• Get used to thinking in terms of 3D when maneuvering your fleet. The sensor view often gives you a better sense of the playing field than the main screen does, so switch to it whenever you’re not sure if you’re sending a ship to the right spot. It doesn’t help your fleet if you send a ship in the right direction but place it far above or far below the actual spot where you should place it.
• You need a two-button mouse for proper fleet movement.
• Don’t think that downtime means play time. Keep collecting resources and building reinforcements even when there are no enemies around, because some are sure to show up soon. And if you hit your unit limit, keep queuing build orders so that reinforcements will automatically start building when the action heats up again and you begin losing ships.
• Remember that resource collectors can repair ships in addition to their primary duties, once you’ve researched the necessary upgrade. It never hurts to direct resource collectors to fix up damaged ships, especially the big ones, during a battle or after one. Just don’t forget to move them back into their primary duties as fast as possible, so that your resource level doesn’t drop too low.
• Capital ships leave behind salvage with a resource value when they’re destroyed. Your resource collectors can collect it, but they can only deposit it at a mothership or a carrier, not at a mobile refinery.
• Pause the action often so that you can catch your breath and figure out your next move. Remember, Karan S’Jet and Makaan are fictional characters; you’re only human, and you can only multi-task to a certain extent.
• During the single-player campaign, the strength of the Vaygr fleet you encounter during the next mission depends on the strength of your fleet at the end of the previous one. The computer will look at your fleet and build a Vaygr fleet to match. Maybe you should retire a few non-essential ships just before the end of a given mission so that your fleet isn’t as strong. You can’t retire captured enemy ships, however.
• Sometimes it’s better to target larger ships’ subsystems and cripple them enough that they can’t fulfill their primary roles. For example, take out the fighter craft facility on a carrier to prevent it from building more ships, or knock out a frigate’s engines to strand it in space.
• Ship-to-ship combat uses, at its core, the same basic rules as rock-paper-scissors: one type of ship is superior against another but inferior to a third. Before you build a type of ship, rest your cursor on the box next to its name in the Build menu and read its strengths and weaknesses. This information will help you make decisions in the heat of battle, or when you know what types of ships will arrive in your vicinity soon.
• Sometimes, you draw a box around several ships to create a control group but accidentally include a resource collector. Hold down the A key as you click and drag to leave non-military units out of the group.
• Hold down the Control key and press F5 to quick save at any point during a mission, which gives you the opportunity to return to the same situation if the battle starts to rapidly deteriorate.
• Fighter craft are generated in groups of three or more. You can dock the group with a production ship and restore it to full strength if it loses members.
• Remember that you can set tactics for all your ships: passive (never attack), defensive (attack only when attacked) or aggressive (attack any enemy unit within the line of sight). Place fighter craft in aggressive mode when heading into battle, but watch them and make sure they don’t stray off to tackle opponents much stronger than them once their primary targets have been destroyed.
• Unlike most games, Homeworld 2 doesn’t come with easily accessible cheats that you can use to create an invincible fleet or automatically win a battle. However, if you want to unlock all the missions available in the game, try this: Open the “Profiles” folder located inside the “bin” folder that’s in the main game folder. Now open the folder for your profile (you may have more than one, if you’ve created more than one profile) and open the “PLAYERCFG.LUA” file with Text Edit or another plain text editor. Look for a line that says “maxmission = x,” where “x” is the number of the last mission you completed. Change that number to 15 and you’ll unlock all the missions in the game.

Note: Keep in mind, however, that if you go straight to a mission later in the game, you will start with the same fleet you had at the end of the last mission you completed, so you won’t want to implement this right after starting a campaign. Work through at least the third mission, which gives you time to build a lot of ships before each wave of Vaygr forces shows up.

The Cavalry. Captain Soban and his fleet arrive.

Engage. The Pride of the Hiigara leaves space dock.

Furious Dogfight. Protect this Carrier at all costs.

Training Grounds. The Hiigaran mothership oversees a combat exercise.

Do Workers Comp Rules Apply to Automated Spacecraft? A resource collector goes about his business.