#263

No battle chatter after patch.

#264

I’ve raised 28 support requests today to cover various bits and bobs. I think the main issue for me now is the flight AI for HW1 ships. The flak frigate AI for assault frigates and gunship AI for corvettes makes them completely useless as they don’t face in the right direction to shoot at anything. That’s effectively 4 combat ships that are now completely useless.

There is also the problem with the missile destroyers. Range is too short, missiles turning circle is too great (missiles circle targets sometimes because they can’t bank hard enough to hit it’s target) and missiles don’t prioritise fighters. Missiles are also too slow, do too much damage and the rate of fire needs to increase.

2 Likes
#265

Just downloaded the 1.21 patch and did a quick check. Most of the problems I reported are still there, but a couple were corrected:

The game no longer crashes to desktop if a cryo tray is destroyed while being loaded on the mothership in mission 3. This is good, although the salvage corvette doesn’t interrupt its manouver and keeps bringing a no-longer-existent tray into the mothership. Much better than before, but could still use some improvement.

I tried deselecting units and switching to the sensors manager as the in-game-engine cutscene in mission 3 started and finished and got no more black screen. Good job :+1:

Other bugs are still there (all frigates retired in mission 3, cryo trays not repairable, enemy shots still fly through the mothership hatch, still missing translation in the manu), while others still I didn’t verify. Didn’t check the resource collection behavior or whether the autosave now works for mission 2 (I tried loading the previous save and it didn’t work, but I didn’t go back to try and regenerate the autosave).

Hope this helps

#266

If its not in the patch notes :wink:

#267

I want to get on board and say that this is almost completely true. Last night I got sucked into a game where I was rolling around with four Missile Destroyers and even when formed up into a strike group (“strike groups and formations don’t work” has been repeated so much that the words themselves don’t seem to make any sense to me strung together like that anymore – the raw truth is too much for my mind to encompass), the Missile Destroyers had to get so close to a target to do any kind of damage interaction that it literally looked silly.

I am absolutely okay with missiles being moved from being anti-fighter to anti–capship. Given the size of the vehicle, I’m perfectly fine with that. It always felt sort of like swatting flies with a machine gun that fired sledgehammers, anyway. But if strike groups are going to continue to be so broken that they stretch out three or four times the range of the ships in the back to the front of the engagement, which is utterly useless, the least they can do is give me missiles on capital ship chassis that have some sort of naval-equivalent range. That means that they need to be able to go further than twice the length of their own ship.

At least then the missile barrages might be somewhat useful. As is, you get into range to do a missile barrage just about the time the rest of your fleet has done more than half the damage to any particular capital ship, and since bandbox activation/targeting of special effects doesn’t work at all (sort of like strike groups and formations), you can’t actually tell the ships in your fleet to spread their shots out over the best targets.

Multiple interacting failure modes. I’m still a little grumpy about it.

#268

So apparently, I cannot click the “Multiplayer - Beta” button when I open Multiplayer Beta. (If that makes sense.) I am able to open the game, but I cannot select “Multiplayer - Beta”, but I can click anything else.

Picture:

#269

Strike groups are meant to be used with multiple craft classes for best effect from what I’ve seen. Formations can be used with single type okay. Missile dessies are great against corvettes form what I’ve seen.

the more you know :stuck_out_tongue:

#270

Yes, that was the original intent and designation in HW2. And by “best effect,” what you mean is “moves along okay in parade, and utterly breaks apart on contact with the enemy – just like Formations.” If that’s not what you mean, you’re just wrong.

However, this is complete crap. It’s so wrong that giving it the designation “wrong” would be to dignify it far too much.

Formations in no way function as they were intended or used to – and worse, how they function now is actively detrimental to using them for any purpose. For any and every application, they are inferior to ignoring the fact that they exist at all. At best, they are “completely meaningless.” By and large, they are actively less useful than ignoring the capability altogether.

Which makes little sense at the scale of the vehicle that the Missile Destroyer represents. The rate of fire of the ship doesn’t seem to match the idea that it should be put against Corvettes in any sense. It certainly doesn’t preferentially target them. That combined with the fact that missile barrage makes absolutely no sense to use against Corvette targets suggest that you might be talking out of your rectum here. Just putting it forward as a possibility.

That doesn’t even make sense. HW2, for good or ill, has always been about hard counters. Original Homeworld was about soft counters, and the flexibility of building multiple types of damage which can be maneuvered in different ways to take out surprising targets, but the sequel was very much about rock/paper/scissors and definite, hard counters – leading to things like strike craft being almost completely unable to scratch the paint on capital ships and largely being overwhelmed by Corvettes, Corvettes in turn being largely able to mostly ignore fighter craft and getting swatted like flies by capital ships, and super-caps pretty much ignoring anything, including mast assault by capital ships, only being significantly threatened by other super-caps.

If you’re going to make up something and pull it right out of your sphincter, make sure it at least makes sense in the context of the table you’re going to drop it on.

Yes, you might try knowing something. It might be an exciting change from what we have experienced so far.

4 Likes
#271

Formations in HWR are most certainly not working okay. Neither are tactics for that matter, which complemented the effectiveness of formations in the original Homeworld. As has been stated ad nauseam on this forum, formations are pointless in HWR as they break up in combat, and the clever tactics system from the original is non-existent in HWR, being replaced by Homeworld 2’s inferior (imo) tactics system. But from what I have heard, even Homeworld 2’s tactics system sometimes isn’t working on HWR. I am not holding out hopes that Homeworld Classic’s tactics will be implemented in HWR, as the tactics system in Homeworld Classic was designed to function with fighters and corvettes that had fuel to worry about. Fuel being another feature removed from HWR, rendering support frigates/corvettes pretty much useless

3 Likes
#272

Christ haha! I should have scrolled down a little further to see that ForceUser’s comment about strike groups and formations being hunky dory was sufficiently rebutted before posting my comparatively lazy and benign response. Godspeed SquidLord!

1 Like
#273

Lets remember to keep any disagreements at a respectful level. The tone of some replies are feeling a bit attack-y. Yes, I did just make a word up there.

Be excellent to eachother.

#274

The funny thing is that I’m actually pretty okay with the absence of fuel as a tactical concern. I miss it, but I can see systems in place to deal without it.

There’s actually a much larger underlying problem: the functionality of support frigates/corvettes has changed from being a “pull” style operation to being a “push” style operation.

To explicate a little, in previous versions, support and repair were things that the support ship actively did. Fighter craft out of fuel would actively seek out a support ship that you put nearby; all you had to do was place the unit tactically and strategically and things would function sensibly. To do repairs, you told the support ship to maintain “this group of ships” with operable bandboxing, and then ships did the appropriate/smart thing, executing your orders.

Now, you must always give direction to affected ships individually in order to get functionality. Particularly with original Homeworld fighter craft which are sort of the worst-case scenario for this, the fighters themselves must be directed to dock to be repaired. No sense of self-preservation, and you can’t count on a unit which is survived long enough to be low on fuel to seek out support craft in order to the both refueled and repaired – they must be directed every time. The support craft are not smart enough to look after their charges; you can’t direct them to escort and maintain a fleet and expect them to do so. They fixate on a single target and as a result do almost no good.

Rather than allowing strategic thinking and careful placement of resources to carry the day, the way things work now in the area of support craft focuses on micromanagement and only concentration on smashing things together. You can’t even put support craft in a strike group using Homeworld 2 directives and have them operate within the context of a strike group. The moment an attack order is issued, the support craft run forward of the main body to get themselves slaughtered and be useless. The intuitive response to that would be to simply tell strike craft to guard one of the ships that you know will be in the rear ranks of your strike group – but since they can’t be depended on to repair ships in their vicinity, that doesn’t work either.

Until Gearbox implements the local knowledge agentive AI that we had and depended on in pre-Remastered Homeworld, everything will fall apart at exactly the one moment that a player needs it not to – on active contact with the enemy. Instead of strategy (implied by the very name “real-time strategy”), we have purely tactical micromanagement, and not even that works well.

That’s a real problem. That’s a real problem that people have seen and noted and which I hope will be addressed in a patch in the near term.

5 Likes
#275

HW1R cannot replay game from start. It just puts me back into level 1 after the intros then crashes.

#276

I’m not okay with it at all I have to say. It provided an additional but enjoyable challenge to the game that meant you couldn’t have your smaller ships go from one battle to another indefinitely even if they are steam-rolling over the enemy. Which makes sense to me. It fits that there is something resembling a system of fatigue for your smaller ships.

Not to mention how well it was implemented in the original. You could limit fuel usage by ordering your ships into aggressive tactics, where they would move slower, keep a rigid formation in battle making themselves easier targets, but combine their firepower to eradicate the enemy much quicker also (within the original’s superior manoeuvring system where fighters behaved more like they were actually in space and didn’t act like fighter jets, and corvettes constantly strafed to bring their forward facing weapons to bear). The opposite to that was evasive, where they would break formation in battle, take longer to eradicate the enemy while moving around much more, becoming more difficult for the enemy to target and using up more of their own fuel in the process. I’m sure you know about all of this already but it cannot be stressed enough how much depth the combination of fuel, tactics, formations, and support ships gave the tactical element of the original Homeworld game, and why it should have been in the original Homeworld 2 as well in my opinion. It’s baffling and disappointing that it has been removed in HWR.

The lack of fuel, and the tactics that went with them, along with malfunctioning formations take so much strategy away from the game. Not to mention making support ships near useless. When considering the other problems with support ships that you have outlined they pretty much ARE useless. Ignoring other issues, I think that just this specific combination of problems and/or intentional game changes take away hugely from the game. A game that has already been made, and has a relatively large fanbase for a reason. If the original functioned like this on release, this forum wouldn’t exist, because the fanbase wouldn’t be there for a game as tactically and functionally limited as this, despite its impressive visuals.

As a side note, after skimming through this thread, I haven’t seen anyone with what I would consider a current game breaking bug with my audio in-game. Every so often there is a slight visual stutter in-game, practically unnoticeable, but often enough to occur near enough to the start of every level/skirmish. After the stutter, the ambient music gets permanently thrown off into a cycle of skipping and cracking noises roughly every second. It’s incredibly annoying. For me, turning off the wonderful ambient music is not an option.

I really hope the talented people who made this remastered collection support it, fix most if not all of these problems with the game, and get HWR to where is needs to be, a restored version of the original with stunning graphics but with similar if not identical game mechanics.

Knowing absolutely nothing about programming or anything like that (studying economics :sleepy:) , I’m ignorant of whether or not any of these problems can even be addressed via patches… :confused:

2 Likes
#277

Not to mention the asteroids are cluttering up the sensor’s manager with too many visual cues for each single asteroid. Good point with harvesters, they seem to be totaly clueless and having bunch of them beside my mothership doing nothing because “Local resources exhausted” is getting on my nerves. The other thing is that right now it seems that there’s just too little resources on HW1 maps - 30RU’s per small asteroid which is nowhere near the original.

#278

Normally I would say something along the lines: “nice review”. But given its content it makes me really sad. I’m glad I furiously deleted my progress after being unable to mount an effective defence in mission 4 - my fighters just kept dying and I had no way of stopping it. Since then I began playing the campaign in the HW classic missing all the cool new graphics.

Just like in the HW2 campaign. After some time I just didn’t bother to build frigates anymore. At least the fighters and corvettes there were of some use.

Well, I for one can live without the physics, I guess it is one of the compromises we have to make because of the HW2 engine. And frankly, from the math point of view the results should be similar if you simulate the projectiles or if you just roll a die - provided you designed your probabilistic model right. Missing a stationary target can happen (ship making unexpected manoeuvre) but the probability should be really low. What you describe essentially means that someone screwed up their math.

#279

Not sure if this is just me, but has anyone noticed that the lines spoken in HW1 have no natural pauses in places where a natural pause would make sense? For example, when the Khar-Selim’s ping is made, he says his two objective lines too fast, with no gap in between each, making it sound way too rushed. I’ve noticed this throughout all the content I’ve seen for anything in HW Remastered, so I suspect there’s a timing issue between a line being spoken, the line being ended, and the script starting the next one.

However, in HW2, all the pauses are proper and there are sufficient gaps between each line which makes it flow better like it is in the classic, so no issues there.

1 Like
#280

  • HW1R Mission 3, Return to Kharak:
    When the tape is being played of the Taiidans attacking Kharak and the installation, at one point several lines are spoken in quick succession, without pause. There should be pauses between these lines.

  • HW1R Mission 4, harvesters CONSTANTLY get stuck behind small asteroids near the mothership when they’re on their way to the asteroid field or heading back to the mothership.

  • HW1R Mission 4, combat music keeps on playing, even after the Turanic Raiders have been dealt with.
    The original switches to something peaceful.

  • HW1R Mission 6, destroyers just can’t find their way around the asteroids! When ordering them to attack one or just move somewhere they move all the way up or all the way down or all the way back… any direction except where you want them. It’s crazy.

  • HW1R Mission 7, spelling error. The unknown contact is shown as ‘Unkown contact’ on the map.

  • HW1R Mission 7-8, harvesters don’t keep harvesting. You constantly need to tell them to go harvesting, they don’t take any initiative to seek out more resources from the nebula.

  • HW1R Mission 7-8, in the original the sensors map would clear up more and more when you’re harvesting resources. After you have gotten all resources the map would be clear again, no irregularities.

  • Other: Teams still lose their hotkey when they’re docked and when you load a game.
    You can still see the assigned team number when you click one of these units, but the key doesn’t respond.

  • Other: Engine sounds still continue to play after a fighter/corvette has docked.

  • Other: Since the last patch, when you hyperjump ships seem to ‘glitch’ for a moment before jumping. This causes them to jump out a second later than the mothership.

1 Like
#281

Yes I have noticed it also. Not a huge problem in the context of the current state of the game, but still a bit off-putting. People have said that there are horrendous problems with Karen’s sentences overlapping entirely in the tutorial, but I haven’t seen it for myself. I’m far more pissed about the audio bug I described towards the end of my last post that for me, is completely game-breaking.

1 Like
#282

“The UI has 4 scaling settings:
Unreadably small
Fills the entire screen
So big it interferes with itself
So big individual elements don’t fit on the screen”

For me even the smallest option is too big imo, i’d like it to be a scalable slider so you could choose exactly your size.