What Are the Important Functions?

I suppose that might be a concern, though I've never had any use for stealth whatsoever outside a few 'don't get detected' missions, and even those were pretty forgiving. Maybe it's just me, but sneaking around in the metal coated fusion reactor didn't seem to be to helpful.

Heh...the cockpit shaking thing is kind of silly, I agree. But, I never keep the cockpit on, so it doesn't bother me much.

And yeah, homeworld muffed it up good. But then, I don't play homeworld for the nifty physics engine, but for the playability and the sheer control you have over your units. No other 3D rps has come close to that, all the enhancements to make life easier also seriously reduces your playing options. Between that and the way your fleet passes over from mission to mission, HW gives me enough to forgive a few physics flaws.

Hey! I never said Homeworld wasn't fun ... I just said their ships behaved like submarines. Homeworld was a blast!

Did you ever capture any missile corvettes? They're something of a spoiler for a lot of the later missions because of their long-range missile barrage, but they're really fun to play around with.

A wall of missile 'vettes behind a couple of Assault Frigates with a few scouts in front to spot the bad guys can really chew things up. While the missile 'vettes are reloading the AF's take whatever meagre resistance is put up by the scattered survivors of the previous missile salvo.

Watch out for the Kadesh, though: once you blast a salvo into the first wave of incoming fighters you might want to either sphere the MC's around a couple of drone frigates or just dock them ASAP. Fighters, particularly Kadesh fighters, will tear up Missile Corvettes.

Actually, yeah, ever since I learned their dirty little secret, I find it hard to play through missions 2 and 4 without going out of my way to snag as many as possible. Makes mission 2 tedious and long, and getting any of em on 4 is a trick in and of itself, but with some practice and some luck with the weird behavior of the things on mission 2, I've managed to snag 22 of em total.


The things are evil, especially if you've got a decent number of em. I tend to put them into 2 seperate balls a fair distance away from the fighting, and use them as tactical weapons. They flat out shred fighter formations, and can trash most ships with enough time. Especially nice with cloaks, since you can use the cloaked ships as spotters and blow everything to kingdom come. Easy to destroy them if the enemy can get close enough, but I go out of my way to make sure that never happens.

I agree with you about the kadesh though. Swarmers are dangerous to those vettes, and those vettes are too hard to come by to put at risk, so they mostly spend those missions in my mothership.

The cloaked fighters were good for getting advance targetting data for that salvage 'vette feeding frenzy at, umm, Bridge of Sighs I think?

There was another mission where the MV's were really useful for speeding things up, Supernova Station I think was the mission name.

You could pound on the station defenses from a position in a dust vein about 60 degrees left by 60 degrees up from the station. From there you could just see the nearest elements of the fleet, including the carrier.

It would mess up the script and/or cause the carrier to light up and leave early if you destroyed too much stuff, but you could seriously degrade the defenses.

The Kadesh multibeamers take good care of the station, anyhow. Talk about a specialized ship: paper thin armor, lousy gunnery, extremely powerful weaponry. A station-killer, pure and simple. Engage the defenses with the Big Iron then slip these guys in to waste the really big targets. Works great against the Emperor's MS.

I imagine they would be useful if you were going to blow up the ships at Bridge of Sighs. I usually spend the time salvaging as many as I can though, because the mission right after it can get nasty. Haven't tried using them on supernova station - was flat out too paranoid about getting them burnt to a crisp to let them leave the mothership. I'll have to try that next time.

They can mess up the AI on the ghost ship mission big time though. Annoying as all heck.

Have you tried the multibeam/cloak trick? I haven't tried it myself, but from what I understand, the multibeam frigate's spinning attack animation somehow mucks up the decloaking to fire deal, making it so they appear for a moment, then immediately recloak while still firing. If it's true, makes them extremely nasty ships.

At Bridge of Sighs you can use cloaked fighters to spot for your Salvage Corvettes, allowing you to assign targets sooner than if you just wait for your quarry to chase your proximity sat into range of other, visible fleet elements.