Welcome to the RTSC Cataclysm page!

The Cataclysm page has been retired: that is, it'll always still be here, but links aren't actively maintained.

Strategically, Cataclysm has expanded Homeworld's scope, buts its a shame that the open blue sky feel has been compromised by barrages of screen overlays and Playstation fireworks; all the visual effects look more garish. There's a variety of new ships that add a variety of completely new functions and strategies that go well beyond the simplistic guns and armour thing.

Cataclysm introduces Support Units (SU) to Homeworld. Like the Farms in Age of Empires or Supply Depots in StarCraft, you have to construct Carriers and Support Modules on all your Super-Capital ships in order to increase the number of vessels in your force. Each class of ship uses a different number of SU's, effectively capping the number of ships you can build or salvage in the game. A lot of time is spent building Support Modules just to expand your fleet. Cataclysm maps are much richer to compensate for all that extra spending.

The Somtaaw Command ship is completely modular: you have to build the right module to acquire the relevant technology to research. Armour and weapon upgrades are also available, and often units have to be upgraded (or mutated if they're Beast vessels) on the field many times, with smaller vessels coming in to dock for modifications. The tech tree, upgrades, special abilities and extendable modules are typical of the "regular" RTS game, and the two Cataclysm sides feel vaguely reminiscent of StarCraft's Terrans and Zerg.

A number of old ship designs have been amalgamated, and some interesting new ones added. The Resource Collector, Repair Corvette and Salvage Corvette have been merged into the Worker unit, Cataclysm's Age of Empires Villager in Outer Space. Both the entire Strikecraft and Corvette lines of shipping have effectively been condensed into just two units: the Acolyte fighter and the ACV Corvette. What's cool about these two is that an ACV is actually two Acolytes docked together. You can separate ACV's into Acolytes on the field and vice versa, so you can switch between a Fighter and Corvette force with ease. Not bad. Refueling has been dropped as a concept in Cataclysm. All the old Probes and sensor units have been combined with the old Scout to become the Recon strike ship. While its very weak on armaments, its light and fast and blessed with long range detection abilities.

Probably Cataclysm's best units are found in an entirely new class of ship on the Somtaaw side: the Microship. Microships are tiny and come in two forms: the Sentinel, and my favourite, the Leech. Sentinels can combine together in spherical formation to generate large polygonal force fields around large units. This is all well and good, apart from the fact that it seems far too easy to take them out. Leeches can slip into fleets to attach themselves to the hulls of other ships to either spy, erode their hulls by "venting" their health points into space, or "leech" them by eating the enemy vessel for its resources like a tick, then returning to base to offload the RU's! Brilliant.

Beast ships have a second hand line-up of assimilated vessels from pirates, Kushan, Taiidan and Somtaaw forces, all recognizable by the monstrous skin disease proudly spotting their hulls. The Beast can infect other ships using an Infection Beam emitted only by the Mothership and Super-Capital ships, or with the rather scary Cruise Missile. Beast Cruise Missiles are actually one shot corvettes, and if one should crash into anything Frigate sized or smaller, that ship is effectively lost to the Beast. Infection beams work by weight: they'll convert a certain amount of tonnage of shipping per shot. A Frigate, or several Corvettes, or a whole squadron of Fighters.