I played Homeworld 1 remastered with no prior exposure to the series. At first blush, the game seemed amazing. The tutorials and first mission or two were a breeze, the music is beautiful, the artwork and ship modeling is serviceable, and the slow pace reminded me of Sins of a Solar Empire. Seeing your ships gather into a formation and march into battle is a delight, and the actual mechanics are interesting enough: do you destroy that ship or capture it; do you split your forces to get a tactical advantage at the risk of having your smaller wings destroyed, or not; and so on. But the game is brought down by entirely unnecessary papercuts that often compound. For example: * At the beginning of a mission, all of your units exit the mothership. This is especially risky for small, fragile ships like bombers. This will still happen even if you set the mothership to "keep units docked" in the previous mission. * At the beginning of a mission, all of your units are set to the "stand down" stance where, upon being attacked, they will neither run away or fight back. * During many cutscenes, enemies will close in on your forces and start attacking. You can see how the issues above compound, right? A mission starts, your units array themselves outside of the mothership in "stand down" stance, and then a cutscene starts during which time your fleet is murdered. The list of minor, infuriating issues goes on and on. * Repair corvettes and frigates won't automatically repair nearby units. They also can't be told to repair a control group. * Control groups are non-exclusive. That is, a unit can belong to multiple control groups (numbers 0-9 on the keyboard). * Unit special abilities can't be set to automatically fire. Not a problem for most units, but a *big* problem for e.g. the drone carrier whose special ability is its only attack. * If a small unit is told to attack a meteor, it will just... fly into it. ...and so on.
