What our customer's say!"O.K. for the price", This book is just O.K. for the price. You can get it cheap, but most of the information can be found on websites by now. Still Homeworld is a great game and there is more in this book on multi-player stratigies.
"Game inconsistency problem", Pros : Complete list of the 2 playable fleets, sufficient formation list with details of their characteristics. Also gives you sufficient information on how to run the game.
Cons : Ship details in the guide are inconsistent with those in the game( for ex in the book a particular ship may have grade 20 fire power rating, while in the actual game it might have only 10...quite a set-back when you've just pre-planned an entire strategy concentrated on the particular's ship's fire power...)
Also, it does not include a list of the ships of the "other" races ( Bentushi, Turanic Raiders and Kadeshi), which is good in a way since it gives the game a better "Unfolding-story-discovery-excitement" feel to it. However one may also say that "this is just a game...I want the details!"
The game itself, especially in multiplayer mode, is VERY spontaneous...thus rendering a complete detailed strategy guide practically useless. One can come up with whatever strategy he likes. THis means that the guide itself is probably only good at giving a player some details as to what ships are most likely capable of.
The Game presents you with a constantly changing invironment in multiplayer mode. The Universe is the limit. You learn as you go along. The Strategy Guide is really just a novelty "How to play the game"/user's manual booklet that just goes really great with the CD :)
"OK guide for homeworld", Real time strategy games tend to be something of a learning experience, but that is part of the fun-- figuring out what strategies works and which ones don't. Homeworld certainly fits into that description, as a unique 3D real time strategy game.
I purchased this book to minimize the learning curve and get some hints. It did minimize the learning curve, and provided plenty of generalized tips and tactics. It also provides (in general terms) walk-throughs of the missions.
Perhaps it was too good. Towards the end I started to get bored with the game. It started to get routine-- research and harvest resources, build a massive fleet, and wipe the other guy out. I think the guide help kill the experience in some small way.
"Interesting with a few new ideas", I fall in between the other reviewers on this one. I liked the book, but found that there were a few obvious items that they didn't include that I would have liked. The Homeworld:Cataclysm guide uses a tabular list of the ships, their cost, armour, firepower and speed etc... all viewable at once. I thought that should have been here too.
In general, the book has good ideas, but I found that frequently, I had radically different strategies than the book that worked at least as well. This is ok, but still, I found that my was was quite obvious. The suggested strategy in
"The Bridge of Sighs" level (building 5 cloaking field
generators to cloak your entire fleet) is a little extreme.
That's 2500 RU's and it would be nice to have a few RU's around after this level.
Frequently, the "strategy" for doing a level is basically knowing the level ahead of time and little else. How other ships will behave, what conditions will cause the enemy to start attacking and what direction they will arrive from etc...
The multiplayer ideas are generally good, and I use them more than the single player level suggestions which I find of less use. I found that a few ships were left unexplored (the drone frigate and the defence field frigate are mentioned but there's almost no info on whether they are useful or not or how to use them).
Your mileage may vary, but if you play this game a lot, and have tried many different ideas already, you will probably have used most of the strategies presented here. You'll already know what ships work against which others, what works well as an escort etc...
Happy hunting.
"Ohio reviewer: Try actually reading the book next time", Just a note to the reviewer from Ohio who finds the book worthless compared to the online guide at CNET which has "the best advice I've found."
The CNET guide with all that good advice is composed of excerpts from the Prima strategy guide -- word for word. In other words, they're both *exactly the same*. Same author. Same words.
How could you not know this unless you didn't actually read the strategy guide? Yes, it's always smart and ethical to read books before you trash them.
The strategy guide is loaded with hundreds of insider tips directly from the Relic development and testing teams, none of which appear in the manual.
