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Rob Zacny

Episode 341: Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

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Three Moves Ahead 341:

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Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

It's a full house as Rob, Rowan, Fraser, and guest T.J. Hafer get together to talk about Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. The original Homeworld games were in space. Deserts of Kharak, believe it or not, takes place on the ground. This type of out-of-the-box thinking appears to have paid off as our four panelists have taken quite a shine to the game.

Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, Starcraft, Sins of a Solar Empire

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I've been watching this game with the hope that it would be good and the fear that it would be mediocre.  It sounds like I need to pick it up.

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What will Fraser have to do to remove this 7/10 staint from his reputation?

 

I think I'm stuck with it forever. It's been well over a year now. 

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Rowan, dear fellow, you owe it to yourself to give Company of Heroes or Dawn of War 2 another try. CoH in particular, merely masquerades as a base building RTS- the base building part is nicely stripped down such that'll it'll never trip you up once you know where to get your units from. The game is firmly focused on making meaningful tactical decisions out on the field, with skirmishes happening from minute one onwards. Units are rich in character and tactical possibility, and the game rewards good positioning, unit preservation and creative use of abilities. It even has that slower pace of combat you liked so much about H:DoK. 

 

Dawn of War 2 removes the base building all together, and it's no loss at all. I'd be a little slower to recommend it because the single player and the multiplayer are such different games, what with the single player being an RTS inspired action RPG and all. The multiplayer is my favourite RTS ever, hands down, but you need real people to play with- the skirmish AI is not just bad, but actively not fun to play against.* Anyway, if you can find someone to play with you get 6 very diverse races stuffed with the best units ever created for an RTS. Oh, and each of those races can be played in very different ways. 

 

What? Topic? Oh. I will say that this podcast knocked the game up on my radar considerably. I'm not sure it's going to displace XCOM 2 but it went right on my wishlist.

 

 

*It doesn't know how to fight at all, so it mostly doesn't. It does know where you can see and where you can't, so it avoids your line of sight and sneaks around uncapping all your points. Do you like playing capture point whack a mole against a coward? Because I don't.

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I have DoW2 but for some reason it looks ultra-ugly for me. I tried MP mode - the one were you select a single hero and give it couple of artifacts - and it looked incredebly boring and shallow.

 

Back to the topic. It's interesting that guys mentioned the game looks plausible. RTS always destroy immersion by forcing you to organize economy and train new soldiers at the same time as the battle rages on. I can live with more abstract games like Rise of Nations. And this eternal strife for maximum skill cap, with microcontrol and build orders and all this stuff - RTS should have pity on us. I think Company of Heroes tries to both have a connection with the real world and doesn't want you to make hundreds of APM. Of course I really lose in StarCraft because of problems with macro (do not produce peons and expansion all the time, do not utilize resources etc) but it seems that the biggest trick in those games is fighting the interface intentionally constructed to make mundane obvious macro-things difficult and micro-things too attention-consuming.

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Not sure whether to pick this up really.  Despite the lads' glowing recommendation, other reviewers have found that the AI is awful and not challenging and there are few maps (although probably more to come in the future).

 

With so many other good games out right now, maybe it's one to wait on a sale for.

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Not sure whether to pick this up really.  Despite the lads' glowing recommendation, other reviewers have found that the AI is awful and not challenging and there are few maps (although probably more to come in the future).

 

With so many other good games out right now, maybe it's one to wait on a sale for.

 

I wouldn't say the AI is awful, it's just very scripted and quite conservative. Also, in SP the maps are brilliant. Diverse, often sprawling, full of interesting geography. In MP, the maps are great, but there aren't many of them. I'm pretty sure Blackbird Interactive said they were working on more though. 

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The AI only really matters in the campaign, which is short and sweet, and it's not bad enough that you won't enjoy yourself. Mutiplayer is really good, though, and that doesn't involve AI at all. I'd say you're doing yourself disservice if your main reason for not picking it up is poor AI.

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I have DoW2 but for some reason it looks ultra-ugly for me. I tried MP mode - the one were you select a single hero and give it couple of artifacts - and it looked incredebly boring and shallow.

 

Ahh, you're talking about the Last Stand . That's a three player horde mode. It's heaps of fun. Not what I was talking about, though- there's a somewhat more traditional multiplayer mode based on Company of Heroes multiplayer- capture points to get resources to build and upgrade squads and vehicles, hold victory locations to win. 

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So has anybody here played Ground Control? The original one, mainly.

That game was a big favorite of mine.

Can somebody who has played both that and DoK tell me if i'm wrong for seeing a lot of that game in Deserts of Kharak?

 

Haven't picked up DoK yet, but... Yeah...

 

Edit: Also, DoK's original title of "Homeworld: Shipbreakers" was way more evocative and cool, i kind of hate the final title.

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Absolutely there's a Ground Control feel to the game. I'm okay with it.

 

I love the majestic feel of the game. I don't think that its speed/buildup time is acceptable for competitive play. Though, the skimmers do get out quickly and a couple early kills affect the game.

 

How to make a game majestic-slow while providing early and frequent decisions is a tough design challenge.

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How to make a game majestic-slow while providing early and frequent decisions is a tough design challenge.

 

Prevent the controls and decisions from scaling up and scale the stakes of decisions up instead.

 

My rant about game design below.

 

Strategy game example that immediately pops into my mind for this is PDX games, where you get more land but... it rarely add to decisions that has to be made (and that is a great thing if you have enough decisions from the beginning (which their games do have)).  Like, what I do in EU4 when I'm a 2 province minor compared to 200 province empire isn't literally 100 times more, and whatever micro that is added is extremely trivial because lot about your nation functions as a whole rather than individual provinces (and those that do function on individual levels are often taken care of in simple 'check off the list' fashion)

 

For RTS drag box selection is a good example of this but more unique units get, less adequate box + a move gets.  The 'perfect-classic-base-building-RTS' would probably have like, 3 ~ 5 unit types max so users focus on quantity instead of quality of battles, and maps/units would be designed to allow multiple discrete defend-able locales akin to main ramp in SC2 or AoE/WC3's super turret main base.

 

SC2 would be so much better if it had half the units (and remove gimmicky stuff like sentry), units had 50% or more hp (movement speed down accordingly to balance melee) and every land paths were either divided in half or shrunk to half so you can cost effectively block more of the map than just the main ramp.

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SC2 would be so much better if it had half the units (and remove gimmicky stuff like sentry), units had 50% or more hp (movement speed down accordingly to balance melee) and every land paths were either divided in half or shrunk to half so you can cost effectively block more of the map than just the main ramp.

 

That sounds like a recipe for trench warfare, though.

 

I'd far rather see something that moved the game away from APM and microing towards more tactical play.  I'm thinking, for instance, of Dark Reign, where you could set fairly complex AI on units (for example, you could tell something "go raiding, come back for repair when you're at 25% health", and then you could leave it be and go pay attention to something else).  Dark Reign also had paths that were independent of units, so you could lay down (say) a couple of paths for a pincer attack, and then tell group 1 to attack move along path A, and group 2 to attack move along path B.

 

We may ultimately want completely different games, come to that.

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That sounds like a recipe for trench warfare, though.

 

I'd far rather see something that moved the game away from APM and microing towards more tactical play.  I'm thinking, for instance, of Dark Reign, where you could set fairly complex AI on units (for example, you could tell something "go raiding, come back for repair when you're at 25% health", and then you could leave it be and go pay attention to something else).  Dark Reign also had paths that were independent of units, so you could lay down (say) a couple of paths for a pincer attack, and then tell group 1 to attack move along path A, and group 2 to attack move along path B.

 

We may ultimately want completely different games, come to that.

 

Maybe, because I agree what I'm saying is closer to trench warfare but that's when I had most fun out of SC2... mid to late game terran vs terran with bunch of siege tanks and sensor towers, vikings constantly peeking out fight for the line of sight.

 

The slower army movement and the efficiency of defense gave easier sense of weight and importance of positioning and I really appreciated that, and it wasn't like the trenches were unbreakable (it would actually break quite fast and violently).  There never was quite enough units with the 200 unit cap that you had completely invulnerable protection.

 

ZvZ being the worst IMO (worse than PvP) as the matchup boiled down to the most 'gotcha' type of fighting... urgh.

 

Marines, tanks and vikings are the simplest but also made the game the best to me.

 

Maybe our differences are more on technical ends... like I think we both want same thing in terms of giving more emphasis to large army positioning to bring player focus on the big picture, but you want to tackle it by adding AI functionality while I want to do it via removing units and narrowing down the maps.

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Maybe our differences are more on technical ends... like I think we both want same thing in terms of giving more emphasis to large army positioning to bring player focus on the big picture, but you want to tackle it by adding AI functionality while I want to do it via removing units and narrowing down the maps.

 

I think that's the core of it. I find myself put off SC2 because I find it's reflexes and gambits instead of strategy. I want chess, SC2 gives me speed chess with a minute on the clock.

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I think that's the core of it. I find myself put off SC2 because I find it's reflexes and gambits instead of strategy. I want chess, SC2 gives me speed chess with a minute on the clock.

 

Then why not play a turn-based game?

 

or, if you like the added pressure, you'd comparison to chess with a clock was an interestig one. Are there any (computer) turn based strategy games that use that mechanic? Feels like an interesting design space to explore. Imagine a game a little like Unity of Command, but you have a 10 min (+ 30s overtime periods)  for a level?

 

I am guessing that a lot of players would be put off by the idea of time limits on a tbs (which I get, as people often play to relax and may be checking their phone, etc while playing) which is a little odd when you remember that both chess and go are always played with some form of clock time when it is competitive. So it is already baked in to traditional turn based games!

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Then why not play a turn-based game?

 

I do. :)

 

I do enjoy RTS games as well, but not ones where APM matters.  I want to be able to drop a unit of space marines somewhere, tell them "search and destroy", and then let them be without having to micromanage their abilities or tell tell them exactly where to go.  They're supposed to be space marines, not drones; I shouldn't have to tell them to take cover or when to pop stims or whatever.  As long as things haven't gone pear-shaped I don't want to hear from them.  Ideally, I'd even like to be able to attach an artillery firebase to a few sets of troopers and allow them to call strikes in.

 

That is, I want to be a general, not the entire command structure from general on down.  That's not incompatible with the concept of the RTS.

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I would love commands like search and destroy, harass, etc.! Way back with games like Conquest of the New World we could tell explorers to auto-explore, ships to scout the coast, and so on. Admittedly I haven't played The Settlers since 3, but the resource-creating workers were fairly intelligent and contrasted starkly with the soldiers who did the traditional standing around until given a move order.

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I agree with Hexgrid - I would like to be able to give any units with special powers the autonomy to use them at their discretion if they wished rather than having to micro them.

 

I bought Homeworld:DoK primarily because of this podcast (at full price!) but found the campaign suffered from some of the same problems as original Homeworld - if you have not managed to play well enough early on you don't have enough resources to survive later levels (see this: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=615295620). Admittedly I was trying on "hard" because I was given the impression that otherwise it was too easy.

 

And those un-skippable cutscenes! Ugh!

 

Plus, despite the glowing reviews I am not finding many opponents online yet...

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I finally got around to buying, and playing this.

 

Lovely campaign, really enjoyed it (although, yes, why aren't the cutscenes skip-able?). A little on the easy side, but hey, I'm replaying on Classic now. I've also picked up Grey Goo, so, I'm slowly slowly catching up on modern RTSs!

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Riad and I have been playing this side by side the last couple of weeks. The campaign is lovely - I’m not usually a ‘pure’ RTS sort of person- Starcraft leaves me cold and I really didn’t get on with DoW3 when I tried the free weekend on steam a week or two back. 

 

But it this game seems to be considered enough that you can group your different vehicle types, use their special abilities without too many problems and get time to set yourself before wngaging in battle. Sure, the AI just can’t deal with the ‘massed Charge’ approach to combat once you are ready but it can hit you hard if you aren’t playing attention and all in all it’s been a thoroughly enjoyable couple of hours. I’d recommend wholeheartedly. 

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I think another thing I really enjoyed about it was the simplicity of the campaign. It's been a while since I played a campaign that's simply a string of scenarios [as opposed to XCOM, Total War etc].

The game is also pretty relaxing. Great art style and soundtrack.

 

We should try some multi-player at the weekend :-)

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