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Epiiiic!
This is where the game shines. Look at some of the screenshots of the big capital ship battles. They are breathtaking, not simply graphically, but gameplay wise. One thing you can't see from the screenshots is how the battles unfold. Away from the three dimensional aspect, the battles are absolutely intense.
A line of beast infection
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They don't know we are the good guys..
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Individual fights take awhile to finish. Let's say you have 20 multibeam frigates, and you come across 5 Beast multibeam frigates. In most RTS games this would be over in seconds, identical units outnumbered 4-1? Even in Starcraft when you are talking about battlecruisers or carriers, super bad units, it takes at most twenty seconds. In Cataclysm this battle might take as much as two or three minutes to finish. The frigates will pound away at each other for what seems like hours. Really big battles of even numbers can take even longer. This has two effects on the gameplay.
The first effect is that it allows you to actually tactically maneuver in a battle. In most real time strategy games, the battles are over in seconds. All of your tactical preparations are done before the battle, and when the battle actually starts you play very little role beyond trying to keep your units from being stupid. In Cataclysm, if you just send your units off to fight, they'll probably die. You have to maneuver in and out of a battle. If a commander is outnumbered four to one he can still actually win.
The big bad Bentusi return!
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Moving to destroy
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This has never truly been achieved in a real time strategy game before besides perhaps Shogun. To return to Starcraft, imagine forty zerglings being defeated by ten, it doesn't happen under any circumstance unless you micromanage at lightning speed. Because of the fact that battles are extended in Cataclysm, it actually puts some strategy back in real time strategy. You maneuver, plot and consider. Divide and conquer is the slogan of the day, children.
Summary of Gameplay
We had three huge pages talking about the gameplay, and there could literally have been ten or fifteen pages here talking about the gameplay alone. If that transpired, however, the editors of FiringSquad would have to live up to their names and shoot someone, and no one wants a lawsuit on their hands. (but it's nice to know that we now have in-house legal counsel in case we chose to do so. -ed)
No, this isn't your ramming frigate, even your processor looks like a killer.
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Getting ready to finish the destroyer
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The Homeworld series has done more for the RTS genre than any other game to be noted save perhaps the OG titles Dune or Herzog Zwei. Remember when people were saying that about Myth? Myth took things away from the genre, it minimalized the areas that didn't need to be included in a strategy game. Homeworld does that as well, cutting off the fat, but adds even more.
Can my system handle the game? 
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