Hi everyone,
On November 21, we are releasing a mothership-sized update for Homeworld 3 that contains a gargantuan number of improvements, fixes, and some entirely new features. We are grateful for your continued support and patience as we’ve worked to bring you this update!
The full patch notes for Update 1.3 (spoiler alert: they’re big), released alongside this Dev Update, detail every change both big and small. But we’d like to provide our insight into Update 1.3’s biggest and most exciting gameplay improvements and new features. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so we’re going to divide this Dev Update into two major sections:
- Combat and Balance Overhaul
- Skirmish & War Games Changes, and Other Improvements
Lastly, at the end of this Dev Update, we will share an announcement about future support for Homeworld 3 and a special farewell message from the development team at Blackbird Interactive.
Combat and Balance Overhaul
With Homeworld 3, it was important to us that we evolved the series’ iconic space combat in exciting new directions. Our team has been working continuously to fine-tune that experience based on player feedback. Updates 1.1 and 1.2 introduced a ton of adjustments, but there was still more work to be done to bridge the gap between Homeworld 3’s combat and what you enjoyed about earlier Homeworld titles.
To that end, we’re very excited to reveal that Update 1.3 will introduce a near-total overhaul of combat. When we began this effort, our objectives were to:
- Increase the importance of strategic decision making
- Make those decisions more intuitive and relevant to the outcome of battles
- Eliminate inconsistencies between how you’d expect units to react to orders and how they were actually behaving
Creating more strategic depth
In Update 1.3, we’ve completely redone how damage and armor works. This is a sweeping overhaul that is complemented by a comprehensive re-balancing of nearly every single unit in the game. All of this in service of giving each unit a meaningful niche to fill, with more clearly defined strengths and weaknesses.
The reworked armor system now groups ships into four varieties, each offering more overall damage mitigation.
- Light Armor - 10% mitigation
- Medium Armor - 20% mitigation
- Heavy Armor - 30% mitigation
- Mothership Armor - 50% mitigation
What’s more, we’ve reworked how directional damage is applied. Now, attacks that strike the aft of a ship grant a much more potent 2.5x multiplier. We’ve also removed the bonus multiplier for attacks that strike the side of a ship to better emphasize the advantage gained from clever positioning.
In order to ensure these balancing changes hit the mark, we’ve been working closely with a group of dedicated playtesters from our community. They’ve been instrumental in helping us tweak each and every unit in the game so they fill more distinct and satisfying niches — far too many changes to cover in this Dev Update. So, today, we’ll share just a few examples.
Since launch, we’ve heard from many of you that you’d like strike craft to be more survivable and formidable — especially the Hiigaran Bombers. Bombers now have more health, increased speed, a reduced attack cooldown, and increased missile damage and AoE.
What’s more, we’ve shortened the distance before strike craft will turn around to re-engage after making an attack run while also giving them more maneuverability. This means all your strike craft will spend much more time actively engaging hostiles.
We’ve also rebalanced ships that we felt were uncharacteristically effective against strike craft to give fighters more of a… fighting (sorry) chance. Hiigaran Torpedo Frigates, for example, are now less accurate against strike craft (and corvettes, too). Capital ships across the board will also be less effective at targeting strikecraft, and some frigates now have reduced rotation speed so they’ll struggle to keep fast-moving fighters in their sights as easily as they once did.
Be sure to check out the patch notes to see granular details of how we rebalanced each unit.
More intuitive ways to control your fleet
Homeworld has always been a very complex and demanding game. While we’re proud of the work we’ve done with Homeworld 3’s controls, we heard from many of you that there were some very specific pain points that you’d like to see addressed.
First, a simple one: We’ve added a Reinforce targeted ship ability to all ships — allowing you to seamlessly integrate new ships into existing formations. When instructing a unit to reinforce another ship, that unit will adopt the assigned formation, stance, and current target of the ship being reinforced. Do note, that you’ll still need to manually add units to control groups since that is a separate layer of controlling and organizing your fleets.
Somewhat related, another item of community feedback we’ve addressed is that ships will now automatically adopt the stance of the ship that produced them.
Now, let’s talk about bandbox attacking — or giving an attack order to a group by dragging a selection box around a group of enemies. In Update 1.3, we’ve implemented an entirely new logic for target selection and prioritization. Instead of a large formation focus-firing on a single ship, units given a bandbox attack command will now seamlessly split into smaller formations and spread fire more intelligently and evenly across the targeted units. Ships will also prioritize targets that they are most effective against. As a basic example, a group of Bombers will now prioritize frigates and capital ships when given a bandbox attack order against a mixed enemy fleet.
Reducing inconsistencies in unit behavior
This last pillar of our combat overhaul is a sweeping number of smaller, individual adjustments that — on their own — might seem insignificant. But together, they dramatically improve how units respond to orders and behave in various combat scenarios.
For starters, we have revisited the retaliation range of all units in the game. Retaliation range is a key component of target acquisition and ship combat behavior. Now units will more consistently acquire new targets during combat, more consistently engage encroaching enemies when their stance is set to aggressive, and more consistently defend themselves when their stance is set to neutral.
How ships behave in combat is broadly defined by what we internally call “attack styles.” Think of this like the base personality of a ship — how does it juggle competing priorities like tracking targets, firing, avoiding incoming damage, and so on? In the case of ships like Battle Cruisers and Destroyers, their attack styles were a little too hyperactive. We’ve fine tuned them (among others), so they’ll spend less time maneuvering and more time punching enormous holes in enemy ships.
We have also made a number of other improvements to ship behavior to make ships feel more responsive to player commands and enable a greater level of tactical control in combat. This isn’t one single change, but rather a lot of edge-case bugs that sometimes resulted in player commands being overruled by various automatic ship behaviors. That is no longer the case, resulting in ships now being more reliable and consistent.
Skirmish, War Games, and Other Meaningful Improvements
Since launch, we’ve been hard at work making Skirmish a more rewarding and meaningful experience for players who love the thrill of fighting one another (or squaring off against computer opponents).
We’ve already spoken about some of these changes, so we’ll focus more on stuff we haven’t revealed. But, just to close the loop, Update 1.3 introduces Hyperspace jumping in Skirmish, allowing you to quickly teleport your fleet around the map at the cost of RUs — just be wary of enemy ships with a Hyperspace Inhibitor as they’ll pull you out of Hyperspace early and into a potential ambush!
We also previously spoke about some changes that we were making to resourcing to heighten strategic decision making, particularly in Skirmish (do note, that some of these changes also are present in Campaign and War Games). At a glance, these changes include:
- Lowering the rate at which resourcing units gather RUs by 10 percent.
- Significantly lowering the default amount of starting RUs in Skirmish
- Doubling the cost of Resource Controllers in Skirmish and Campaign
For Skirmish, these changes will emphasize the need for smart decision making — especially in the early minutes of a match — The classic RTS strategic decision trichotomy: do I invest more resources in developing my economy, building combat units to attack or defend, or in progressing my tech? Do I push heavily in one direction to try and gain an advantage over my enemy in the early, mid, or late game or do I take a more balanced approach?
Play some Skirmish matches and you’ll quickly notice we’ve entirely reworked the tech trees for both Hiigaran and Incarnate factions. Now, Research functions like a classic tech tree, where ships and abilities are spread across branches that you gradually unlock piece by piece. In addition to the Research Queue added in Update 1.2 (which made it so you can only research one upgrade at a time), you’ll now feel further empowered to make meaningful strategic decisions on how your fleet evolves over the course of a match.
Your mothership also comes with an apocalyptic new research option: The Fusion Missile. This endgame superweapon unleashes hell on a targeted ship and anything unfortunate to be close by, making it a thrilling (and terrifying) ace up the sleeve for endgame fleet battles.
Something else that we haven’t discussed: We’ve reconfigured the Standard and Hard AI difficulties so they’re much more capable of delivering a beating to unprepared players. What’s more, we’ve also added AI Personas that change the personality and unit preferences of AI opponents. These options exist separately from difficulty and bring even more variety to computer matchups. The Sentinel, for example, favors expensive, heavy-hitting ships while the Swarm persona prioritizes cheap, fast ships to overwhelm foes.
War Games tech tree revamps and new features
In Update 1.3, all players can enjoy several new features and meaningful updates to War Games aimed at addressing player feedback.
First, we’ve added 45 new Artifacts to obtain — including Ultimate Artifacts. These powerful new Artifacts only become available after you’ve collected the associated Pattern Artifact and one of each available Upgrade Artifact. Each one partially cancels out the negative effects of their requisite Artifacts, opening up new possibilities for ever-more powerful ships.
We’re also injecting some much-desired variety into War Games missions with Interstitials. These new “mini-missions” have a chance to appear between each of the traditional War Games maps and will throw some fun curveballs your way. The Shop, for example, will let you buy Artifacts at a steep price (hopefully you saved up your RUs!), while the Bombing Run interstitial rewards you for destroying enough targets within the allotted time.
Since we’ve rebalanced tech trees everywhere else, we didn’t want War Games’ fleets to feel left out. In particular, we heard from many of you that the Platform, Raider, and Remastered Fleets could use some work so we’ve restructured their tech trees entirely. Across all fleets, however, more ships and ship abilities now require you to first research them. This, in addition to the resourcing changes mentioned above, will inject some more challenge and strategy into the early minutes of War Games matches.
Other Improvements
One piece of feedback we have heard frequently and consistently since launch was that the pace of the Campaign was too fast. Players wanted the freedom to continue playing in a mission after the objectives were completed (similar to how many missions worked in earlier Homeworld games). Many players felt like there was no room to catch your breath, no opportunity to take your time to repair or rebuild your fleet, and no time to gather the remaining resource nodes or chunks of salvage scattered around a map after your hard-won battles.
We have gone back through the Campaign, and, where it made sense narratively, given you control over when you proceed to the next mission. There are some missions where we have not made this change as it didn’t make sense with the mission narrative. However, by and large, you will now have more control over when to move the Campaign forward after each mission.
It is also worth noting that many of the improvements in combat behavior, unit responsiveness and tactical decision making — along with balance tuning and resourcing changes — have directly benefited Campaign gameplay. While many of these changes have increased the overall difficulty of the Campaign (particularly on Hard), your ability to affect the outcomes of individual engagements through smart, tactical decision making is also improved.
Expanding the potential for modding
One last thing we’d like to mention: A number of improvements have also been made to the Homeworld 3 mod tools, such as the ability to inject custom Unreal Blueprints and the inclusion of Homeworld 3’s Campaign Blueprints. This should further empower the modding community to make more awesome creations. Be sure to check out the patch notes for more details!
Thank you to our community
This update marks the completion of the revised road map we announced back in September. We’d like to take this opportunity to share that Update 1.3 will be the last major content update for Homeworld 3.
To be clear, this means that while we won’t be expanding Homeworld 3 with more content, we still want to ensure a positive experience for players. Gearbox will be carefully monitoring incoming reports and will address any widespread critical issues that may arise in the wake of Update 1.3’s launch. Homeworld 3’s multiplayer functionality and mod support (including the in-game mod browser) will remain online.
We’re extremely grateful to the players who have accompanied us on this journey and hope that Update 1.3 delivers an even deeper, more satisfying Homeworld experience.
We’d now like to share a personal message from the development team at Blackbird Interactive:
“Blackbird Interactive was born from Homeworld and the enduring passion of its community. We dreamed of creating a spiritual successor which, by a twist of fate, became a reality when Gearbox Publishing acquired the rights to Homeworld and enlisted our help in continuing the franchise with both Deserts of Kharak and Homeworld 3. It was a dream come true. But it is now time to close this chapter and begin a new one. Revisiting the Homeworld universe has had a profound impact on just about every person at Blackbird. To that end, we’d like to offer our heartfelt thanks to Gearbox Publishing for bringing us in to work on Homeworld with them. We wish them all the best. We also want to thank you. The fans who, through your support and dedication, have helped Homeworld persevere across so many decades. It was an honor to contribute to this unfolding saga. We’re deeply grateful for those of you who have supported us through launch and beyond, and who took the time to articulate thoughtful, constructive feedback. We read and listened to every word of it and everyone involved worked like hell to address as much of it as possible. Update 1.3 is the culmination of that effort, and we sincerely hope that you enjoy its many new features and refinements. They wouldn’t have been possible without you. Until next time, Blackbird Interactive”
We’re hopeful that these sweeping changes and updates will make Homeworld 3 a game you’ll return to — especially as the modding community only continues to grow in capability and ambition (seriously, if you haven’t checked out the modding section in the Homeworld Discord server, we urge you to take a look at all the exciting projects in the works)!
Thank you for taking the time to read this Dev Update. We’re very excited to deliver Update 1.3 later this week and to see your response to its many additions.
- The Homeworld 3 team