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Page 3 of 7

New Den Mother

Here's your bare-bones mothership, with some modules being constructed…

Your mothership starts out as a mere mining vessel, but the new module system will let you configure it into something that's superior to Homeworld's original mothership. For one thing, in single-player scenarios, this ship can move. It's no longer annoyingly anchored to its starting point. Now you can mobilize your main base anywhere at will.

Research is also different. You no longer build research ships but instead build different modules, which in turn open up different technology trees. Here are the modules you can tack on to your mothership in the game.

Here you are all moduled up and ready to take names.

Support: Support is a new concept in Homeworld. Different ships have different support ratings; the bigger the ship, the more support it needs. If you need more support to build a bigger fleet, you can either build carriers or add support modules to your mothership. These modules are relatively cheap, and while they do not assist in the research tree, you will need enough of these to field the new ships you research.

Hangar: As soon as you build the hangar, you create the foundation for your navy. Here you research the engines that power each of the ship types, from fighter to frigate to destroyer. Then, you make them more efficient by researching the advanced versions of those drives.

Armor: Building this module lets you research upgrades to your ships. Incidentally, upgrades are another new feature for Cataclysm: Now you can improve your ships through research. The armor module lets you acquire a variety of armor, from simple strong plating to exploding plates that injure the attacker. You can also research and improve the force fields that the sentinel ships create.

Here's me charging my Big Gun before it puts the hurt on some poor AI schmuck.

Engineering: A lot of the technologies researched here open up new specific ship types, as opposed to the hangar, which opens up ship hull types. This is where you research things such as microship technology (for creating leeches and sentinels), linking (for the combined vessels), holographic projection (mimics), and abilities like harvesting crystals or repairing other ships.

Advanced Engineering: A few improvements to preexisting ships lie here. The afterburners and advanced-sensors upgrades improve the speed of all your units and enhance their sight ranges. Researching repair bots helps capital ships become more self-sufficient, as they can slowly repair themselves out in the field while waiting for the workers to come to speed up repairs.

Weapon: This is where all the toys are researched. EMPs, explosives, ion cannons, and missile launchers are all researched here. The most significant research item here is Big Gun technology.

The Big Gun: You can think of this as the Homeworld Death Star module. Once you research the Big Gun at the weapon module, you can then build this module onto your ship. If we had to name one thing that makes the Somtaaw mothership better than the original Kushan one, it's this module here. It takes a very long time to build, but it will be well worth it once it's complete. Your mothership then gets the Big Gun command, which, when selected, zooms out to the sensor screen, letting you designate a victim well out of visual range. The resulting blast is so powerful that all ships below frigate class near the mothership are injured by the resulting shock wave.

Next: The fighters
 
 

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