Mildly dissatisfactory space strategy game Homeworld 3 will receive its last major update this week, developers Blackbird Interactive have announced. Due to launch on 21st November, Update 1.3 will deliver “a gargantuan number of improvements, fixes, and some entirely new features”. These broadly consist of combat and balance overhauls together with changes for the Skirmish & War Games modes, though they’ve shown the campaign a little love as well.
The devs announced that they would condense the game’s launch roadmap back in September, so update 1.3 is actually several updates rolled into one.
As regards the game’s combat, Blackbird want to “increase the importance of strategic decision making”, “make those decisions more intuitive and relevant to the outcome of battles”, and “eliminate inconsistencies between how you’d expect units to react to orders and how they were actually behaving”.
To be specific, they’ve introduced a new armada-wide armour system that groups ships according to four tiers of damage mitigation – 10% for light armour, 20% for medium armour, 30% for heavy armour and 50% for mothership armour. This accompanies a new approach to directional damage: shots to the rear now have a 2.5X multiplier, but there’s no longer a multiplier for damage to the side of a ship, “to better emphasize the advantage gained from clever positioning”.
Other highlighted changes from Blackbird’s announcement post include increasing the potency of strike craft. Calling upon community playtester feedback, they’ve shortened the distance strike craft fly before turning for another run on the target, beefed up bombers across the board, and made it harder for capital ships to shoot fighters and bombers down. The future is now, Hiigaran Torpedo Frigate captains!
With regard to controls, Blackbird have added a “reinforce targeted ship” ability to all ships. Command a ship to partner up with another using this ability, and it’ll automatically adopt the formation, stance and current target of the ship being reinforced. You’ll still need to manually add ships to control groups, however.
There’s a new logic for target selection and prioritising. Give a group of ships a bandbox attack command, and they’ll now “seamlessly split into smaller formations and spread fire more intelligently and evenly across the targeted units”, prioritising ships they’re more effective against. In other words, you can point ships at a mixed enemy fleet and let them figure out engagement tactics by themselves.
More diffuse changes include tweaking the retaliation range and “personality” of several ships so that they behave more consistently. Battle Cruisers and Destroyers, for example, used to be “a little too hyperactive”, preferring to jockey for position at length rather than opening fire.
As for the changes to Skirmish mode, the update introduces the ability to hyperspace jump around the map, tweaks the resourcing system to encourage more strategic thought, especially early on in a match, and reworks the research element. “Now, Research functions like a classic tech tree, where ships and abilities are spread across branches that you gradually unlock piece by piece,” the post explains. They’ve also expanded the AI difficulty settings with new bot “personae” such as “Sentinel” and “Swarm”. Oh, and they’ve given Motherships fusion missiles, an endgame tech capable of blowing whole fleets away. Let’s see those wily bomber pilots dodge that.
The roguelitey War Games mode now has 45 new artifacts, including “ultimate” artifacts that mitigate the negative effects of other artifacts. They’ve also “[injected] some much-desired variety into War Games missions with Interstitials” – aka randomly occurring mini-missions like bombing a certain number of targets against the clock – and revamped each War Games faction’s tech tree.
Last but not least, Blackbird have made changes to Homeworld 3’s campaign based on player feedback. In particular, some missions will now let you linger on, repair your fleet and farm the map after achieving victory. Oh, and “a number of improvements have also been made to the Homeworld 3 mod tools, such as the ability to inject custom Unreal Blueprints and the inclusion of Homeworld 3’s Campaign Blueprints”.
This “will be the last major content update for Homeworld 3,” the devs conclude, though they add that publishers Gearbox “will be carefully monitoring incoming reports and will address any widespread critical issues that may arise in the wake of Update 1.3’s launch”. The game’s multiplayer functionality and in-game mod browser will remain online for the foreseeable.
Homeworld 3 has been a severe disappointment for series enthusiasts and space simmers at large, with much criticism levelled at its controls and the underwhelming campaign. The above tweaks and additions don’t strike me as a glorious rebirth – Steam reviews remain mostly negative at the time of writing – but they’re clearly the result of much thought and toil.
There’s a closing note on the post which makes arch mention of “beginning a new chapter”. What would you like them do next? I wouldn’t say no to a Hardspace: Shipbreaker follow-up.