At the last fight you just jumped into enemy gravity field, which pulls your ships out of hyperspace and badly damages ships that were not jumping on their own hyperspace drive.
I'm not sure if you knew and I don't really remember if it's the right button, but if you hold down alt, it give you an "eye" cursor and you can click/drag a box on a fighter and see a single fighter fly around in 3rd person view. It's a fun way to look at the battles.
Just got this game. Watched this to learn how to play. Good video. There is a lot of totally weird stuff which I do not like. Bonus points for collecting 20 RUs first? What is that about? I have never seen that in any other game. All that should matter is destroying the enemy however you can. I may give up with this.
It seems to me that most ships have pretty unrestricted line of sight in which to fire, which makes me wonder how tactics would look like in multiplayer. Is it just fleet composition, or is there actually some significance in how you engage your ships?
The beginning small scale fights are pretty much down to fleet comp, but once you get into end game and capital ships start flying around like battle cruisers and destroyers you can take out their guns/engines to cripple their firepower (engines making it so that they can't turn to bring their guns/missile launchers to bare) also capital ships have weaker armor on the top and bottom of their hulls therefore you can make bombing passes with bombers coming down from above or below to deal massive damage to capital ships with smaller vessels and that's pretty much where the macro of the game comes in during fights, fleet comp also helps of course.
There are actually several facets to strategy in this game: 1) Each ship has a specialty and using them effectively means managing each ship type properly in combat 2) Capital ship armor is weaker on the dorsal and ventral sides of the ship, maneuvering to attack them there helps 3) There are special units such as cloak fields and gravity generators, these add a dimension of ambushing 4) Hyperspace capability with super capital ships means you can potentially withdraw from, or enter engagements quickly and unexpectedly 5) Adding relics, crate drops, or resource injections will force players to take map control Building a good fleet is key, but making sure how to use it right and building it quickly enough can be a challenge. Hope that helps explain it a little.
HeirofCarthage Yea, your explanation does help quite a bit. It seems to me as if total war games tend to be rather intuitively obvious. Even if you don't know much about the stats of each unit, seeing your katana samurai outflanked is clearly bad news. I'm sure CA also worked very hard to make it that way. But with this game I feel far more unsure of what makes a fleet successful, and as a result I often don't know what to look for. Having bigger ships seems to be rather helpful (as you demonstrated in this video ;) ), but the significance of each specific move is mostly lost on me. Perhaps some focus on explaining the different roles of ships in combat may be useful, but I get the feeling that I just gotta watch more high-level battles to get the hang of it.
It's hard to explain the different roles, in part because there are typically multiple options for each given fleet task. Do you want to use frigates for anti-fighter work? You can do that. Would you rather use corvettes? You can do that. Would you rather use your own fighters? You can do that. It changes which frigate, corvette, or fighter models you build, but ultimately Homeworld is very flexible. When I used to play, I always preferred fighter-based fleets over frigate/capital ship fleets and that was typically viable if you played aggressively enough, but it's not the only option. I loved these games... now that they've been re-released it's only a matter of time before I buy them again.
