The primary role of the Mothership is to manufacture your and service your fleet. It receives resource shipments from your harvesters, and its docking bays repair or refuel most spacecraft Frigate sized or smaller. It is the only vessel that can produce the biggest hull sizes in your build tree, the Super-Capital Class ships: Destroyers, Battlecruisers and Carriers. These heavy units emerge from an impressive floating bay door on the Kushan Mothership. On the Taiidan version they emerge underneath from a giant, open bay.

This can be a real problem: if there's sufficient attackers, they can safely ignore any defenders standing in the way and just blast the Mothership out of existence before you even slow them down. If you've let the enemy waltz up to your Mothership in force, then you're a bit of a dill. This also presents Homeworld newbies with a potential game stopper: there's a cheese strat where you can simply hyperspace your entire fleet on top of someone else's Mothership and demolish them before they can do anything to stop you. Its the beginner nightmare in most RTS games: spending an hour building up a beautiful fleet only to have some smart arse take you out within the first minute of real combat.

And yes, the Kushan Mothership does look like a big banana. The Taiidan one is sometimes called The Toaster.

Its as simple as that: Homeworld's tech tree isn't sophisticated at all. Science Vessels look sort of interesting when the parts dock together, but the only thing that this feature really offers you is a bit of extra speed in gaining those valuable tech's. This really only helps in fast games on smaller maps. On huge maps most players accumulate everything they need (if not hit their population cap a few times over) by the time they get down to the serious mid to end game battles. The other major use for a Science Vessel is as bullet soak: some people fly these unarmed craft into the middle of a map to distract fire away from their fighters or resourcers.

There are only two resourcing units: the Resource Collector and the Resource Controller.

Controllers can also refuel and repair Corvettes and Strikecraft like a Support Frigate, but on a far smaller and slower scale. They usually form the heart of a mobile expansion, covered by Support Frigates, a few Capital Class vessels and a standing squadrons of Corvettes and Strikecraft to keep the enemy at bay. Some players order their Controllers to Guard one or two Harvesters, so they will follow them all over the map, and then guard the Controller with armed vessels. This is okay, if you don't mind surrendering your command decisions to the game AI.

These civilian units are both unarmed and highly strategic targets. Losing them won't cost you your store of RU's but will seriously hit your economy. Its no surprise to find in many multiplayer games, small raids on enemy resourcing quickly escalate into ongoing battles that dominate the game.

Best of all, when assigned to guard a group of other ships, they will initiate any repairs automatically. This alone makes them one of the most valuable assets in any fleet, and many players will fire on support first before attacking the rest of the fleet. Their usefulness is their biggest drawback: these ships are simply too useful and too dangerous to ignore, so they invariably die first. Certainly the game AI seems to prioritise them first during a fight, regardless of how many other ships there are in the battle. Keep them heavily guarded and at the rear.

Support is absolutely critical in Homeworld, especially for refueling Strikecraft and Corvettes. Without it, your high speed fighter wings will eventually grind to a halt, unable to escape any enemies. When you begin deploying squadrons across a big map, you will need to establish forward supply bases made up of Support Frigates and their defenders.

Once snared, the enemy ship becomes supine and ceases to resist, but until that point your corvettes are in grave danger - the opposition can rescue any snared craft by zapping your corvettes. A half grabbed ship will spin in slow circles, unable to do anything until rescued.

Salvage Corvettes are great against unescorted capital ships and especially potent stealing unattended Resource Collectors, but being unarmed and unable to escape enemy fire, sassy foes will blow them away first. At the very least they can be a useful distraction but require considerable micromanagement and covering fire. They can deprive your foes of their powerful capital craft right when they least expect it, and at the very least, will keep their major shipping out of the fight during the salvaging process.

Far more useful is the medium sized Proximity Sensor. This is a proper ship and not a one shot probe. Packed with sensor gear, it can detect invisible units nearby and effectively counters the Cloak Generator and Stealth Fighter. Its simply an unarmed eye in the sky though, but its always wise to keep a few guarding your fleets, especially near support or resourcing units. There's nothing worse than being sprung by a force of invisible ships you can't shoot back at...

The ultimate radar system in the game is the giant Sensor Array. This effectively lights up the whole map. Again, its unarmed and extremely slow, so Arrays tend to be left hanging around the Mothership. While lacking any kind of defence, they are still incredibly tough. Some players use them as temporary bullet soaks for the Mothership to buy time against any attacks until help can arrive.

Strikecraft are organised similarly on both sides. The Scout is the lightest fighting ship. You can churn these out the moment the game starts, and in fact, large clouds of Scouts swarming the map are not uncommon sights in many online Homeworld games. Scouts sacrifices armour in favour of high speed and manoeuvrability to check out the map and tackle anything in a hurry. In longer games they tend to get replaced by Interceptors, the standard issue fighter of Homeworld. Interceptors live longer in a fight, and compromise speed for better firepower, armour and refueling times. Large groups of Interceptors fill out most forces, dealing with any gaps in your defences that bigger and slower ships aren't best suited to deal with. Fighter screens also distract any enemies by presenting dozens of hard to hit targets.

Defenders on the other hand, are Strikecraft that are little more than a slow moving Strikecraft with three modest turrets. They're far too slow for attacks but used instead in small clouds to defend capital ships and anything unarmed against fighter raids. Defenders suffer alarming attrition rates, but they can be thrown together in a flash for last ditch defences. Large numbers of them can hose down small targets in a blaze of small arms fire.

Taiidan forces get a second specialised defensive unit, the Defence Fighter. These odd ships have no offensive weapon except a weird laser beam that actually shoots bullets out of the sky. Scattering these fighters through your Taiidan fleet cut down the amount of small arms damage substantially. They're fantastic when mixed with Taiidan's lesser Defender if you're fielding enemy fighter swarms - but lacking any offensive weapons themselves, are utterly useless on their own.

The Kushan get to use their own unique Cloaked Fighter. This is essentially a slower moving and less nimble Interceptor that can actually turn invisible. They're much more expensive, run out of fuel a little faster, and if spotted lose all their stealth advantages and get blown clean out of the sky. As a result not many people tend to use them unless your worthy foe has forgotten to build Proximity Sensors.

Light Corvettes are the first you can build once you've got the first Corvette tech under your belt. They're often outclassed once the mid game gets underway, but in the opening battles they comfortably outlast fighter battles simply because of their heavier armour. In fact, Interceptors have better firepower, but Light Corvettes demonstrate that better armour can trump a Homeworld fighter battle - provided no bigger ship classes have joined the fray.

The Multi-Gun Corvette tends to be a little more popular online thanks to its versatility and slightly faster rate of fire: you have the option of firing in all directions against fighters at once or aiming everything at a single target. Its lighter and faster, and while it shoots rather insubstantial individual shots, bullet speed is almost instantaneous, guaranteeing more hits. Numbers count: six high speed, omni-directional turrets on a dozen Multi-Gun Corvettes stacks up quickly.

Frigates bring you to the small end of the Capital Ship classes. Everything smaller than a Frigate needs refueling; but all Capital ships are completely self-sufficient - barring battle damage of course. Assault and Beam Frigates provide the mainstay of much of your forces.

Even in smallish numbers they can melt large vessels in short order, but their low manoeuvrability means they are helpless against Corvettes and Strikecraft. Certainly a pack of them can deliver substantial damage to a target, and they're tough enough to withstand a cloud of fighters long enough to do their work. Other than their thick hide, they have no defences or any other weapons. They're best used against the biggest targets on the field, provided they are looked after.

There are a few unique frigates for each side. The Kushan Drone Frigate releases a spherical cloud of small floating gun turrets that can blast away at a swarm of small targets like a formation of strike craft or focus on a single one. They're excellent for mine clearing and make for a good anti-Strikecraft unit, since the cloud can shoot in all directions.

By contrast, the Taiidan Shield Frigate emits a giant force field that helps reduce enemy fire. It extends an invisible sphere around the ship, blocking something like 80-90% of all incoming enemy fire except for Ion beams, space mines and missiles. They're like a formation of Defence Fighters, except without the messy micromanagement. Being unarmed, they're vulnerable to heavy attack, but they make good support for Carriers or lightly defended outposts. The field allows any out-going small arms fire to pass through without being blocked, allowing the Taiidan defenders to return fire uninterrupted.

As the hull classes get larger the number of unit types you can build drops sharply. Destroyers belong in the Super Capital class, and can only be produced by the Mothership.

Destroyers are Capital Class raptors, designed expressly for savaging other Capital class ships. They're huge but lean; powerful ships packing massive cannons and a pair of huge ion beam turrets, all on a highly manoeuvrable chassis - almost as nimble as a regular Assault Frigate. This is the second most destructive vessel in the game. Destroyers are the equivalent of two Assault Frigates and two Beam Frigates fused together at half the price. You get the all-weather, multi-purpose brawler, but one that can focus enormous amounts of firepower on a heavy target. The only downside is the severe unit cap imposed on these powerful units. Ironically, they are so effective and so dangerous in a fleet fight that they nearly always die first in spite of their power because they are simply too dangerous to be left alone.

Where Destroyers are Number Two in the destruction stakes, Battlecruisers are quite clearly Number One. They're as subtle as a brick to the head: nothing else matches these monstrous dreadnoughts for sheer, blundering firepower. A cruiser is somewhere between two and three times more powerful than a Destroyer, but only as fast and nimble as an iceberg. They pack six huge kinetic turrets and two twin Ion Beams. Battlecruisers absorb and deliver extraordinary amounts of fire while remaining at full fighting strength right until the bitter end. The two drawbacks to using a Battlecruiser is the sheer amount of time and resources needed to build one, and their glacial speed. Once built though, they are a serious obstacle that cannot be ignored. On their own can easily demolish a Mothership and seriously wreak havoc on the backbone of an opposing fleet.

Focus fire can bring them down too, so don't make the mistake of thinking they're indestructible. Like all prized naval assets, they need their escorts and you need to keep an eye on them. Something you've invested so much time and expense in really has to be looked after, and these bad boys take forever to repair. For best results, keep escorts nearby to handle the lighter targets so it can focus on what it does best: demolishing big targets like itself, helping to swing the battle in your favour.

Most Homeworld players never seemed to want to use them; the amount of micromanagement required switching between your production shipping and sorting out all your docked ships in multiple places made them awkward and clumsy to use.

You can opt to remove Motherships from a netgame entirely by playing a Carrier Only game. Hull sizes are thus limited to Frigates or smaller, and unless the map includes some extra big ships at the start, all your eggs are placed in one basket: your Carrier is your one and only factory.

The other is more tricky but not as potent: the Cloak Generator. Anything friendly within a Cloak Generator's radius becomes completely invisible. Having one or two Cloaks guarding a fleet can prove devastating, since it becomes difficult for the enemy to select anything to shoot at if there's nothing to be seen. Weapons seem to fire from empty space and it becomes eminently possible to sneak a sizeable force up to their unsuspecting victims. Like the Gravwell Generator, they have a short battery life and need plenty of recharge time. Cloak Generators are not as popular as Gravwells, because they are so easily countered by Proximity Sensors.