Engagements
Longer, more strategy-oriented engagements. Every ship’s health is boosted to 10x stock, with corresponding tweaks to other stats.
Does 10x sound like too much? Engagements now has a Lite version (5x) and a Medium version (7.5x)!
Lite (5x): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1541006190
Medium (7.5x): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1541006021
Original (10x): you are here
The base Engagements mod only affects multiplayer. The singleplayer campaign is pretty heavily balanced on ship health, and you may encounter serious gameplay issues trying to use this mod in the singleplayer campaign (e.g. Mission 3 of the HW1 campaign will be way too easy, and Mission 16 will be way too hard). However, if you want to play Engagements in singleplayer, there are now add-on mods for it!
Lite (5x): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1541006266
Medium (7.5x): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1541006085
Original (10x): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1541005850
This is not one of those "uuuuu the base game is so unbalanced" mods that always seem so prevalent in the Homeworld community. The base game is actually pretty well balanced. The only thing I don’t like about it – and this has been a gripe of mine since HW2 – is that ships are made of explodium. It takes seconds to bring down a heavy cruiser if your fleet is sizable. Nonsense!
This mod is designed to create longer, more strategy-oriented engagements, without substantially altering the base game’s balancing of one ship relative to other ships. It:
– multiplies the health of every ship by 10.
– removes all health regeneration for ships that have it (Frigates and up in the base game).
– boosts repair rates, but not to the same degree as health, so it will take longer to repair your damaged capital ships and docked strike craft.
– increases marine/infiltrator frigate capture time, to give the current owner of the ship a chance to fend off the stronger frigates.
– slows salvage corvette engine speed, to give the current owner of the ship a chance to fend off the stronger corvettes.
– slows construction time for capital and super-capital ships, so that it is not possible to churn out ships faster than enemies can destroy them.
– boosts anti-ship-class values, e.g. multigun corvettes are now better at shooting down fighters, to account for the fighter’s significantly better armor.
With these changes, frigates should now be able to take several seconds of sustained fire from super-capital ships without popping like a balloon. Destroyers are now relatively resilient, and will only be in any significant danger if a cruiser challenges them. They can, however, still be pecked to death by attack bombers over many minutes – A wing of bombers can no longer deliver a devastating salvo against a destroyer, but with other supporting ships, they can contribute to a decisive victory. Cruisers are now basically resistant to anything barring a full-fledged fleet battle with other cruisers involved. Even one cruiser up against multiple enemy destroyers and frigates will probably be able to survive. The ridiculous health of a cruiser, however, works both ways – if an enemy cruiser arrives, it will be frustratingly difficult to take down, particularly if your own cruiser is already even moderately damaged.
As you’d imagine, battles take approximately ten times as long. This gives you p_l_e_n_t_y of time to do things like withdraw damaged capital ships to safety, hyperspace in reinforcements, or change strategies on the fly. It also somewhat increases the importance of relative fleet size – a smaller fleet of capital ships will take long enough to knock out the enemy’s mothership that they run a real risk of being wiped out by reinforcements, possibly from the mothership’s hangar itself! You need a great big battle fleet before you can challenge Mommy. Proper use of support ships also becomes essential, since your damaged capital ships will remain damaged until you get a repair crew to them.
There are some unexpected side effects, however. Ships are now MUCH less effective against ship classes they were not designed to combat, and this really encourages good fleet diversity. If you’re used to capital ship slugathons and pay little attention to the smaller craft your enemy is fielding, you’ll probably end up in a very bad situation – the assault frigate, much maligned in the days of HW1 Classic multiplayer matches, becomes nigh essential if you’re playing as a HW1 race. If you don’t have anti-strike-craft ships, you’ll be overrun by strike craft.
The base game’s lower AI levels are not well adapted to this mod. I’d advise bumping up to the difficulty level above the one you usually play against. Expert seems to do irritatingly well with it, so no worries there.
I built this mod (and the other Engagements variants) with a build system I created in C#; it processes HWRM’s vanilla ship files and applies the necessary gamerules and value transformations for this mod. And it’s open-source! You can totally take it and make your own mods with it if you want. If you’re making an Engagements-ified version of another mod and uploading it, please link to this mod :). If you’re modifying some other stats that what I’m doing, you don’t need to link here (but maybe at least link to my gitlab repo so other people can use the builder too).
