

And if i can also be honest, i personally never really liked the whole WOLOLOLOLO aspect of HW2's Marine Frigs.

That is exactly what happened to me the last time I played it.