INTRO:
Real-time strategy games that are set in space are some of the most complex games around, but are quite demanding because they often require players to visualize and coordinate movement of assets in 3D. Yet, not everyone is quite capable of this, so these games have since retreated into a niche.
As a preface, this game was originally meant to be a Relic Entertainment title and another entry in the Homeworld series. However, the collapse of Relic’s previous owner, THQ, meant that the Homeworld IP was tossed into limbo; Relic’s new owner, Sega, is simply not interested in Homeworld. Some of the developers left, together with the ideas and framework for this game. What they took with them were made into Shipbreakers, the tentative title for their game. With Gearbox Software’s acquisition of the IP (for better or worse) and their deal to publish the game with the Homeworld label, the game was redesigned into the prequel that it was originally intended to be.
Unfortunately, this also meant that Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is further proof that the age of space-based full six-axes real-time strategy games is long past.
That said, some of the people who made the first two Homeworld titles made Deserts of Kharak, having decided to go for gravity-bound gameplay instead of battle among the stars. It may not be as sophisticated as the earlier titles, but Desert of Kharak retains the capability to deliver on what is arguably the Homeworld IP’s strongest aspect: its storytelling.
PREMISE:
For the purpose of story-telling, Blackbird Interactive has greatly expanded the lore of the ultimately doomed eponymous planet, prior to the release of the game.
Deserts of Kharak, as its name implies already, is a prequel to the numbered Homeworld titles (in which Kharak is already savaged). The people of Kharak – the Kushan – have lived on Kharak for many centuries. They have structured them into clans, called “Kiithid” in their tongue.
As the intro of the first Homeworld title has already mentioned, some of the Kiithid long had the suspicion that they are not native to their planet. They know that they have agnostically sophisticated technology, and have no evidence of a gradual progression in their level of civilization. Moreover, any relics of the past that have been found are obviously products of advanced engineering.
If all these relics were to be found, studied and thoroughly documented, the Kushan would have learned the truth of their past. Yet, not all of the relics could be secured for such purposes. A sizable number of them are within the territories of Kiith Gaalsien. They zealously guard the sites of these relics, and do not divulge anything of what they know about them to anyone else.
This would not have been a problem, except that the planet is turning worse for everyone else. The deserts are expanding, and only the Gaalsien have the means to survive in such harsh environments. Sadly, due to many years of bad blood between the Kiithid, the Gaalsien care little for the other people of Kharak; that they are religious fanatics did not help matters.
The other people of Kharak include Kiith S’jet, the protagonists of the series. Prior to the events of this game, they have banded together into the Coalition of the Northern Kiithid (named after the northern pole of the world that they live on). In desperation, they have made their biggest incursion yet into the southern regions, in search of the fabled Khar-Toba relic that their brightest minds believe hold the key to their salvation. (The relic, of course, contains the first Hyperspace Core that the Kushan found.)
One of these brightest minds is Rachel S’jet, who is the chief scientist for one of the expeditions that are undertaking the incursion. One of the other expedition’s main assets is the Kapisi, one of the land carriers that are built to be mobile bases in the deserts of Kharak.
Of course, as to be expected of an RTS game, the player takes on the near-omnipresent role of being the entire fleet of the Kapisi. The player will face many ardent enemies along the way, as well as experience the culmination of the worst relationships between the Kiithid.
TUTORIAL:
Although games set in full 3D space like Homeworld had been exceedingly rare things, there had even been a while since the last ground-based RTS title. Thankfully, there is a tutorial that puts the player up to speed with the usual controls, as well as some other things that Homeworld fans might recognize.
PAUSE BUTTON:
The handy feature of pausing the gameplay of the campaign is in this entry of the Homeworld series too, though it was only implemented in the v1.3 patch. The campaign can be quite hectic at times, pitching the player’s forces against a considerable number of enemies coming from just about any direction.
However, the player might want to avoid using the pause button too close to the completion of objectives, or any other points just before cutscenes occur. If the player uses it when a cutscene is just about to occur, the game freezes.
HIT POINTS & REPAIRS:
Just like so many real-time strategy games, a meter of hit points determines the durability of a unit. Regardless of the extensiveness of damage that a unit has suffered, it maintains its performance in battle until it is destroyed.
No Coalition unit is capable of repairing itself, including those that are capable of performing repairs on others. However, a pair of repair-capable Coalition units can travel with each other and repair each other on the fly. This is especially doable the Support Cruisers. (In the campaign, Rachel S’jet’s souped-up baserunner can do the same.)
Repairs on Coalition units are enacted using the terribly sci-fi radiation-based technology that has been seen in the first Homeworld title (and its stand-alone expansion, Cataclysm). As unbelievable as this is, it is quite convenient, because it allows repair-capable units to repair others even as they do other things, like shoot at enemies.
Thanks to the generally more advanced tech that the Gaalsien are using, most of their units are capable of self-repairs over time. However, their repair rates are nowhere near those that can be achieved through repairs performed by Coalition units. Indeed, there had been some complaints that this gives the Coalition an advantage, especially if the player is good at micromanagement.
SENSOR VIEW:
Deserts of Kharak has the Homeworld IP’s signature sensor view, which can be brought up with a touch of a button. Units and resources are represented with flat icons. The mouse cursor and any other associated visual effects are greatly simplified in this mode too. The game can be mostly played in this mode, but the panel to give commands to units are hidden. The player could use the shortcut keys, of course.
The detection range of a unit is represented as a dome, not unlike how a sphere represents the sensor range of ships in the original Homeworld titles. This does affect the detection of enemy aircraft, especially if they are merely passing overhead. However, enemy aircraft that are making attack runs have to dip in order to deliver their payloads, meaning that they might enter the dome earlier than they would if they were just passing overhead.
MOVING GROUPS OF MIXED UNITS:
Some of the most interesting designs of the game are how groups of different units move.
If units of different types are already close to each other when the order to move somewhere is given, they move at the speed of the slowest unit; the faster units will adjust their speed accordingly. In the case of fast light-weight units (called “strikecraft” in-game) like the Light Attack Vehicles and Sandskimmers, they move at their highest speed, but circle around the other units instead; this can be an amusing sight, and also prevents them from being hit by enemy fire too readily.
If they were not close to each other when the order is given, they attempt to vary their speeds and eventually form a main body of sorts; the faster units move at their highest speeds to catch up to the slower ones, or slow down so that the slower units can catch up. If the faster ones were already close to the slower ones but are ahead, they might turn around to link up with the slower ones.
If some units are not close to the rest but are closer to the destination, they move over there first; they will not turn around to join the main body.
The formation that the units would form at the destination are always as such: damage-sponge units at the front, fire support units at the back and the strikecraft zooming around the other units like flies.
GUARD FORMATIONS:
When units are set to guard another unit, all of the units move at the speed of the slowest unit, whether it is the one being guarded or the ones guarding it. As for their formation, the toughest guards surround their charge and its fire support follows it from behind, but for whatever reason, strikecraft are often at the fringes of the formation.
It should be kept in mind that the guarding units are practically set on attack-move mode as they follow the one that they are guarding. If enemies come within their range, they attack. In the case of units with turrets, this is not an issue; they just turn their turrets and shoot for as long as they can while they continue moving.
However, this is an issue for units that have to point their hulls. In order to make an attack against enemies that get too close, they have to angle their hulls, thus slowing them down and losing their place in the guard formation. Furthermore, if there are enemies in range but not within clear lines of fire, e.g. they are behind the crests of hills, the guards might break off to engage in combat. This can be a serious problem.
LIMITED UNIT FORMATIONS & FACING FOR GROUPS OF THE SAME UNITS:
When the player has groups of the same units move about, they always try to form a line at where they would be. The orientation of the line depends on the direction that they were moving along before they stop at their destination. This line is approximately perpendicular to this direction.
Unfortunately, this formation is the player’s only option. There is no way to get units to follow other formations when they are given orders to move. This becomes a problem in making use of high ground, as will be described shortly.
TOPOGRAPHY:
The dunes and mountains of Kharak make for some interesting terrain in warfare. Units on terrain that are higher than that of their targets are marked with labels depicting their advantage against their enemies. This advantage manifests in the form of damage bonuses and better accuracy.
Unfortunately, in practice, it is next to impossible to get groups of units to use high ground, because of the limitations in the scripting for unit formation.
The player might have some units in the group just behind the crest of the high ground, thus enjoying the aforementioned advantage while having the enemy’s line of fire broken up by the crest. However, the player may also have other units in the same group going over the crest of the high ground; although they gain the bonus, they also expose themselves to enemy fire. The player might also have some units in the group well behind the crest, which prevents them from engaging in combat if they depend on direct fire.
Speaking of which, units that are capable of indirect fire, e.g. those that launch high-arc missiles, do not gain anything from high-ground advantage.
As mentioned in one of their blogs, the developers were not able to implement formation scripting that takes advantage of terrain contours. This can be disappointing, considering that some of them are former employees of Relic Entertainment. Company of Heroes was a Relic title, and that game featured some good scripting that has units sticking to cover, depending on its shape.
That Deserts of Kharak does not have such scripts strongly suggests that either the formerly of Relic people who worked on the game did not recall how to code them, or the people who worked on Company of Heroes did not share their knowledge with the people who were formerly of Relic. Neither speaks of Relic’s pedigree.
THE CAMPAIGN:
Speaking of which, the main appeal of the game is the story campaign. The first mission starts off with a small tutorial of sorts, though it is not as extensive as the tutorial mode.
Then the second mission wakes the player up, and reminds followers of the IP that the campaign missions of the series tend to be quite challenging if the player is not used to enemies that do not need to follow rules that the player has to follow.
The main source of challenge is keeping losses low, while fending off and destroying enemies that would come after the Kapisi and its fleet. The player can harvest materials (more on these later) from wrecks and surface ore deposits, but they are limited in supply and the enemy, if they can do so, will harvest these too just to deny them to the player. (They do not really need them; they are scripted to produce units periodically and continuously.)
Meanwhile, the player has to pursue objectives that sometimes require fleet assets to be peeled off and sent elsewhere, thus putting the Kapisi in danger of being overwhelmed. Obviously, if the Kapisi is destroyed, that would be game over.
However, throughout the campaign, the Kapisi and its fleet gain new additions, thanks to ongoing R&D and reverse-engineering efforts. If the player could conserve the Kapisi’s forces, the player would have a mighty fleet to fight its enemies with, and it would be all the mightier if the player is spending resources on upgrading units instead of making replacements.
THE CARRIER:
Deserts of Kharak resembles the classic Carrier Command because of its ground-bound gameplay more than it does its predecessors in the Homeworld series. Of course, the player still controls more than just the Carrier, but in the campaign and most multiplayer/skirmish matches, having the Carrier go down is a straight loss.
Like the Motherships of the other Homeworld games, the Carrier is the main source of units. It has a massive built-in manufacturing facility and hangar that is used to assemble together just about any unit, which then comes out of one of its two ends (or one of the hatches on its runways, in the case of aircraft). Since units come out of the Carrier, the player should always keep the whereabouts of the Carrier in mind.
Conveniently, any units that have been created but have yet to be assigned to any task follow the Carrier around by default; this has been a hallmark of the Homeworld IP for a while. Since the Carrier is the slowest unit in any fleet (by default), any other unit would find it easy to follow.
Small units like the Light Attack Vehicles and Scavengers can just go underneath the Carrier’s hull; there is enough space for that. In fact, small units can go in between the tracks without a problem too, as unbelievable as that seems. Of course, this is just for the purpose of gameplay convenience.
However, the Carrier cannot move around anything bigger than strikecraft, and vice versa. Fortunately, the pathfinding scripts for units also include lines that have any other units making way for the Carrier, though at the cost of their own cohesion.
CARRIER SYSTEMS CANNOT BE DELIBERATELY TARGETED:
In the previous Homeworld titles, the Motherships’ systems are segments on their exteriors that can be deliberately damaged. There is the narrative excuse that large vessels like the Mothership had been designed with modular expansions in mind.
In the case of the Carrier in Deserts of Kharak, its exterior has to be hardened against the violent desert storms. Consequently, its systems are contained well within its hull. Therefore, none of the systems can be deliberately damaged.
However, the construction of the Kapisi was rushed in order to meet the deadline of the latest incursion, so many of its internal systems are not fully implemented. Hence, there is a narrative excuse in the campaign for the Kapisi not being able to function at its full potential, at least initially.
CARRIER SYSTEMS:
Anyway, the Carrier’s systems are represented with four meters. In the case of the Coalition Carrier, these are its Armor, Repair, Weapons and Range systems respectively.
The Armor system is the Carrier’s ability to shrug off damage. The Range system determines the reach of its weaponry. The other systems on the Coalition Carrier systems will be described in their own sections.
In the case of the Gaalsien Carrier, its repair system is dedicated to itself. Instead of diverting power to armor, it can divert power to its engines, making it move at an incredible clip.
To activate these systems, power has to be allocated to them. In the campaign, the Kapisi only has power to activate and maintain a few systems at less than full capacity.
CARRIER REPAIR SYSTEM:
The Repair system of the Carrier is not meant for the Carrier itself. Rather, it is meant to repair other units. If the Carrier itself is damaged, other units, such as the Support Cruiser, have to repair it.
There are repair arms ringing the exterior of the Carrier; these cannot be damaged, but they are not functional by default. After allocating power to the Repair system, the repair arms activate. At the first level, only one repair arm on each flank of the Carrier is activated. At higher levels, the other repair arms on other sides of the Carrier come online, allowing the Carrier to effect repairs on many units.
CARRIER WEAPON SYSTEM:
Any Carrier is armed to the teeth. However, the Carrier does not have the means to activate all of its array of weapons. Furthermore, without allocating power to its range, its arsenal can only be brought to bear against enemies that are close.
HEAT:
Later in the campaign, the Carrier may have plenty of power to go around its systems, but another issue crops up: heat. The first level of any system barely generate any heat. However, the higher levels generate more.
A meter next to the system meters show the highest level of heat that can possibly be reached with the permutation of power allocation that causes that heat build-up; this is represented as a dark brown bar. The actual heat that the Carrier is running at the time is indicated with a yellow bar, overlaid on top of the brown bar. A horizontal marking on the heat meter shows the amount of heat that the Carrier can tolerate before it overheats. All this is not exactly well explained to the player, even in the tutorial mode.
If the systems generate too much heat, the Carrier begin to take damage periodically. The player could continue making use of its high-powered systems, while risking further damage.
COLLECTING & INSTALLING PARTS:
Thanks to some narrative excuses, such as the Coalition being far less gentle in their salvaging techniques than the Gaalsien are, the Kapisi can gain rare parts and other technological relics to install into its many internal spaces that were previously empty (no thanks to its rushed construction). Through such means, the Kapisi gains much needed operational capacity.
Most of the relics are obtained from doing the activity for which the game was previously named for: ship-breaking. Throughout Kharak, there are parts of derelict space-faring ships, which are on the planet for reasons that followers of the Homeworld IP would know all too well. (However, Deserts of Kharak does have some exposition on how some of the ships were able to somehow land completely intact; it is as entertainingly incredible as it is unbelievable.)
Anyway, these ships are made of stern stuff that have weathered the years. The Gaalsien had been careful not to damage them with their salvaging operations, but their sturdy builds have also prevented the Gaalsien from getting into the most durable pieces. The Coalition, however, has no regard for their sanctity.
In the campaign, the player would be planting explosives around the derelicts and then detonating them, effectively blowing them apart. Still, the most durable bits happen to survive even such rigorous processes, allowing Rachel S’jet or a Salvager to retrieve them and return them to the Carrier or any Support Cruiser.
Narratively, this angers the Gaalsien. Gameplay-wise, in some missions in the campaign, the Gaalsien may send a punitive force over to the wreck site after the player has blown them up. In some others, the Gaalsien spawn even more units as the player breaks more wrecks. In most missions, these sites are placed into the map together with a guarding force.
In skirmish and multiplayer matches, any fleet, including the Gaalsien, will be blowing up derelicts in order to spawn nodes of resources. As a general rule of thumb, the player should expect these sites to be contested.
CONSTRUCTION UNITS:
For better or worse, one of the terms for the resources that are used to produce units and upgrade them is called “Construction units”. This awkward term was likely introduced so that the other term, which is “Resource units”, remain reverently used to describe the materials that go into space-faring ships.
Anyway, Construction units are the materials that are obtained from smaller wrecks, some of which are more recent and not from outer space. They can also come from ore deposits that have been exposed due to erosion, as well as construction supplies that have already been prefabricated; in the campaign, these are typically stolen from the enemy’s stashes.
Construction units are used to produce most units and pay for most upgrades. However, these materials are not enough for every application; more powerful assets require more.
RESOURCE UNITS:
As mentioned earlier, Resource units are the materials from which the space-faring ships stranded on Kharak are made from. These are sometimes found alongside deposits of Construction units, and are more than likely to appear when a wreck is broken.
Gameplay-wise, they are just there to complicate the asking prices of certain units and tech upgrades. They have little other use than being yet another set of numbers that are spent on the usual real-time strategy things.
RESOURCING:
Resource-gathering, or “resourcing” as it is called in-game (and in the Homeworld series), is the province of the Salvager unit, and only it. For better or worse, Deserts of Kharak implements a mixture of the conveniences and limitations of resource gathering in the first and second Homeworld games.
The convenience is that, not unlike the Worker units of the first Homeworld title, Salvagers do not need to come into contact with resources. They can somehow sponge up resources, store them and dump them on the closest resource drop-off unit.
Speaking of which, Deserts of Kharak retains a welcome tradition of the series, which is that critical units within the fleet are the drop-off points for these resources, instead of some dedicated structure that serves no other purpose. This is just as well, because staying mobile is the best way to keep resourcing operations safe.
The limitation is that only two salvagers can work on a deposit at any time. This is not unlike the limitation in Homeworld 2, but it is not as believable here; in Homeworld 2, there is the excuse that the size of an asteroid determines how many Resource Collectors can work on it at once. There is no narrative explanation for this limitation in Deserts of Kharak.
Gameplay-wise, it is of course there to have the player thinking about divvying up the Salvagers across multiple resource nodes so as to maximize their productivity while minimizing their exposure to enemy attacks – this is easier said than done.
FLEET BALANCE:
The composition of the player’s fleet is of considerable importance, because of how specialized each unit is and the deliberately scripted disadvantages/advantages that they get when pitted against other units.
For example, strikecraft do very little damage against their “natural predators”, which are the armoured units like the tanks and hovertanks. The armoured units also seem to have the uncanny ability to reliably strikecraft. For another example, mobile Railgun platforms almost always miss strikecraft, even if they are not moving at their top speed.
Therefore, to avoid being a victim of the purposely-imposed rock-paper-scissors balancing, the player might want to ensure that his/her fleet has a balanced composition of every unit imaginable. Also, the game does not have the limits on unit types as imposed in Homeworld 2, so it is possible that the player might make the mistake of having too many units of one type, especially if he/she has not been counting his/her button presses when ordering the building of new/replacement units. This precaution has to be extended to combat groups too; any detachment away from the main fleet (if there is any) should have a balanced composition as well.
One example when a balanced combat group is needed is when the player is facing enemy railgun platforms. Railgun platforms, especially the Gaalsien ones, are faster than most other units, and they can fire on the move. Given enough space – and the CPU-controlled enemy certainly knows how to do kiting – they can dance out of the reach of any reprisal and chip away at a combat group that does not have railgun platforms of their own or strikecraft (which are the natural enemies of the railguns).
Strikecraft, armour, and the railgun platforms form the triumvirate of fleet mainstays. However, there are other units that deserve their own mentions later.
MANUFACTURING UNITS:
A Carrier can produce multiple units simultaneously, and then deploy them out of its ports after they have been made. This means that a fleet can replenish itself quickly, as long as it has resources to do so. Even if the Carrier is being hounded, the Carrier and the trickle of fresh units that it produces will eventually grind down any piecemeal pursuit if the enemy could not bring overwhelming firepower to bear on it.
UNIT LIMITS:
Following a proven tradition in the real-time strategy genre, the size of a fleet is limited with the unit limit counter.
In the campaign, the unit limit increases on its own from mission to mission. In the other game modes, the Coalition Carrier has to build Logistic modules, which are static assets that are cheap but can be wrecked. The Gaalsien Carrier only needs to purchase fleet size upgrades.
This is a considerable difference that affects the differences in the mobility of the faction fleets. On the other hand, the Coalition fleet can protect its Logistic Modules with defensive turrets, and can expect the enemy to go for these if they discover them and thus plan an ambush.
AIRCRAFT:
Any fleet is mostly composed of ground units (or hovercraft that are close the ground, in the case of the Gaalsien). However, the atmosphere of Kharak is conducive to aircraft, so there are warplanes too.
The Coalition have three types of aircraft: fighters, bombers and gunships. Fighters launch missiles that almost unerringly seek and hit their intended targets; fighters are also always launched in wings of three, where possible. Bombers drop bombs (with considerable splash damage) on their targets and gunships fire fragmentary shells.
Of the three, only gunships can stay in the air for more than one attack run; the other two types have to return to the Carrier to rearm after one run, though the player can have them linger for a while just to have eyes in the air.
Speaking of which, if they stay around, they will have to fly circles around where they have been assigned to linger. This can result in them straying into the range of enemy anti-aircraft assets, especially the Gaalsien heavy turrets that appear in the campaign.
Aircraft are the only units that have hard limits on their numbers. The Coalition carrier can only have a dozen or so fighters, a trio of bombers and a couple of gunships. It may seem limiting at first, but anti-aircraft assets are not as effective as one would think; this will be explained later.
The Gaalsien air force operates along similar limitations, but they do not have gunships. Moreover, their aircraft are noticeably faster than the Coalition’s. However, their payloads appear to be designed for hitting masses of targets rather than delivering concentrated power to a unit or two. Regardless of their differences though, raids with any aircraft should be done with overwhelming numbers for maximized enemy casualties.
AIRCRAFT TAKE-OFF AND LANDING:
The Carrier happens to be a mobile air-strip. It can facilitate the take-off and landing of aircraft. Speaking of which, taking off and landing is not as simple as one would think.
When aircraft are deployed, they have to be lifted onto one end of a runway before they can launch. Likewise, when aircraft is recalled, they have to land and move down the runways onto the lift platforms before they are lowered into the body of the carrier.
There is a set of three runways that is dedicated to launching fighters, one runway for launching bombers, and one for launching Gunships. Each type of runway can only serve one aircraft in taking off and landing at a time (one wing, in the case of the runways for fighters).
Both of these processes take considerable time, so the player might want to time airstrikes carefully. For example, if the player intends to deliver a storm of ordnance, it might be wise to have the participating aircraft rendezvous at a safe location before sending them after their target.
ANTI-AIRCRAFT PLATFORMS:
There are units that are primarily meant for anti-aircraft work. If any aircraft comes into range, they launch missiles that are guaranteed to eventually hit them.
The problem is that they are at best a deterrent against commanders who do not want to lose their aircraft assets. They are not a deterrent towards more reckless commanders who only care about having their aircraft deliver the payload. Indeed, more often than not, anti-aircraft units fail to shoot down opposing aircraft before they can release their payloads.
Coalition Gunships need to linger in order to inflict significant damage, so anti-aircraft units are hard counters against them.
AIRCRAFT PAYLOAD DELIVERY BEHAVIORS:
All of the aircraft types are effective against any target. However, the player needs to consider how they deliver their payloads if the player intends to preserve them from being shot down by anti-aircraft fire.
Fighters are the least likely to be shot down, because they make a fast U-turn after they have delivered their payloads. Bombers do not have the fighters’ nimbleness, so they have to make a wide U-turn that can very well put them into the range of anti-aircraft fire. Gunships circle about their targets like sharks, hitting them with their frag cannons, but as mentioned earlier, they are the most likely to be attacked by anti-aircraft assets.
CRUISERS:
Cruisers are large imposing units that carry considerable firepower. There are several types of cruisers in the game, and each of them has different capabilities and roles in battle.
The Coalition’s Support Cruiser would be the lynchpin of the fleet. They are tough and have an array of autocannons, and can be upgraded with anti-aircraft capabilities. However, their main role is to repair units, and they do that quite well even in the middle of battle. Their other main role is to act as a resource drop-off point. (In the campaign, artifacts can be delivered to a Support Cruiser instead of the Carrier.)
The Gaalsien’s Production Cruiser is not effective at keeping units alive. Rather, it is meant to make replacements for those that had been lost. It can also act as a resource drop-off point, but it requires an upgrade to make this available.
The Coalition has the Artillery Cruiser, and the Gaalsien has the Siege Cruiser. As their name suggests, they saturate areas with ordnance. They are very good at destroying combat groups that failed to use speed to close the distance quickly or at least adopt a staggered formation to minimize damage. Both cruisers can fire on the move, but the Gaalsien Siege Cruiser has to angle its entire hull to face its target, which can take away some speed as it turns. To compensate for its lack of a turret, the Siege Cruiser has special abilities that the Artillery Cruiser does not have.
The Gaalsien’s Honorbound Cruiser is a powerful and tough bruiser that points its entire hull at its target just to fire its huge cannon. It has very little in the way of other ground-to-ground weapons. It can be toggled to fire anti-air missiles for a while, but it cannot use its beam cannon while doing so. The toggling also takes a few seconds.
Where the Honorbound is meant to slay the enemy at a distance, the Coalition’s Battlecruiser is a heavily armored bruiser that rumbles into combat, firing its considerable array of guns. Indeed, if the Carrier is not around to soak incoming damage (as risky as this is), the Battlecruiser is a good substitute.
BASERUNNERS:
Baserunners are the auxiliaries of any fleet. Their main purpose is reconnaissance. They also have other functions, which are unique to the faction that they belong to.
The Coalition baserunner can drop turrets for both anti-ground and anti-air defense. The Gaalsien one does not have this ability, but can emit pulses of energy that supercharge the auto-repair abilities of Gaalsien units.
The player rarely encounters Gaalsien baserunners in the story campaign. The Baserunners of the Kapisi also happen to have the ability to drop ground-based scanners in addition to launching probes, and they can also lay down mines. All of these additional abilities cost Construction Units to use, however.
SPECIAL ABILITIES REQUIRING CONSTRUCTION UNITS:
Speaking of which, there are quite a number of special abilities that require the expenditure of Construction units. Most of the Baserunner’s abilities cost these, so do some abilities that are oriented around large missile strikes, such as the huge Cruise Missile that a Coalition Carrier can launch. This is in addition to the considerably long cooldown timers that these abilities tend to have.
RETIRING UNITS:
If the player has unwanted units, the player can send them to the Carrier to be “retired”. Some of their construction costs will be reimbursed when they are decommissioned. However, the player will not be compensated for any experience that they have gained.
UNIT EXPERIENCE:
Speaking of which, units gain experience as they fight and defeat enemies. There is an icon that is dedicated to the experience tracker of every unit; the tooltip of the icon shows the experience points that a unit has garnered and any benefits that it has earned.
The experience meter is in turn split into several ranks. Each achieved rank brings with it benefits. For most units, the first two ranks merely grant hitpoint increments. Interestingly, from the third rank onwards, the benefits for each unit are different from those that other units get. The benefits are usually tailored to improve the unit’s performance at its main role. For example, most railgun platforms gain range increments.
Thus, keeping units alive for as long as possible is in the player’s interest, as any long-time follower of the real-time strategy genre would know. Of course, this is easier said than done. The challenge in doing so is mainly due to the aforementioned rock-paper-scissors scripting.
PERSISTENT FLEETS:
One of the hallmarks of the story campaigns of Homeworld titles is persistent fleets. Any units that the player has made to support or enact the operations of the fleet will reappear in the next mission if they survive the current one. They retain their experience ranks too, so it is possible that they might advance to the incredibly potent high ranks, at which their performance in battle is noticeably a leap above their less experienced compatriots.
One thing to keep in mind about the persistency of fleets from mission to mission is that the game will attempt to spawn as many units in the fleet as possible onto the map if there is enough space. Otherwise, they are initially stowed away in the Carrier and are deployed one by one until all of them are accounted for. Until then, only the already-deployed units count towards the unit limit. In such scenarios, the player could possibly circumvent the unit limit by producing additional units even as the Carrier deploys the ones that survived the previous mission.
Of course, the main caveat of the persistency of fleets is that it punishes careless players. If the player ends a mission with considerable casualties and could not replace them in time, the player has to spend time and resources in the next mission to replenish the fleet. Alternatively, the player could just enable the default fleet option, in which case the persistent fleet is swapped with a pre-made one.
CAMPAIGN-ONLY ENEMY ASSETS:
The story campaign has a lot of units that are only ever seen in it, and more often than not, they are arraigned against the player. They are nasty, but often have weaknesses that are exploitable.
For example, there are heavily armed automated turrets, which pack heavy long-ranged weaponry and missile silos. These are often linked to control centres, which, as any experienced game consumer would know, can be destroyed to render them useless.
CAMPAIGN-ONLY KAPISI ASSETS:
In the story campaign, some Coalition units have capabilities that are not available in the other game modes. The most notable of these is the aforementioned Baserunner; those made by the Kapisi can lay down mines, which can ravage incoming enemy waves on their own. (The enemy waves are just too stupid to know that they are moving into a minefield anyway.)
Late into the campaign, the Kapisi manages to reverse-engineer some Gaalsien tech, resulting in the Assault Cruiser. It is a Cruiser with bruising firepower and speed that can keep up with the faster elements of the fleet; it even has the Gaalsien’s signature auto-repair tech. Of course, it is not as tough as the Battlecruiser, but it can quickly respond to threats. It can also be upgraded to have a tactical missile launcher.
ENEMIES SPAWNING AT MAP EDGES IN CAMPAIGN:
The CPU-controlled enemies in the campaign are completely exempted from following any limitations that the Kapisi’s fleet has to follow. However, they are incapable of making use of their unending streams of units. For example, they are not bright enough to accumulate units until they reach critical mass.
Therefore, to encourage the player to stay alert, the mission scenarios in the campaign often have waves of enemies periodically spawning into the map at certain edges. These waves then follow whatever script that they have been assigned with, which is usually roaming about until they come across the Kapisi’s attendants. The waves can often be destroyed piecemeal, if the player is proactive enough in eliminating them.
This kind of challenge can seem laughable or even disappointing.
CAMPAIGN DIFFICULTY:
The campaign difficulty determines the toughness of the enemy waves that are thrown at the player. There are more of them and they have better statistics at the higher difficulty settings. They are not any smarter, however.
RACHEL:
Rachel S’jet and her science team are using a customized baserunner with plenty of scientific gadgets. Its first tool is a repair arm, which lets it repair other units. As the campaign progresses, it gains more abilities, such as dropping ground scanners and launching demolition charges, among others that will be described later.
Remembering to use Rachel’s special abilities, as well as those of other units, is part of the micromanagement process that the player needs to understand in order to get through missions with as few casualties as possible.
Rachel’s baserunner can also be upgraded to improve its combat performance and special abilities. Indeed, it can take so much damage after its durability has been upgraded a couple of times.
RACHEL’S HACKING ABILITY:
Interestingly, Rachel’s scientific baserunner has the capability to hack into some Gaalsien units, thus allowing the player to somehow incorporate them into the Coalition fleet. Of course, this handy feature comes with a setback: captured enemy units count towards the unit limit. The hacking ability can only take over small units at first, but eventually it can take over even cruisers.
The fate of the crew of the stolen units is unknown, and the fleet does not appear to transfer any crew over into them. It can be a bit unbelievable at times, seeing how the hacking can take over even cruisers, which according to the narrative are crewed by people instead of being fully automated.
Due to the aforementioned system of campaign difficulty, it may not be in the player’s interest to hack anything other than the most powerful Gaalsien units – especially the Honourbound Cruisers – in the campaign. Since the player is playing as a Coalition fleet, there is no way to obtain upgrades for captured Gaalsien units.
RACHEL’S EMP ABILITY:
Whatever Rachel could not hack, she could still knock out with her baserunner’s EMP ability. Her baserunner is not the only unit that can launch EMP bursts, but in the campaign mode, it is virtually the only unit that can do this.
Any unit that is hit by an EMP burst is rendered helpless for several seconds. The burst has a significant area of effect and considerable range, so it can be used to hobble waves of enemies before they can inflict too much damage.
SKIRMISH/MULTIPLAYER MODE:
The story campaign is ultimately just a little more than a dozen missions. The rest of the value of the game lies in its skirmish and multiplayer modes.
Firstly, the story campaign does not prepare the player for these other modes. Unit and upgrade costs are different, as are certain infrastructural things about the factions such as the Logistical Modules for the Coalition.
The Coalition and Gaalsien fleets are intended to have asymmetries, so that the experience of playing either of them is different from the experience of playing the other. Ideally, the differences should not be so stark that they result in unbalanced gameplay, but there had been complaints about the advantages that one faction has over the other.
Nevertheless, player feedback has allowed Blackbird Interactive to fine-tune the balancing further. For example, the difference of costs between the anti-air units for the Coalition and Gaalsien were a sore point, until the first patch (v1.0.1) increased the cost of the Coalition anti-air unit so that parity with the Gaalsien is achieved.
In the latest version, which is v1.3, quite a lot of balancing had been done, though the multiplayer scene of the game has waned more than two years after its debut (as is often the case for any real-time strategy game, with the exception of the Starcraft IP).
As for the player composition in matches, they are the usual that long-time followers of real-time strategy games would expect: players can choose to go it alone, or form teams.
Without enabling the artifact retrieval game permutation, the victory conditions for skirmish and multiplayer matches are the defeat of the opposition. Their defeat can be achieved through destroying all of their units, which is not too complicated to achieve because there are no units that can be hidden from detection. Alternatively, the match host can choose to enable the option to have defeat immediately occur for a player when his/her Carrier is destroyed.
ARTIFACT MODE:
Peculiarly, one game mode is only available if the players are playing in teams. This is the Artifact hunt mode. In this game mode, artifacts spawn into the map periodically at specific locations that can be seen in the sensor mode. The players have to send Baserunners (and specifically only Baserunners) to gather the artifacts and return them to the gathering point of the team (which is often far away from the starting locations of their Carriers).
This utilization of artifacts is thematically far removed from how they are presented in the story campaign. It can seem a bit jarring at times.
Still, there is some glee to be had from this game mode. Any artifact that is successfully retrieved by a team increases the power reserves of their Carriers by a small amount. This increment means that it is easier to maintain a winning momentum if a team has managed to secure the spawning locations.
CPU-PLAYER DIFFICULTY IN SKIRMISH/MULTIPLAYER :
The difficulty rating of CPU-controlled fleets is represented as a mix of factors that affect their performance. One of the factors is a bonus or handicap to their resourcing operations. CPU fleets with a lower rating run out of resources faster, whereas the higher rated CPU fleets gain considerable improvements to the efficiency of their resource-gathering, perhaps to the point of being unfair.
The difficulty rating also determines the density of decision-making scripts that the CPU fleet would use. Ironically, Easy-rated CPU fleets can be quite a handful to fend off. They have an unpleasant knack for early-game rushes, mainly because they have been scripted to hound their enemies as soon as they are able too. On the flip-side, the Hard-rated CPU fleets might fall back to baseline strategies when their circumstances do not allow them to enact the more advanced scripts.
VISUAL DESIGNS – IN GENERAL:
Deserts of Kharak makes use of a modified Unity engine. This means that the developers could implement visual options to allow the game to run on a considerable range of machines.
The setting of the desert world Kharak helps minimize the use of visual assets; this will be described further later. Therefore, the bulk of the variety of visual assets is in the models of the units.
The models of the units are made of polygons that peculiarly resemble standard volumetric shapes that have been cobbled together. Of course, there are textures that provide them with more detail, such as the ribs on the tyres of Coalition vehicles. The Gaalsien units have far less moving parts than Coalition units since they are hovercraft, but they do have particle effects that show their hover engines blowing sand away.
Speaking of particle effects, there are plenty of these. Most of these are for sand being tossed around. There are visuals of war such as billowing black smoke, fires burning on the hulls of units, and, of course, explosions. There are also the flashes of colour that accompany the discharge of energy-beam weapons. In other words, there is nothing new that followers of sci-fi games would not have seen.
SPARKLY ARTIFACTS IN ARTIFACT HUNT MODE:
Where the “artifacts” in the story campaign are ship parts that had been around for thousands of years, the “artifacts” in the skirmish and multiplayer modes with Artifact hunt enabled are sparkly things. They can seem rather silly, and further emphasize how differently the different game modes treat the matter of artifacts.
SENSE OF SCALE:
According to the canonical material and the visual designs of the cutscenes, all units are huge, relative to the size of any person on Kharak. Yet, when the player views things, most units would seem small, especially when they are next to the Carrier. Of course, there is not anything that could provide a relative measurement of any kind; there are not any human-looking people running around outside of cutscenes.
A LOT OF SAND AND ROCK:
Being set on a planet with the titular deserts, Deserts of Kharak has very little variety in its offering of visual vistas. There is a lot of sand to look at in the environment, and if it is not sand, it is weathered rock that are red, brown, gray or black. In some levels, such as those that take place in canyons, there is more rock than sand, but most of the time, it is more sand than rock.
Granted, this is not the first time in video game history that such visual monotony has happened. The Dune real-time strategy games, being set on Arrakis, has plenty of sandy maps too, and does not need much of an excuse for its lack of climate diversity. The case of Deserts of Kharak is perhaps just as acceptable, though of course, Kharak does not have paranormal “spice” growing on its sands and giant serpentine worms.
ARTWORK FOR CHARACTERS:
Humanoid characters have been featured in the previous titles, but they were barely animated and did not have a lot in their colour palette.
The ones in Deserts of Kharak have far more details, colours and animation, thanks to modern-day animation tools for 2D objects. They and their surroundings have minor semblances to water-colour paintings, which give them a distinctive appearance that obviously indicate to the player that cutscenes are happening.
Their designs also firmly confirm that the Kushan are indistinguishable from humans.
VOICE-ACTING:
The slightly melancholic but otherwise sternly professional voice-acting that the Kushan (especially Kiith S’jet) are well known for is in Deserts of Kharak too. Even in tense moments, both Coalition and Gaalsien units rarely if not never sound hysterical, though they do express urgency where appropriate (especially in the case of strikecraft).
The most significant voice-acting is heard in the cutscenes and the post-mission segments, when characters make entries in their journals. The S’jet people talk very much like real-world middle-class white-collar Northern Americans. This is perhaps a deliberate design as the S’Jet are associated with the Age of Reason era of Kharak, which is when Kiithid like the S’Jet chose scientific discoveries over myths. The people of other Kiithid have much more mystical ways of talking, injecting elements of spiritualism whenever they could. These greatly contrast them against the S’jet.
CHATTER:
When playing as a Coalition fleet, the player can hear chatter in the background between people in the fleet. They talk about things like noise over their communications channel, sensor ghosts and minor equipment malfunctions. Sometimes, the player might hear banter too, like people talking about what they would do in their off-duty shifts.
Interestingly, there are different conversations for different units. Baserunner crews have the most amusing ones, mainly because baserunners are canonically scouts that are not always permanently attached to fleets.
If the player finds such chatter distracting, the player can tone them down in the options for sounds.
However, there are not as many voice-recordings for the Gaalsien, other than their usual responses to given commands. There may be a lost opportunity to give this faction some character, other than portraying them as fanatic antagonists in the story campaign.
MUSIC:
Following the tradition of the Homeworld series, most of the music has Middle-Eastern and Mediterranean themes. In the campaign, the tracks switch according to the scripting of the story-progressing events. They are stirring tracks, though there had been so many of such tracks in the history of the series as well as elsewhere that they are not particularly memorable. Nevertheless, customers of the game have the option of getting the audio files of the tracks separately, if they wish to listen to them outside of the game.
SUMMARY:
Deserts of Kharak may be set on a planet with hard ground and gravity, but it retained the other signatures of the Homeworld series, such as its storytelling and its emphasis on mobility of forces.
Yet, Deserts of Kharak has some foibles, despite improvements that have been implemented since its launch. There is still next to no variety in unit formations. There is still no convenient way to have units take advantage of terrain contours. The skirmish and multiplayer modes are not as appealing as the story campaign, and perhaps never will be.
That this entry of the Homeworld series is not set in full 3D space is a sore point for followers who prefer gameplay to be more complex where possible. Still, Deserts of Kharak is a competently designed real-time strategy game, and a welcome rarity these days when the genre is more niche than ever.