Help with Homeworld: Cataclysm...

[Carolus Rex]

First time I ask for help with a game, but I'm stuck and I don't have enough patience this time (I have lots of good games to play, which kind of stresses me)...

IIRC it's mission 8 (I can't spell anything from this game, so I won't even try giving you ship names, sectors and so on... Heck, it's even worse than the Aztec city names! )

The first objective is to intercept and engage some foo workers... Problem is that whatever ships I send over get tangled up in som gravity distortion field... I've tried leeches, mimics, acolytes, you name it (ok, some ship types after all)... I have not been able to identify the sources of these "gravity prisons" in order to attack them first...

What's the trick here? Should I wait until the enemy moves away from the area? Should I try to get around the gravity distortion fields somehow? I've tried to station my ships just "out of reach" and in "evasive" mood, but they are always pulled in sooner or later... And once they are tangled up, they're just sitting ducks...

What to do?

Carolus

[Kassiopeia]

Could you post a few screenshots of the map and the general area? To refresh my memory - I've slogged through this game two times but it's been so long I can't quite remember the mission you're in.

[Carolus Rex]

I can try, but probably not until next week.

Carolus

[MORON]

uh, I dont have cata (crapa?) but try the bigger ships if it works like gravwell in HW1....

[Carolus Rex]

Well, I don't have very big ships at this stage of the game. I think the biggest ones are Hive (?) frigates; I guess I could build some and try...

Maybe I should read the manual and check if there are certain ships that can deal with this...

Carolus

[Carolus Rex]

I accomplished the mission yesterday!

There was indeed a source to these gravity distortion fields, which (after I figured out which ship it was) I eliminated with some acolytes. After that I had no problems with the mission.

Thanks Kassiopeia and MORON for your interest!

Carolus

[Carolus Rex]

BTW, sending in heavier ships did not make a difference (at least not one that I noticed). First, I tried with a Hive frigate and then with the command ship itself...

Carolus

[Kassiopeia]

Good to hear you got through, even though I wasn't much of a help really. Cataclysm, IMHO, is pretty easy compared to Homeworld, in Homeworld the only way really to manage is to salvage a crapload of ion frigates at the third to last mission, whereas the final mission in Cataclysm is really rather easy once you get the hang of it.

[Sandman]

If I remember rightly, your mothership in Cataclysm is quite powerful, so you should move it into position if you want to guard something.

[MORON]

in Homeworld the only way really to manage is to salvage a crapload of ion frigates at the third to last mission,

Not quite: dyanmic difficulty scaling means that the more ships you have, the more ship your opponents have. The only serious requirement is that some heavy hitters are around in the last mission, and my 60bomber battleball managed to win the mission after a few tries. It would have been less tries if I had more support frigs before my frig cap was used by mutibeam and ion array frigs...as well as enough fuel pods to stretch across the map.

[Kassiopeia]

Originally posted by MORON

Not quite: dyanmic difficulty scaling means that the more ships you have, the more ship your opponents have. The only serious requirement is that some heavy hitters are around in the last mission, and my 60bomber battleball managed to win the mission after a few tries. It would have been less tries if I had more support frigs before my frig cap was used by mutibeam and ion array frigs...as well as enough fuel pods to stretch across the map.

I know about scaling difficulty, but scaling diff. had an upper limit - there was only so many ships the game would put into the last mission. You, on the other hand, could salvage closer to 150 ion cannon frigates. I set these up into my own "battleballs" and the battle was still somewhat close. It was fun to have two huge fleets duke it out in one final battle, besides.

[MORON]

The key is defeating the first 3 hyper-fleet attacks, as the rest of the attacks are kinda scattered. All those Ions can't get back to the Mothership in time in parade formation (unless you play Taiidan) and isn't all that useful.

[Kassiopeia]

I played Hiigaran and the last of them got in time with me to help take out the third Heavy Cruiser lead assault. *shrugs* The first thirty, fifty helped repel the first assault, the second came in when the second wave attacked, and so on. Of course I had a sturdy fleet of fighters and heavy capitals to shrug off the initial assaults to get the ion frigates in a proper position.

[Carolus Rex]

Is the first game (Homeworld) still for sale out there somewhere? Because if Homeworld: Cataclysm comes out second (you guys seem to claim so), then Homeworld must be a magnificient game!

BTW, Homeworld 2 really is Homeworld 3, right? Cataclysm seems to be a stand-alone game; I don't need Homeworld to play it...

i) Homeworld
ii) Homeworld: Cataclysm
iii) Homeworld 2

Or?

Carolus

[Kassiopeia]

In the timeline, that's how it goes.

Cataclysm had nice new gameplay features, but the writing and production values altogether weren't as good as those of the original Homeworld, in my opinion. Technical matters considered, Cataclysm is probably better. Homeworld 2 brought in some of the "new" stuff Cataclysm already had, so it was a sort of a dud. However, HW2 continued the actual storyline and its production values were again solid.

You see, Cataclysm was developed by a different team (Naughty Dog or somesuch) as opposed to Relic which created the actual games 1 and 2. As far as HW1 and HW2 and Relic are concerned, the events of Cataclysm never took place, so it's a sort of a standalone episode in a limbo between the two actual HW games. It came into being because the publisher had the rights to the world and the story etc. and decided to rake in some money with a new game before Relic was ready for HW2.