Homeworld is, in a word, massive. It can take a solid twenty minutes to traverse the available space, and longer if your ships are the massive frigates and cruisers that they’re inevitably going to be. Watching your ships majestically soar through space at your command is a great experience, however, and the battles that can occur are simply mind boggling. Here’s an example from a match between Pat and myself.
Pat and I had found/stolen the disc for Homeworld from Caleb, and after a few matches decided that getting resources and slowly making a fairly small fleet was just too damn slow and boring. Being the super 1337 hackers that we were, we decided to change the configuration files for the game and make very ship free, and make it appear instantly when clicked.
We opened a new game, and ferociously began clicking. After a minute or so, however, we were rudely interrupted by the call of dinner from the other room. What the hell, we thought, our ships still have to get into position and leave the mothership, right? We’re set for twenty minutes while they did that, right? We clicked through the ships a bit more, and I scheduled another 400 or so big bastards, while Pat settled for 500 piddly little ships. We walked out to dinner, but before I left, I made some fake excuse to stay in the room a second longer while Pat walked out. I rushed back in and hit K on Pats computer, and strolled back out.
Now, those of you who know Homeworld (that’s right, all one of you) are probably gasping in shock, but for the rest of you, here’s a lowdown on what that does. Hitting K triggers kamikaze mode, where your ships fly into whatever you designate as a target, and explode, rather than the usual flying around shooting at it. This is – in theory – a way to smash your enemies with the remnants of your damaged ships, however it does about as much damage as attacking a tank with a feather. Pat didn’t know what kamikaze mode was, and he sure as hell didn’t know how to turn it on and off, so it was something that I was looking forward to all dinner.
After we finished eating, we rushed back into the computer room, and readied ourselves for battle. Because it takes fifty damn years to get a big ship out of the mothership, I had around 100 big fellas in a line next to my base, whilst Pat had more people than could fit onto the screen. He was pretty cocky, saying that his guys were going to wipe me out, and my big ships weren’t going to even be able to touch his fleet of tiny dudes. I sat and smiled.
We decided to meet just outside my base, because quite frankly my ships moved slower than tectonic drift, and his were hyped up on a combination of Red Bull, red cordial and cocaine. Looking at the radar, it looked bleak. My force – which looked fairly intimidating in person – was absolutely dwarfed by the thousand or so little green dots swarming haphazardly across the map towards me.
Mentally, I steadied myself. If he’d managed to somehow catch on and hit the K key, I could be in serious trouble. 1000 of anything is a problem, especially when my ships simply carried massive one-shot a minute lasers that might hit one guy, maybe. I got increasingly more nervous as I watched, feeling certain that he would have seen through my ruse and aborted his pilots suicidal orders.
The first of his ships appeared, and bright blue beams lanced out from my fleet, hitting the centre and passing through. The casualties suffered by the incoming fleet were inconsequential, however, compared to the screen filling wall of metal that suddenly emerged from the dark of the surrounding space. My heart froze. Had he managed to disable kamikaze? Had I horribly miscalculated, and was I about to be utterly destroyed by wave after wave of tiny bastard ships?
No. As I watched, his wall formation collapsed into a cone, with the tip headed straight towards the very centre of my ships, who were hurriedly trying to reload before the horde arrived. Pat was amazed at the new tactics on display, and cheered his men on as he watched them bravely fly towards their shared enemy. The fire began, and hell was rained down upon the unlucky Ion frigate that bore the brunt of the attack.
However, as we both watched, the first of his men collided in fiery explosions with the hull of my ships. Pat stopped cheering, stunned, and swore as another volley from my cannons tore through a sizeable chunk of his forces. He swore again as the bulk of his ships reached mine, and threw themselves against the hardened steel of my ships. The first target went down in a blaze of glory, knowing he served his purpose as the bearer of the brunt of the attack. The rest of Pats ships, by now halved at least, began to separate and find their own targets to attack. Pat hurriedly tried to call his attack off, but it was useless. By the time he managed to call off his assault, 90% of his ships were not more than floating debris, and the rest were being picked off, scores at a time by my ships.
Pat retreated, swearing vengeance for the loss of his hundred of men, but found that in the fray I’d managed to push further into his base than he’d anticipated. We were sitting several seconds from his mothership, and as he watched, I yelled triumphantly and plunged into battle with his scant defences.
It was over in seconds. My ships tore through what little was there, and whilst doing so, hunted down the rest of Pats forces. The devastation was complete. Nothing was spared. My cruisers, content in the knowledge off a job well done, declared the war over, and went home to their wives and children.
All up, 20 ships were lost. A fifth of my men died, but at the cost of several thousand of Pats. A victory, then. Pat and I haven’t played Homeworld since. It’s too long, shallow, and horribly unrewarding to play too much, but in the short amount of time that we played it, I managed to take one wonderful, glorious victory from it.
Oh, and Pat still doesn’t know I put his ships on kamikaze. Sorry, Pat.
