How did I not know this thread was here?!

Suffice to say, after all these years, Homeworld, Homeworld: Cataclysm and Homeworld 2 are the only original disks I still have. They're above and in front of me right now, and all three are installed. (Part of why I haven't switched to Vista/7.)

Homeworld (The Voyage Home *Rimshot*) will always be the best strategy game I have ever played. A large part of that is nostalgia. Another large part of that is innovation. The third large portion can be put down to the graphics, the environments and the soundtrack (The other final 'game' CD I still have in original form, the soundtrack).

It was fun. It was challenging (not always, but a lot of the time.). It was so challenging, when it came out, I couldn't beat the campaign. I went back three years later and demolished it with a sort of bittersweet happiness. I still play a skirmish or two each week, depending on which game I'm in the mood for.

Cataclysm was just more Homeworld with new races and options to me. I didn't like the story as much, but skirmish and multiplayer was just as captivating.

Homeworld 2. . .I really don't know what to say. Back when it released, anyone who asked would receive a vehement "THIS IS SHIT!" from my direction. Now, it's just sort of a "Eh *Shrugs*" It's neither bad, nor great. It feels like a mutated Homeworld, maybe another version of the Complexity mod for HW1. I could really care less about Homeworld 2 at this point, except to hope that, if they make more Homeworld, they buiild off 1, and not 2.

That said, to anyone who played Homeworld online, Oi

Homeworld is best game ever ...however multiplayerwise Sins is better...i remember back in the day i really wished for game like HW but with this 4X feeling to it, colonizing planets, building starbases in different starsystems, bombing enemy homeworld to stoneage like Centauri did to Narn on Babylon 5.... i had to wait for Conquest Frontier Wars for this and then Sins...thank god there are people  like Sins developers, who know what kind of game i like,  otherwise i suppose i would have to start developing games myself

It is somewhat difficult for me to choose between Starcraft and the Homeworld series as my fav.  I play Starcraft a lot more often, but that's because, even on Windows 7 64-bit, I can play Starcraft.  Homeworld (and HW2) just doesn't work on any modern OS, and none of my systems that could play homeworld (the last of which ran Windows 2000) are operating anymore.  I have two current computers:  this laptop and my gaming rig.  Both of these have multi-cores, and RAM and hard drives that exceed the capacities of 32-bit OSes

When I think about categorizations and my affinities, it seems a bit odd that I loved the HW series so much ... in Starcraft, I tend to turtle, build heavy overlapping defensive towers (like the Protoss' photon cannon).  There are no such permanent, immobile structures in Homeworld -- one of the definining things about it is that you operate from a Mothership.  You have no permanet base ... even your 'HQ' (the mothership) moves.  And yet ... I truly loved it.  Resource harvesting, tech upgrades, battles that generally take more than just a couple vollies to be over (one feature I think Sins copied well) which eliminated the one thing I do NOT like about most RTSes:  clickfest contests.  I don't like losing battles because my hand-eye coordination isn't great and didn't get a kajillion clicks per second in.  I want to play a strategy game, not a third-person shooter, and Homeworld I think really clinched that.  It was beautiful with no visible borders or map edge, a vast playfield and was the first game I played that gave a really tremendous sense of scale with units ranging from small scouts and fighters up through capital ships and the behemoth motherships ... and it wasn't always the biggest ship that would win.  Nimble fighters and bombers could take out a capital ship, but were vulnerable to corvettes and smaller capital ships with robust point defense weaponry.

I really, truly miss it.  Master of Orion II and the Homeworld series are the two games I most wish to see a modern remake/sequel to.