Brief Description

Homeworld is a game by Sierra. It is a RealTimeStrategy game in which you control your fleet of spaceships in 3D space, supposedly with the assistance of Fleet Command (a human female callen Karan Sjet who was surgically installed into the Mothership) and Fleet Intel (he's just this guy, you know?) who "generates mission objectives" for you.

Structure

The game is based on a Level-By-Level structure, so you must complete one level before going on to the next. How long you spend on one level does not affect the timing of events in the next level, no matter how urgently Fleet Command assures you that you need to hurry up and hyperspace (the method used to progress to the next level). Hyperspacing is the only way to move your mothership (in the SinglePlayer game) because its engines are permanently offline.

When starting a new game, you can choose to be one of two races; the Kushan (default) or the Taiidan. Taiidan spaceships look like 'real spaceships' with gun-turrets and things. They're chunky and solid-looking. Kushan ships look too smooth and elegant. They all look pretty similar so that I often was confused between my Support Frigate and my Drone Frigate (with its drones retracted.) The Taiidan Mothership seems better since there are several 'portals' (the place where new ships emerge from and docking ships meld with) guarded by gunarms. In contrast, the Kushan Mothership has one portal and one hangar door but it is slimmer so (I guess) slightly harder to hit so often. Almost all ships are common to both fleets but there is one fighter and one frigate exclusive to each race.

"Money" is called "Resource Units" (a nice, generic term <grin>). It is 'harvest'ed by Resource Collectors and takes the form of asteroids or spacegas clouds. This material is then shipped back to the mothership (or a Resource Controller if one is closer and unoccupied) at 650RU's per Collector-full where it can be stored and turned into new ships. Obselete ships can be Retired, whereapon 60% of their cost in RU's is added to your Cosmic Bank Account. When selected, each ship's "health" is displayed in a colored bar above them. This bar is long and green if the ship is in good repair and as the condition of the ship worsens, it shortens and changes to yellow, then red, then disappears with the ship. What a novel idea... (but then again, it is good to be consistent.)

Fleet command has only so many neural control links, and once a certain number of ships of one class have been added to your fleet, she warns you that she has reached her limit (technically, known as 'capping' <grin>). Later in the game, you may hear her complaining, "Maximum number of ships in the fleet reached". You can't build any more, but there are other ways to increase your holdings...

Storyline

But as far as it goes, without giving away the plot, the story is that your race has spent its years on a desert planet called Kharak; just bumbling about business as usual. Then one day they uncover a spaceship-wreck in the sands of the Great Desert. They excavate the site and find an ancient stone, enscribed with the word Hiigara and a map of how to get there. Hiigara, in the ancient tongue, meant "Our Home".

Incredibly, the populace of the planet is suddenly driven by a common desire of goodwill and co-operation into building a spaceship capable of traversing the great interstellar void. It was such a vast project that it took the entire planet's resources. And it took such a long time too; all of sixty years (a Kharakan year may be equivalent to five Earth years.) Karen made the great sacrifice of being installed into the heart of the mothership. 600,000 of the planet's population were freeze-dried and packed into cryogenic vats in orbit near the mothership.

Throughout the game, you command your fleet of fighter ships, support vessels, and capital ships as you blaze a trail of destruction across the cosmos in your search for Home, Peace and True Hapiness. Fleet Command decides where you will hyperspace to next, and then it's all over to you to "defend the mothership". This generally involves melting any hollow metallic polygons of high velocity that vaguely look like coming anywhere near those green dots in the Sensors Manager.

Style & Praisings

The cutscenes are done in a nice Manga-esque style of animated illustration. The background images cover 360° in each axis and really add to the general atmosphere of high ownage. Each ship is polygonally rendered at different complexity levels depending on how 'close' the camera is to it. This means that gameplay is smooth and fast during a battle but at any time the user can press the pause button and zoom down onto any ship to take a look at its condition, it firing, being hit by homing missiles, etc. With the version 1.04 patch you can even view the gameSpace from the perspective of any of your ships' pilots (the Sensors Array views the world upside-down until you issue it a Move command.)

The music is very cool and appropriate to the game. During cutscenes, you are played "Adagio for Strings" by Samuel Barber. The rest of the time a music track loops behind the sound effects. This sounds quite attractive until about Level 5 when you have heard it enough and decide to disable the interneal music and leave WinAmp running in the background! Remember to pause your music before a cutscene, however, or you might miss a vital piece of information Fleet Intel suddenly discovered and thought you ought to know.

Features

At most times, the game can be paused by pressing the P key (this is configurable.) Players of Baldur's Gate alert: you will no doubt (as I do) continue to press the spacebar to try to pause the game! Unfortunately, in Homeworld you may not issue orders while the game is paused. (If you do, they are ignored.)

At many points during the game, you may feel almost overwhelmed by the beauty of the image being displayed on the CRT before you, and have the desire to record the sight for display purposes at other times. Sierra in their newfound wisdom (after the Uninstall 'feature' that accompanied their game 'Halflife', "wisdom" was not a trait often associated with Sierra) has included a screenshot button. This is the "Scroll lock" button (why oh why not the "Print screen" button like every other game? It's only one button away...) These screendumps are stored in the Homeworld\ScreenShots directory in JPEG format. Make sure you don't rename any of the files or Homeworld will refuse to take any more screenshots until the non-standard files are moved / renamed / deleted.

Requirements

The lowest spec PC I know that runs homeworld acceptably is a Pentium 200MHz MMX with 32MB of RAM but you will really want something more like a K-6 350MHz with 64MB+ of RAM. In version 1.04 and above, there are CPU optimizations for AMD's 3D-Now! technology but I didn't notice a significant improvement in speed or performance using this switch. Much more important is the graphics card you use. The game supports software rendering (but any machine fast enough to cope with SW rendering really ought to have a decent GFX card in it) but the images are badly banded and there are other compromizes... It also supports Direct3D, OpenGL and 3Dfx-GL. You'll also want to have better than an ISA Soundblaster 16 for the sound and music. Something with a DSP will take a load off the CPU.

I used an AMD Athlon 550MHz with 192MB RAM, an ATi 16MB All-in-Wonder Rage 128 GL and a Sounblaster Live! 1024. The 4-speaker function of the SBL is very impressive. Using D3D on the ATi card kept hanging the computer but it worked fine on "Default GL". It had to have the supplementary texture RAM buffer enabled, though. If I had had my way when buying the system, I would have gone for a Matrox G-400 or something more along those lines.

In the last level, however, my CPU reached its limit with the size of my fleet! It has to calculate the position, movement, damage, 'health' and 'intelligence' (tactics & formations) for each ship (I had > 400, the enemy had ~50 + strike craft) on and off the screen. And it has to play the sounds for the selected ships and the ships onscreen 'close enough' to be 'heard'. Then it has to calculate the detail level to draw each visible ship. And draw it. And draw the special effects (muzzle-flash, damage splodging, etc.) And it just wasn't coping with all those ships flying around and shooting and getting shot. I was getting between 5 and 2 fps.

Medium

Homeworld comes on a 80 minute CD. The data covers 676.99MB of disc (346618 sectors) in a single DAO data track. A serial number (consisting of 5 sets of 4 characters) is required during installation and is stored in the system registry at:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\WON\CDKeys\Homeworld
on a Win9x OS. The CD is required each time the game is launched. If a full install has been chosen, the CD can then be removed (eg. for network play). If the music has not been installed, the CD will be required permanently, unless music is disabled in the Audio tab of the game's Options screen. If Speech has not been installed, the CD will be required permanently, unless speech is disabled in the Audio tab of the game's Options screen. If the Movies have not been installed, the CD will be required when launching (of course) and at each cutscene. These occur between levels, when starting a new game, when the last level is completed, or when viewing the Credits.

Patches and upgrades can be downloaded from Sierra's Homeworld page or from Download.com