When the first Homeworld was made, avid followers of the strategy game genre who were wishing for something different were star-struck with its utilization of the full six axes of motion to create a strategy game that has the player directing the efforts of a fleet of ships that believably feel like space-bound vessels.
Before the first Homeworld, games that utilize the full six axes of motion (three for translation, three for rotation) were usually space-fighting simulators like the Wing Commander and X-Wing VS TIE Fighter franchises. Supposedly space-based strategy games ultimately restricted the so-called space-ships into what are effectively two-dimensional planes. Homeworld did something different, and perhaps even broke the mould that it is made from.
Unfortunately, the latter idiomatic statement can also be considered a criticism of Homeworld. Strategy games were already quite a mindful for digital game enthusiasts back then, and its utilization of the six axes of motion introduced even more complexity and in the cases of some players who have problems focusing on points of reference in virtual game worlds, vertigo as well.
For better or worse, Relic Entertainment does not seek to change the formula that made Homeworld a very different title from its peers in the strategy genre; it has essentially made an overhauled version of the first game in the form of its sequel, Homeworld 2.
The game's story mode is the continuation of the one in the first Homeworld game. It is worth noting here that the standalone game Homeworld: Cataclysm appears to have been considered irrelevant or even non-canon, as there is no mention of the Beast incident in that game and the protagonists of Cataclysm are nowhere to be seen defending their home-planet.
Anyway, the victor of the first game is now canonically the Kushan (though this stipulation has been made in Cataclysm). The Taiidani Empire has collapsed with the reclamation of the Kushan's home-planet of Hiigara, and the Kushan has renamed themselves Hiigarans thereafter. However, as has been shown in the first Homeworld, the galaxy is a dangerous place no thanks to the deadly legacies of older now-extinct civilizations, and it wasn't long before the Hiigarans face a new threat in the form of the Vaygr, which is a nomadic, brigand-like civilization that has gained its strength from absorbing the remnants of the Taiidani. Soon enough, the Vaygr's reasons for embarking on a galaxy-conquering war became evident, and these plot elements help set up an epic story involving the pre-history of space-faring in Homeworld's universe.
The ups and downs of the campaign will be described later.
The fundamentals of the gameplay in Homeworld 2 haven't changed since the previous games, but the details certainly have, as will be made evident shortly.
The previous games made very convenient use of the franchise's sci-fi themes to implement the game's version of the sci-fi matter-to-energy harvesting of materials. This design decision was very likely the result of the game engine's limitation at having models collide or come into contact with each other in a natural-looking manner, but the sight of worker units scanning and sucking away materials in the form of energy particles can be considered rather cheesy.
More importantly, such designs caused gameplay problems. The first of these is that worker units tend to bunch up, making them especially vulnerable to area-saturating weapons. That a body of resources could be worked on by as many worker units as there is space (and there is a lot of space in space) also meant that there are corny resource-raiding tactics (involving Resource Collectors) that exploit this.
As in the previous game, Homeworld 2 has the player obtaining resources mainly by mining celestial bodies like asteroids with worker-archetype units, which are still known as Resource Collectors. However, the new game engine (made using the Lua language of programming) allows for changes that address the above-mentioned problems in the previous games.
The much smaller Resource Collectors in Homeworld 2 no longer use the scanning and matter-energy converting technology of its predecessors; instead, it grapples onto bodies of resources and cut away at them on a much more localized scale. This may seem like a technological step-back from thematic perspectives, but the Hiigarans' canonical cultural emphasis on utility and practicality justifies the change from relatively clumsy and large worker units over to much smaller ones.
Being smaller, the Resource Collectors are much harder to hit with heavy weapons. That they now latch onto asteroids and other bodies of resources, and also bigger ships when repairing them, means that they benefit from the cover that whatever that they are latching onto can provide. Resource Collectors also appear to latch onto these larger objects at different locations on the latter, far away from other Resource Collectors that may already be on the latter, thus reducing the chances of multiple Resource Collectors being caught in the path of heavy weapons.
The new game engine also makes smooth the process of having Resource Collectors grapple onto larger objects. Instead of resorting to cheesy and cumbersome fixed points on the latter for the triggering of canned grappling animations, the game engine lets Resource Collectors perform the attaching quickly and almost anywhere on the larger object.
However, Relic appears to realize that this new system for resource-collecting and ship-repairing can be abused to stick many Resource Collectors onto a larger object by manually maneuvering a Resource Collector to a certain point in space relative to the latter and attaching it to advantageous locations like crevices in larger ships that can shield it from a lot of fire (and this can really be done). Therefore, some coding has been implemented to have the Resource Collector latch onto specific regions of the larger object; no more than one Resource Collector may use the same region for whatever it is supposed to do while latched onto something. (This also prevents players from using Resource Collectors as ablative shields.)
Like their predecessors, Resource Collectors are incapable of repairing any ships smaller than Frigate-type ships. Of course, that Resource Collectors now has to grapple onto whatever that they need to repair makes an repairs on lithe vessels implausible, and this is more understandable than the limitations that Resource Collectors had in the previous games (where their repair beams/waves should have been able to affect strike-craft and corvettes as well).
However, they now have the ability to perform towing operations, though this has already been seen in the Resource Collectors of Homeworld: Cataclysm. There are minor flaws with this feature though: it would appear that regardless of the size and mass of whatever the Resource Collector is towing, it will always move at the same speed as that which it has when towing any other object. This means that there is no incentive to salvage the smaller pieces of a destroyed vessel before the biggest chunk of debris.
Unfortunately, the replacement of the energy-mass converting themes with the new docking-oriented ones meant that the Resource Collector may no longer derive resources from celestial bodies other than asteroid fields. Whereas the previous games have the player taking resources from nebulae and even odd sci-fi space crystals, the player will be mainly mining resources from boring-looking, crater-pockmarked space rocks.
Homeworld 2 retained the mechanic of having mobile drop-off points for resources, apparently another mechanic conveniently justified by the sci-fi setting. These are in the form of units, specifically Mobile Refineries. They are now armed with guns that can deter enemy strike-craft from making raids on the Resource Collectors that they serve, but in return, they have lost the ability to allow strike-craft and corvettes to dock with them for servicing.
Homeworld 2 retained the restrictions on fleet configurations that had been in the first Homeworld, and may have tightened them even further. As before, the player may only build a certain number of vessels for every category of ships, such as only fourteen ships in the frigate category. However, there are also other restrictions, such as only two Hiigaran Defense Field Frigates are allowed to be built, and these count towards the fourteen-ship limit for frigates too. Overall, the restrictions ultimately result in the player achieving a force that is more or less in line with the doctrine of combined arms, assuming that the player can obtain enough resources to max out all unit caps.
Considering that many other strategy titles that impose unit caps generally do not impose any further restrictions, that Homeworld 2 does gives the impression that it restricts the player's strategic preferences. Of course, such restrictions are meant to prevent the use of possibly imbalanced fleet choices, such as forces with extreme builds, e.g. an all-capital-ship fleet or a fleet comprising mainly strike-craft but little else. (Such fleet builds can be seen in Homeworld: Cataclysm, which relaxed the category caps.)
Nevertheless, such measures can feel heavy-handed and artificial, as well as suggest that Relic Entertainment could and/or would not devote more time to play-test and fine-tune the game so as to achieve balance of power between a fleet of combined arms and a single-mindedly themed fleet. Yet, if the player can acknowledge and accept that the gameplay ultimately restricts his/her fleet to a combined-arms force when it reaches its maximum size, he/she would find that the otherwise-sophisticated gameplay rewards those who like winning through superior tactics and strategy.
In the first Homeworld, the Sensor Manager view-mode was implemented to give the player a full 3-D overlay of the map in play, with abstract icons representing most of the game's units and celestial objects. However, the Sensor Manager view-mode was mainly meant to give the player some bearings as to where he/she needs to have his/her fleet go to; commands cannot be issued from this screen, though move orders that have to be carried out over long distances conveniently brings up the screen so that the player can make the right trajectories.
In Homeworld 2, the Sensor Manager returns, retaining most of the designs from the first game. However, it also has implemented the changes to the Sensor Manager that had been in Homeworld: Cataclysm, which include the convenience of being able to select and issue orders to ships while in Sensor Manager. A player can in fact play the game almost entirely in Sensor Manager.
The control mechanic of waypoints, long having been implemented in other strategy games, is also in Homeworld 2 (though Homeworld: Cataclysm has already done this before).
While some features were retained from previous games or changed/improved upon, some others have been completely removed. Chief of these is the ability to forcibly tow stricken enemy vessels over to the Mothership or Carriers to be hacked, hijacked and taken over permanently. This means that a player that is playing either of the two factions can ever only use that factions' technology and ships in a permanent, certain fashion. While this is a disappointing reduction in versatility of gameplay, this does remove exploitative strategies such as capturing upgraded enemy vessels and gaining research options for their upgrades that can be overwhelmingly powerful if pulled off successfully.
Another mechanic that has been removed is the limited fuel capacities for strike-craft and corvettes, though this has already been implemented in Homeworld: Cataclysm. This mechanic made the use of strike-craft and corvettes very cumbersome, so its elimination (made conveniently possible due to the sci-fi setting) increases the utility of these categories of ships.
As in the first Homeworld game, the different categories of ships play different roles – roles that would be similar to the (sci-fi) designs of (sci-fi) space-based navies. Of course, there have been many other games that have space-based navies (but not necessarily a truly 3D game engine to place them in), so Homeworld 2 retained the series' signature vessel, the Mothership, which is a huge and slow-moving vessel that lack heavy weapons (except for the ones in Homeworld: Cataclysm).
Both the Vagyr and Hiigarans have their own Motherships, but these are very much different in shape; where the Hiigaran Mothership is like a tall, monumental pillar floating through space, the Vagyr's (called the "Flagship" in-game) is laterally oriented and perhaps bear more familiar resemblance to known (sci-fi) space-ships. Of course, such visual differences would have amounted to little more than cosmetic qualities if the Homeworld games have been set in pseudo-3D space that is still bounded to two-dimensional planes, but they are not; the designs of the Hiigaran Mothership would make it more vulnerable to enemy fleets oriented in a vertical formation, while the designs for the Vagyr one makes it more susceptible to fleets oriented for maximized broadside attacks.
Otherwise, both Motherships perform essentially the same roles: as a mobile production shipyard for all vessels, a docking port for corvette and strike-craft, and drop-off point for resources. However, the Mothership is a slow, ungainly and lightly armed vessel, making it not very useful for combat purposes and thus vulnerable to raids and other attacks of opportunity.
Supporting the Mothership's role are the smaller and more mobile Carriers. Both the Vagyr and Hiigarans appear to have Carriers that perform the same functions, but they differ a lot in stats and options for versatility. The Hiigaran Carrier is a lot tougher, but is more lightly armed, whereas the Vagyr Carrier can be dangerous to strike-craft with its multitude of laser ports. The Hiigaran Carrier also has three slots that can be filled with production facilities, versus just one for the Vagyr's, though these additional slots also come with higher price tags for the former. However, both types of Carriers have just two secondary slots for modules with purposes other than ship production. (These module options are shared with the Battlecruiser, as will be mentioned later.)
In addition to the Carriers, there is also the Shipyard, which practically serves as a pseudo-Mothership. They are very costly and are virtually unarmed, but having a back-up to the Mothership can be very strategic if the player knows that the enemy is a particularly relentless person that would sacrifice a lot to take out his/her Mothership. One may wonder why Relic Entertainment would bother to introduce such a unit that may seem more in place in scenarios in the story mode, but the Shipyard is tied to an attempt to balance the gameplay, as will be elaborated on later.
Space can be rather ominously vast with a lot of hiding places despite the void, so the player will need to perform some scouting to locate resources and enemies.
The player has access to units that specialize in reconnaissance in the form of the Scouts, but with enough resources, the player probably wouldn't need to bother with micro-managing scouts for the purposes of reconnaissance. Like in the first game, the player can build one-off units known as Probes in Homeworld 2 and direct them to travel to and stay at a fixed point in space to survey the target area. Probes take up their own unit limits, and can travel astonishingly fast – fast enough to outrun even strike-craft. Of course, Probes can't be moved after they have reached their destination and will eventually run out of energy as depicted by their decreasing sensor radius, but as long as they aren't destroyed prematurely, they will continue to act as sentries that can overlook a large region of space, practically serving one of the purposes of the scout (which is to spy on enemies) without taking up a strike-craft slot.
(Crafty players will notice that they can be used to fool the AI into wasting time to destroy them too.)
If there is a saving grace to be had with Scouts, it is their upgrades. For the Hiigarans, they can upgrade their Scouts to fire EMP shockwaves, which disable enemy ships temporarily. However, the shockwaves originate from the position of the Scout vessel, thus requiring the Scout to get rather close to enemy ships, at which point it will probably already have been intercepted and shot down; of course, the player can attempt to use it while enemy ships are distracted, but this takes some micro-management skill. The Scout can also fire a sensor ping of very long range, practically giving it the ability to fire indestructible (but shorter-lived) Probes of its own. For the Vagyr, they simply upgrade the sensor range of their Scouts even further, giving them the ability to spy on enemies from a range so far without them suspecting it.
The story mode eases the player into the details and roles of the different categories of ships by starting with the aforementioned Resource Collectors, essentially using the early parts of the first mission in the campaign as a tutorial on how important they are. (There is a dedicated tutorial mode though, but this one mainly covers the controls and the basic mechanics of the game.)
A harsh introduction to the ruthlessness of the Vagyr in persecuting the Hiigarans makes for a good opportunity to introduce the strike-craft category of ships. As in the previous games, strike-craft (namely fighters) are intended to intercept other strike-craft from reaching their intended targets (if their goal is not to engage in dog-fights in the first place), harry fleeing enemies or bomb the slower and clumsier of the enemy's ships.
For the fighters and bombers, there hasn't been any change in their roles if the first Homeworld game is used as a comparison, so it may be a disappointment to those who had played and liked Homeworld: Cataclysm that Relic Entertainment had not seen fit to give them special abilities that give them other roles.
However, there have been other changes to the designs of strike-craft. The most noticeable of these is that strike-craft is now produced in squadrons, but each individual ship has its own health rating. This makes squadrons more durable in dog-fights, but more vulnerable to anti-strike-craft weaponry.
There are some differences in the gameplay designs between the two factions' fighter and bomber strike-craft, but these are mainly statistical and numerical differences that ultimately balance out each other, which is unremarkable and perhaps rather unexciting.
There are attempts to differentiate them more, such as a special upgrade for Hiigaran Bombers that make them better at hitting specific subsystems on capital ships, and an additional strike-craft type for the Vagyr in the form of the Lance Fighter (which are intended to be counters against Corvettes), but these, at best, have very modest utility.
Speaking of corvettes, the vessels that are halfway between frigates and strike-craft return, providing ship-types that are either meant to protect larger vessels from raids by strike-craft, or attack frigates and other corvettes. Most of them won't be able to run-down strike-craft, but their durability means that they can last longer than the latter, and like strike-craft, they retain the ability to dock with capital ships that have docking bays for speedy repairs.
Significant changes in the designs of Corvettes include the upgrade in weapons designs over their predecessors in the first Homeworld game. For example, the Hiigaran Gunships have turrets that have full-revolution arcs of fire, and the Vagyr Missile Corvettes fire missiles that chase their targets independently of the corvettes. In previous games, most corvettes have to line themselves up with their targets, much like strike-craft does, but their more ungainly frames made them vulnerable to heavy weapons. The corvettes in Homeworld 2 can make use of their maneuverability to evade fire from the heavy weapons that are typically used by bigger ships. It is also worth noting here that corvettes are also produced in squadrons.
Where there were few significant differences in the designs of strike-craft between the two factions, the corvettes show where the two of them start to diverge in ship designs and roles. While the Vagyr again shows preference for slightly more nimble and less heavily armed ships so that more vessels can be included in each squadron compared to their Hiigaran counterparts, there are more sophisticated differences.
The just-mentioned Hiigaran Gunship is the only corvette in the two factions that is dedicated to getting rid of strike-craft, thus giving the Hiigaran fleet an advantage at setting up anti-strike-craft screens for heavier ships. On the other hand, they are not effective against any other kind of ships, apparently to balance the Hiigarans' exclusive access to anti-strike-craft corvettes. Similarly, the Vagyr Missile Corvettes are the only corvettes with missile batteries, thus giving the Vagyr fleet more units that can saturate space with deadly missiles that can damage any enemy units that fly into them (if they did not manage to hit their intended targets in the first place).
The Hiigaran Pulsar Gunships and Vagyr Laser Corvettes may seem to be straight counterparts to each other, but the Pulsar Gunships have turrets with full-revolution turrets and are intended to fend off other corvettes, while the Vagyr practically intends the Laser Corvettes to be bigger variants of Lance Fighters that are to be used against Frigates and capital ships.
The Vagyr forces have Command Corvettes, which appear only as individuals and not squadrons. It is completely unarmed - a drawback that is intended to balance against their ability to boost the damage of nearby friendly Vagyr ships. Unfortunately, having low hitpoints and not being in a squadron means that players (including the AI) would target Command Corvettes and destroy them as top priority. Human players can attempt to have them stay close to larger ships for cover, but positioning them properly can be a frustrating affair; these drawbacks make them less of a worthwhile investment for the fleet.
The Minelayer Corvettes of both factions are the only ship-types in the corvette category that appear to be identical to each other in function. Nonetheless, laying mines is still a worthwhile tactic because while space-borne ships can simply go around mine-fields, this can take a while and the fleet that the mines are associated with can push through them without setting them off.
If there is a significant complaint to be had with corvettes, it is about their unit limits. The player can only have a handful of corvettes in his/her fleet, and considering how useful they are, they can seem very restrictive. On the other hand, having too many of them may render frigates and strike-craft less effective.
Where the Vagyr appears to have more ships in the strike-craft and corvette categories, the Hiigarans have more ships in the frigate category, though this is due to role specializations.
The Hiigaran Flak Frigate is a lot better than the Vagyr Assault Frigate in setting up anti-strike-craft kill-zones, while the Hiigaran Torpedo Frigate is better than either in getting rid of corvettes. However, the Assault Frigate is a catch-all for destroying corvettes and strike-craft, so using them is as simple as having more of them. However, this does not mean that the specialization of the Hiigarans' frigates put them at a disadvantage in tactical flexibility; there is an upgrade for Torpedo Frigates, which gives them torpedoes that are effective against capital ships, which neither of the other two ships can boast of.
The Hiigarans' torpedo upgrade is balanced by the Vagyr's Missile Frigates, which in turn have to be obtained by spending resources on typical unit-unlocking research.
While players are no longer able to capture enemy ships permanently, boarding actions are still represented in the game. Boarding can only be performed on enemy capital ships, but the results of successful boarding can be very satisfying; enemy capital ships generally become temporarily helpless and immobile, drifting in space while occasionally turning their weapons on other nearby enemy ships.
However, while the benefits of boarding actions may seem to be attractive, the act of attempting to board enemy ships can be a different matter altogether, as will be elaborated on shortly.
The Hiigaran Marine Frigate is lightly armed, but it has more hitpoints and is a lot faster than other frigates, which is appropriate as it has to physically come into contact with capital ships (and only capital ships). Unfortunately, while the Marine Frigate uses the convenient collision scripts that are also used for Resource Collectors, the need to approach and come into contact with the boarding target very much renders it a prime target for destruction. On the other hand, it does take away enemy fire from other members of its fleet.
The Vagyr Infiltrator Frigate may seem a bit more practical with their different methods of boarding, which is to fire boarding pods that ram into the target ship, but it also has to get rather close to its target before releasing the pods.
These proximity requirements make boarding actions rather impractical to pull off.
Unique to the Hiigarans are the Defense Field Frigates. The Hiigaran player can only build two of these, because their benefits can be overpowered if the player can build more of them. They generate their namesake defense fields, which can block a lot of weapons-fire, including extinguishing missiles that get into them, as well as rapidly damaging enemy strike-craft (which is a peculiar effect of the fields).
Also unique to the Hiigarans are the Ion Cannon Frigates, whose armaments are completely dominated by hull-length ion cannons, which are themselves icons of the Homeworld series. As in the previous games, they are intended to be used against capital ships and other ungainly ships, such as other frigates, from fantastic range. This may seem overpowered, but their firepower is balanced by their lack of any other weaponry, which makes them very vulnerable to attacks by bombers and corvettes.
Overall, the designs for frigates are satisfying, but there is also a complaint to be had. In Homeworld: Cataclysm, frigates can dock with the more immense Carriers and Mothership for quick repairs. This change was reverted, apparently for purposes of gameplay balance. Unfortunately, the sole repairing method of having Resource Collectors grapple onto them is not effective: only two of the latter may latch onto each frigate at a time, so the repair rate can be rather slow and the frigates are not big enough to provide enough cover.
Both the Vagyr and Hiigarans have Destroyers, but unlike their predecessors, they cannot build any subsystems onto themselves; the only subsystems that they have are their engines, which can be targeted and destroyed to hobble them. This can seem like a step-back from the previous Homeworld games, and seems to render them little more than bigger, more heavily armed and armored versions of frigates.
On the other hand, they bring a lot of versatile firepower into the fray. The Hiigaran Destroyer has an array of turrets that can pound targets in any direction around it, while having some anti-corvette capabilities. The Vagyr one has some protection against strike-craft, but its missile batteries can be especially devastating against other capital ships and frigates.
The Battlecruisers of either faction are some of the most impressive units in the game. These are practically end-game units that are intended to assault the enemy's Mothership and the defenses that surround it once-and-for-all, and they are suitably armed and armored for this purpose. There may be some balance issues though, even with the restriction of just two Battlecruisers per fleet.
The Vagyr Battlecruiser, with its prow cannon and more importantly, its massive battery of missiles, can hammer other Battlecruisers and the Mothership rather easily; more often than not, a single volley of missiles is all it needs to terminate carriers and frigates. It is somewhat balanced by very slow rates of fire, but a crafty player can manipulate the Battlecruiser such that it expends its weapon cycles on multiple targets, such as missiles for annoying frigates or carriers and the prow cannon on slower targets.
The Hiigaran Battlecruiser does not have an issue with slow rates of fire or weapon alignment, what with its weaponry being mostly mounted on flexible turrets. It may not have the potential for very high damage that can be done per volley, but its armaments can ruin lighter ships, especially frigates, very quickly and more efficiently than the Vagyr Battlecruiser ever can.
Both Battlecruisers also have module slots that can be filled with strategic devices, such as Fire Control Towers that increase the damage of nearby friendly ships, Cloak Generators that can hide them from sensors (and this can be devastating if they can be used properly on ships such as the Battlecruisers), Hyperspace Modules that allow them to spend resources to make short-ranged jumps (which is also devastating) and Hyperspace Inhibitors (which prevent enemy capital ships from attempting to jump away).
Even without the modules, Battlecruisers can also act like pseudo-carriers, allowing strike-craft and corvettes to dock and receive repairs, or storing them for later deployment.
All these abilities can seem to lead to some serious gameplay imbalance, and it appears that Relic Entertainment's most significant measure is to restrict the production of these ships to the aforementioned Shipyard (and even so it has to build the Hyperspace Module to fill in one slot); the Mothership is not able to build them. Such unit production designs appear to suggest that the player who can gather the most resources quickly and retain them from being lost due to raids and foiled attacks is the one who will win. This may seem acceptable to some veterans of the strategy genre, but it would seem disappointing to those who had wished that Homeworld 2 would break this ages-old convention.
Considering that resources are located in fixed positions of the map and all rational players would keep Resource Collectors close to them as much as possible and that the Mothership (and Shipyard) is a slow unit, that the previous Homeworld games lacked static defensive emplacements made it necessary to tie up otherwise mobile units in the defense of these assets. Homeworld 2 alleviates this problem by introducing weapons platforms. These can be built and launched in the same manner as Probes, but last indefinitely until scuttled or destroyed, unlike the latter.
Both the Vagyr and Hiigarans have Gun Platforms, which are meant to counter raids by strike-craft. Their weapons may not be powerful enough to destroy corvettes though, and frigates and capital ships can hit them from afar. For the latter case, there are the Hiigaran Ion Cannon and Vaygr Missile Platforms, which can handle frigates rather easily and significantly damage capital ships before they are destroyed; they also go a long way towards slowing down a Battlecruiser onslaught.
However, there appears to be a dubious issue regarding their deployment. While they do become immobile after having being moved just once, they will remain alongside the Carrier, Shipyard or Mothership that built them as long as they have not been deployed, and they are still able to fire their weapons. This allows cheesy exploits of having the aforementioned ships being accompanied by a few platforms at all times to augment their defenses.
Fortunately, the Vaygr Hyperspace Gate may not be exploited in this manner. The player may only enjoy its benefits of allowing ships to jump from one gate to another after both have been deployed.
There are some other units that would have been worth elaborating on, if the mechanics that they are associated with had been fleshed out some more. The Proximity Sensor was intended to be used to counter cloaked ships. However, there are very few ships that can cloak, and even these have to build modules onto slots and thus incur opportunity costs. Distortion Probes scramble enemy sensors, causing the enemy to detect more ships in Sensor Manager, but the unit caps on ship types will reveal the deception if an experienced player can make a quick count of the pings and compare them to expectations of enemy numbers based on the timeline of the match (namely in multiplayer).
The story mode also features certain units that are only exclusive to the story mode, for purposes of narrative and considerations of gameplay balance. These include amplified versions of regular units, to more remarkable units like Progenitor vessels. Wherever they can be included in the player's (Hiigaran) fleet, these conveniently have their own fleet slots. Of course, to describe them would be to give away the story, but it should suffice to say that their presence in the story mode is satisfactorily impactful, though gameplay-wise, they may not be so: a certain Progenitor corvette doesn't do much other than being a particularly clumsy corvette lacking any turrets after its schematics have been added to the player's fleet.
One of the chief criticisms of the story modes in previous Homeworld games was that players start new missions with the ships that they are left with in the previous mission. This can result in the less capable of players being unable to adapt to challenges in new missions quickly, while the more capable ones that are able to conserve his/her forces start with a fleet that is more than powerful enough to complete the next mission with.
To address these complaints, Relic has implemented scripts to adjust the difficulty of the next mission according to the composition of the fleet that the player has when entering it. For illustration, the greater a player's fleet is when the next level commences, the more numerous the initial enemy forces are. This can lead to some gaming of these scripts, such as players decommissioning all vessels that can be retired to render them down to resources so that he/she enters the next level with a smaller fleet and facing less opposition, but this is balanced by the diminished returns of decommissioning ships and the need to rebuild the player's forces. They also have no effect on scripts that trigger enemy reinforcements or other methods of spawning.
Unfortunately, while the experience of the story mode is great, it also dims the fun to be had from the game's multiplayer. Multiplayer in Homeworld 2 has the usual flavours to be had from so, so many other strategy games: free-for-alls and team-based matches, with options for victory conditions, resources and technology restrictions that would be all-too-familiar to veterans of real-time strategy games; there is also the obligatory skirmish mode.
Considering the sophistication of the Homeworld series, that Relic Entertainment doesn't attempt to utilize the sci-fi space settings of Homeworld 2 to introduce game modes that are different from the norm can be a bit disappointing to those who had been expecting more.
It has been mentioned earlier that Relic Entertainment has ignored and discarded certain changes to the Homeworld gameplay mechanics that Barking Dog Studios has introduced in Homeworld: Cataclysm. While some of the omissions may be somewhat understandable (such as the aforementioned flexibility in fleet composition), some are less so because some mechanics that Barking Dog Studios has introduced to the Homeworld franchise in Cataclysm had enriched the gameplay more than they detracted from it.
Chief of these is unit experience, which had been proven in many, many titles in the strategy genre to be useful in encouraging players to be more careful with their strategies so that they can minimize casualties as much as possible and retain units with combat experience (the more of which increases the combat effectiveness of said units). Of course, Relic Entertainment may have removed this mechanic out of consideration for gameplay balance; after all, the scarcity of resources (even with periodic replenishment of asteroids in multiplayer matches which enable them) that have to be expended to build replacement units would serve the purpose of encouraging players to be more conservative.
Homeworld 2's game engine also allows for graphical achievements that are greater than those in the previous Homeworld games. These can be seen in the ship models, which have a lot more sophisticated contours and sharper textures for more details such as torpedo tubes and docking bays that are more than just decals. Of course, ultimately, these are space vessels, and there won't be much in the way of animations to be expected from them, other than the swiveling of turrets and blinking communications arrays; the ships may spin and rotate, but the player shouldn't be expecting the gracefulness of marine animals from them.
That is not to say that there are no impressive animations to be had from the ships though. The Hiigaran Mothership has the most impressive animation to be seen in a ship, which occurs when it distends a part of its hull to release a Carrier or Destroyer into space, giving especial emphasis on its status as the "Mothership". (Otherwise, most ships just shoot/drift out of ports in their parent ships without much pomp.)
What the ships lack in animations, they make up with plenty of particle effects. Ships fire ballistic projectiles, lasers, energy beams and missiles, all of which would look (figuratively) believable and impressive to one who is familiar with sci-fi space franchises. The impact of these munitions is also impressive to look at, especially missiles and ballistic projectiles, which slam, explode and/or skid off the hulls of the target ships, if they are not destroyed outright.
Speaking of destruction, ships explode brilliantly, even more so than in the previous games. Clouds of explosions, decal applications of craters and holes and removal of certain pieces from ship models make up the death animations of ships, which eventually leave behind pieces of debris, some of which is recognizable as having belonged to the ship that was destroyed. The generation of debris is a lot more impressive (and less cheesy) than the creation of space dust in previous games.
The sound effects that accompany the above animations are also satisfying to listen to, oddly enough despite space not being exactly a medium that can transmit sound. Regardless, they contribute a lot to the game's immersion, which would have been damaged if Relic had been too anal-retentive with balancing logic against the aesthetic portrayal of space.
Space looks even better in Homeworld 2, with better application of background sky-boxes that reduce the impression of being trapped in a large bubble. The textures used for the sky-boxes have a lot more artwork too; these improvements can be seen in the first level of the story mode itself, where a gigantic derelict take up much of the background.
While asteroids are the only celestial objects that can be harvested for resources in Homeworld 2, this does not mean that other celestial objects have been neglected. Space dust does return, and despite being space dust, it looks impressive enough, resembling fog, except in space. Particularly large asteroids also exist in the game, mainly as story-oriented set-pieces.
The other celestial objects, such as nebulae and black holes, are unfortunately part of the background artwork, though they still look very impressive.
Like in the previous Homeworld games, the story-writing and music in Homeworld 2 are still influenced by Hebrew and Persian influences. This can be seen in the name of the maps and locations in Homeworld canon. While the use of these mystical/mythological/biblical (whichever applicable) elements may seem cheap to some who are more easily offended, the significance of their use is not nonchalant, as can be seen when the themes of the aforementioned locations, such as the murky asteroid fields of Gehenna, are compared with the biblical meaning of their names.
The musical soundtracks in the Homeworld series have never reached the same heart-thumping beat as that heard in other strategy games that involve armed conflict, but they are no less stirring. The soundtracks range from the serene tune heard in the Sensor Manager view-mode, to the more ominous and upbeat chants that accompanies scenes of battle. That Homeworld 2 doesn't resort to the typical orchestral scores that other sci-fi space franchises have would be pleasingly notable to those who prefer a refreshingly different approach to the aural aesthetics of space sci-fi themes.
The Homeworld has not really been known for fantastic voice-acting (except perhaps for Homeworld: Cataclysm), though this is mostly due to canonical reasons. The Hiigarans and their forebearers the Kushan are of a rather practical and level-headed culture, so this somewhat justifies the bored and sometimes listless tones that the voice-overs for unit responses and characters in cutscenes. If there are high-points in the writing for the dialogue in the game, they are for moments where mystical and ominous statements are made.
In conclusion, Homeworld 2 may not be light-years ahead of its predecessors in sophistication and have omitted certain mechanics introduced earlier in the series that would have added to its value, but refinements to the gameplay, such as the introduction of weapons platforms, make Homeworld 2 the best in the series thus far overall.