Be Excellent To Each Other

I'm currently getting this from (Pirate Bay - yay for rule changes - Ed). It looks an awful lot like Homeworld, and C-monster loved it.
Has anyone had a go?

This looks epic, not usually into RTS or any other S's really but I loved Homeworld.

Yeah it looks ace. It's by the bunch that did Galactic Civilsations II y'know. Let me know how that download works. Also, are you off work? I've been IMing you.

I am off work, sorry fella. I've got my IM stuff running at home now, though.
BUT! I'm off to Manchester for a couple of days, so won't be around until Saturday.

I hate it. Boring ships, stupid quests given to you by other civs that you can't refuse - "Kill 25 Zargon ships in the next three minutes! What do you mean you haven't met them yet? I don't care!" which then make them hate you when you inevitably fail. Stupid in-system navigation, dull combat, blah blah blah.

Admittedly, at the moment nothing can come between me and Internet Spaceship Timesink Game. I have Dawn Of War and Gal Civ 2 on this laptop, untouched.

Aw, boo. Only 10 mins to go, too.

Wait - did you like Homeworld?

Homeworld was brilliant. This sounds awful, if Craster is to be believed.

Yes, it was rather good.

Aw. Well, just de-compressing now. I'll let you know what I think soon.
[edit]Gah - who still uses Bin / CUE files?

Good points:
The units seem 'smart', and act with a certain amount of intelligence.
You can put stuff in the build queue as soon as you start to research them, and they'll build when the research is done.
It's rather good fun.

Bad points:
It's ugly, to a level of 'damn'.
Fighter's fly-by is way too long.
I fear its complexity, and I've only done the first tutorial (tutorial 2 update - fuuuuck) (tutorial 4 update - what happened in tutorial 2 again?).
Planets spin too fast, and space isn't red.
"then press a number key from 1-10 while holding down Ctrl". 10?
I set the difficulty to 'easy' and still got whipped, maybe because...
I didn't know I could increase my fleet limit.

Other points:
There doesn't seem to be a 'campaign', as such.

Been playing Company of Heroes again, with Opposing Y-Fronts expansion. It is still awesome, and the best RTS going full stop.

Anyone played Homeworld: Cataclysm? That's the best Homeworld of all, in my opinion. The bit when part of your ship gets taken over by the flesh-metal-virus thing is terrifying. The screaming really made me flinch, so much so that I became really agonised over protecting refugee ships and fleet ships from infection-missiles. It really made me care about the threat. The final boss fight was excellent too. I liked the way you start off with a mining ship and upgrade it gradually into an unlikely last hope.

Plus you can get a first person camera from the fighters and bombers, which is really whizzy!

I played the demo of Sins, I liked it, but not enough to buy. I didn't like the ugly ship designs, mainly.



Found it! Brrrrr!

CoH is awesome, but I'm rather tired of WW2 now.

I've been nervous about buying this because (a) I'm not sure my PC could play it and (b) I am an ENORMOUS fan of the previous game, "Soldiers: Heroes of WW2". The level of detail in that was just superb - managing the ammo levels of 20 odd soldiers sounds tedious, but it really isn't. Scavenging weapons from dead Jerries, nicking the heavy machine gun from teh tank you've just knocked out, repairing the tank and using it to drive through the building which is full of snipers etc etc etc. Bliss.

CoH is, from what I understand, more of a unit based game, like Panzers and so on. I'm afeared it will not live up to my expectations.

It will, Mr Chris, it will.

What I advise is to seek out 'Tales of Heroes', and watch some of the latter ones - though the series 1 episodes are good. They're recorded matches with commentary, and they're great fun. You'll get an idea how it works, tactics, probable fun levels and so on. You can download or stream.

Or check my review.

The specs aren't that demanding on the lower settings, it's very scalable, and doesn't look bad on shaders 2.0. I wrote a FPS tweak guide somewhere. Hmm...

Plus it's a fiver in some places now, I think. Or at most a tenner.

Ooooh - at that price I shall just pick up a copy and see how I get on regardless.

Yeah, I read your excellent review a while back - I've been mulling it over ever since.