Capturing ships |
Cloaking (invisibility) |
Pausing |
Keyboard shortcuts |
Readers' Contributions |
Spoiler Alert
These hints may spoil your fun playing through the game. Using what is
contained on this page, the game may suddenly stop being a challenge.
I recommend you exercise self control and only look at this page if you
do not mind possibly seeing such information.
Manuals
Having the manuals (and actually looking through them) helps when you want
to know if your ship will be able to outrun the enemy ship 'coming up ahead.
They are in .PDF format and are installed to the Homeworld\Documents
directory. They are available from the Downloads
page predominantly for people who do not own the game but would like
to browse through them to get more of a taste of the game before buying it.
Cancelling Orders
Set the hotkey for "Cancel Orders" from 'tilde' (the wiggly hyphen ˜ ) to 'O'.
Pressing tilde did nothing for my ships, but 'O' works fine.
Keyboard Shortcuts
You'll be much more efficient if you learn the keyboard shortcuts
associated with the various formations, commands, etc. rather than going through the
right-click menu each time. As well as commanding your units, Control Groups can be assigned
in a Command&Conquer style to select groups of units with one keystroke, no matter where on
the 'map' each unit is. To assign a Control Group, select the units you want to group together
and press Ctrl-n
where n
is a number from 1 through
0 on the number strip. To select a group, press the number associated
with that group. To focus that group, press the number again. To zoom-in close to the group,
press the number again. A single unit can be assigned to several Control Groups. For example,
my Interceptors were 1&2, MGC's were 3&4, SC's 5, AF's 6, IF's & IAF's 7, D's 8, MD's 9 and
then all my ships were in group 0 so I could keep track of losses. Strike Craft will
get confused if you reassign their Control Group
while (some of them are) docked.
Support Frigates
All your units are likely to get damaged by your enemy's (or your own) fire so it is
important thet you repair them when necessary. All your Capital Ships (except any rescued
IAF's) will automatically repair themselves slowly and do not require fuel. All StrikeCraft
cannot repair themselves (a Repair Corvette can repair other ships) and do run low
on fuel. When going into battle, it is often a good idea to have a row of Support Frigates
Supporting your Capital Ships. They will (hopefully) prevent any Caps from being destroyed
and are close at hand for Strike Craft to refuel and repair. If they are attacked, you
must concentrate fire on the attacking enemy ship because Support Frigates will not
last long under fire. They can heal each other, however. Divide the group into two halves
and set each half to Support the other. They will last much longer this way, but won't be
able to repair any other vessels. (NB: A Support Frigate must turn to face its ward before
it can start administering support. This takes time.)
When commanding your wing of Support Frigates to Support other Capital Ships, it is best to
assign each individual SF to a selection of targets as opposed to setting your entire
collection of SF's to Support all of your other ships. If they are commanded separately,
they can act independantly but if you command them en-mass, they will fly around en-mass
to the most damaged ship in their target list and all administer that one ship while others
in danger are ignored!
Docking
When Strike Craft get low on fuel or 'health' you should Dock them with a Support Frigate,
Carrier or the Mothership. Note that Strike Craft docked using "AutoDocking" at the end
of a level will NOT be refuelled or repaired when they emerge at the beginning of
the next level. They certainly have time to be refuelled and repaired; you can build four
or five ships during a Hyperspace jump!
Launch Manager
It is often advantageous to turn Autolaunching off on your Mothership and all your Carriers
so that as you HS into a new level, they don't all spill out and get melted before your Cap
Ships are in range to deal out some serious damage. The Launch Manager can be accessed by
pressing 'L'. If the level includes lots of asteroids flying around or Grav Well Generators
in front of the HS entry point <hint hint>, it is probably adviseable to keep all
Stike Craft docked. But if you want a selection of Strike Craft to launch during the cutscene
following the HS jump, put them in a Carrier and everything else in the MS. Set autolaunch
on for the Carrier and off for the MS.
Fleet Command only likes you having up to 4 Carriers but you can easily capture all seven.
The Build Manager and Launch Manager only cater for up to four Carriers, however, so doing
anything with the last one other than using it as an oversized Resource Controller is, at
first consideration, hard. Having more than four Carriers screws up the Autolaunching and
the ordering (when in Military Parade with the MS) and who needs more than four carriers?
Just retire the extras for 1200RU's each. But if you have more than
four and you want to use a specific Carrier for a task, you have to select and focus it
before entering the Build or Launch Manager. This usually works.
Forced Attacking
In some circumstances, you may want to attack something that isn't normally flagged as
'enemy'. Such items may be Bentusi Mothership, the Junkyard Office, asteroids, Captain
Elson's Destroyer, the Mothership's scaffolding in Lev01, etc. This can be done (in most
cases) by holding 'Ctrl' and 'Shift' while clicking the desired target. If the pilot of
the attacker is dubious about your orders (for example, commanding your team of Heavy
Cruisers to attack your Support Frigate) then you'll hear the pilot say something like,
"It's your call..."
Scouts and Interceptors
I found it very effective to have a wing of fighters consisting of mainly Interceptors
with only one or two Scouts. Place the Scouts at the tip of Delta formation. The enemy
ships automatically target the lead ship (the first to come into their view). When the
wing is flying normally, it will stay in formation. As soon as you order the wing to
attack enemy Strike Craft, however, the Scouts will leap forward. They will shoot at the
enemy and then pass them by. The enemy will turn to follow the Scouts. The Interceptors
still have the enemy in their sights and blast them from the rear (so don't have to keep
turning, which wastes time and fuel). The Scouts will dodge most enemy fire (especially
if set to Evasive). After the battle, the wing will reform to Delta since the individual
units were not given specific commands; merely the entire wing. The Interceptors don't
get shot and the Scouts don't get to shoot.
Scouts scouting
In later levels, Scouts are next to useless in battles; they have next to no armor and
have to refuel frequently. So I stopped building them after Lev04 and still had some left
at the end of Lev16. Once proper fighters can be built, use your scouts as mobile Probes.
They haven't got such a large field of vision as a probe, but they are more useful since
you can take them to the next level. They can also be useful in 'activating' events when
the craft that activates the event is sure to die doing it. Or they can be used for
detecting Grav Wells <grin>. Lots of uses. Little point 'Retire'ing them since they
are so cheap (you get 60% of the buying price for retiring a ship, no matter how damaged).
They can out-run a missile swarm. If you just tell them to Move, they can last for
a few seconds. If you get them to Move with Evasive, most will survive for quite a while.
But if you activate their Afterburners (by pressing 'Z') they streak ahead. Missiles are
'discarded' once they loose sight of their target.
Version conflicts
The v1.04 updater comes with this readme file. It fixes many bugs
in the game. It enables the Homeworld CD to be in any CD drive at game startup. Many people
were having "the Build Bug"; they could build any ship but frigates. The game would take RU's
and time to build a frigate but one would never emerge from the mothership. This is now fixed.
I started playing the game unpatched, then patched it around Lev04. Halfway through Lev15
I took my SavedGame file to a friend's (his HW was unpatched) for a few days until I had almost
finished Lev16 then, brought back the updated SavedGame file to my computer and completed it
there. No problems at all. But this is not recommended and SavedGames can become corrupted
through mixing versions.
Command-line switches
There is a number of switches you can use when
launching Homeworld. To add them:
Start
] menu
Programs
] submenu
Homeworld
] submenu
Homeworld
] menuitem
Properties
] menuitem
Shortcut
] tab
Target
] field
D:\Homeworld\homeworld.exe /enable3DNow /disableavi /pilotView
]These are many of the hints that I can think of for Homeworld. If you want to suggest any others, please let me know and I'll put them up here.