Homeworld 3 Multiplayer Review – IGN

Certainly, faction-specific tactics for each will emerge to capitalize on those subtle advantages – as well as things like the Hiigarans having superior scouting abilities thanks to their recon ships – but the thing that seems most significant in my experience has been how repair and capturing abilities are shuffled between ships. The Hiigarans have a dedicated support frigate that does nothing but repair damaged ships, but if you want to be sneaky and attempt to capture an enemy vessel you’ll have to pull one of your resource controllers off of mining duty and use it to attempt the abduction. The Incarnate remix this by putting the repair functionality on their resource controllers and using smaller, more fragile capture corvettes to do their pilfering – and they require two to survive long enough to latch on instead of one.

Having to choose between income and repair power is a big deal for an Incarnate player. In practice, though, having support frigates in the fray against a human opponent doesn’t shift the balance too much in the Hiigarans’ favor because anyone with a brain is going to target those first, and the Incarnate’s minor firepower advantage makes up for the rest.

There’s one other difference between the Hiigarans and Incarnate that baffles me, though: the Hiigaran ships default to neutral stance, while the Incarnate default to aggressive. That sounds thematically appropriate, certainly, but it means that the Incarnate have a real advantage when it comes to building ships – especially strike craft – while under attack. Aggressive ships will immediately scramble and go after enemy ships that come into range, but neutral ships will fire back without moving other than to turn to face their attackers. When we’re dealing with small, fragile fighters, that means they’re sitting ducks and will get picked off almost immediately (probably before you notice you’re under attack), so if you don’t manually select them and change their stance or give them attack orders the moment they’re built, they’re as good as dead. That’s not a bug like some other issues, such as a voice chiming in to announce the loss of a resource ship that was actually the enemy’s or calling a corvette a frigate, but it might as well be.

It’s impossible to know what will happen when Homeworld 3 is out in the wild and the most competitive players get hold of it, but in the matches I’ve played, the big trend has been that the Motherships are very active participants in the early fighting instead of hanging back, as they usually do in traditional Homeworld matches. Part of that is that these maps, which are largely based on those from the campaign, aren’t nearly as vast as Homeworld vets are used to, and also Homeworld 3’s Motherships are relatively quick to move and can get around easily. They’re also decently armed against fighters and corvettes, and you’ll need all the help you can get to keep the pressure off of your resource harvesters and defend them from rush attacks aimed at crippling your economy before you can tech up and unlock heavier ships. However, knowing when to pull back is crucial if you don’t want to be caught by destroyers and battlecruisers, because they’ll burn through your Mothership’s armor very quickly.

Terrain also plays a significant role because it’s often close to resource patches, and that means you can cover it with heavy turrets (and anti-strike craft turrets to defend those) that’ll make short work of an enemy resource collector that autonomously wanders near. It’s also viable to turtle up by parking your Mothership near a floating platform, making it difficult for an enemy to get near without being bombarded by turrets and tripping over mines. Other than that, I haven’t found using terrain as cover terribly useful because it’s difficult to manage sight lines in real time for anything smaller and faster than a destroyer – but again, that doesn’t mean the community won’t find ways to do it.

Homeworld 3’s most exciting multiplayer mode, though, is War Games – I haven’t seen too many co-op modes in this vein since the Last Stand mode from Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War 2 – Retribution, and it’s given me thrills that remind me of those memorable battles. Alone or with up to two allies, you take control of a scaled-down fleet headed by a single carrier and build options decided by your chosen loadout; you’ll start with one focused on Hiigaran strike craft, but as you level up you’ll gain access to others that cater to bombers, missile frigates, Incarnate ships, and more. While it’s a bummer to not have access to heavy-hitting destroyers and battlecruisers, there’s a lot going on to make up for their absence, and you’ll generally want to be as mobile as possible.

Rather than simply holding out against waves of enemies, you’re given randomized objectives to complete on a series of three maps: destroy a carrier, capture some points on the map, salvage some objects, escort AI-controlled ships, that sort of thing. You’re never entirely sure what you’ll get, so you’ll have to be at least somewhat flexible with how you gear yourself to handle what’s coming. Meanwhile, the incoming fleets keep getting stronger, so once you’ve completed your objective you have to make the decision of whether to hold out and scour the map clean of resources, or hyperspace jump to the next one to avoid taking more losses than those resources can replace.

Homeworld 3 War Games Multiplayer Mode Screenshots