Homeworld: Prima's Official Strategy Guide [Paperback]

Rick Barba (Author)

Book Description

Series: Prima's Official Strategy Guide | Publication Date: October 6, 1999

Space is vast. Your enemies are numerous. You'll need help . . .

• Detailed strategies for every mission
• Tactics for multiplayer games
• Tips to get the most from your fleet formations
• Advice from the game testers
• General strategies to help in any situation

Editorial Reviews

Review

Space is vast. Your enemies are numerous. You'll need help . . .

From the Back Cover

Space is vast. Your enemies are numerous. You'll need help . . .

Product Details

• Paperback: 168 pages
• Publisher: Prima Games (October 6, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0761515763
• ISBN-13: 978-0761515760
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.2 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,378,817 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Ohio reviewer: Try actually reading the book next time, February 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Homeworld: Prima's Official Strategy Guide (Paperback)

Just a note to the reviewer from Ohio who finds the book worthless compared to the online guide at CNET which has "the best advice I've found."

The CNET guide with all that good advice is composed of excerpts from the Prima strategy guide -- word for word. In other words, they're both *exactly the same*. Same author. Same words.

How could you not know this unless you didn't actually read the strategy guide? Yes, it's always smart and ethical to read books before you trash them.

The strategy guide is loaded with hundreds of insider tips directly from the Relic development and testing teams, none of which appear in the manual.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting with a few new ideas, November 10, 2002

By 

Travis Cottreau (Wellington, New Zealand) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Homeworld: Prima's Official Strategy Guide (Paperback)

I fall in between the other reviewers on this one. I liked the book, but found that there were a few obvious items that they didn't include that I would have liked. The Homeworld:Cataclysm guide uses a tabular list of the ships, their cost, armour, firepower and speed etc... all viewable at once. I thought that should have been here too.

In general, the book has good ideas, but I found that frequently, I had radically different strategies than the book that worked at least as well. This is ok, but still, I found that my was was quite obvious. The suggested strategy in
"The Bridge of Sighs" level (building 5 cloaking field
generators to cloak your entire fleet) is a little extreme.
That's 2500 RU's and it would be nice to have a few RU's around after this level.

Frequently, the "strategy" for doing a level is basically knowing the level ahead of time and little else. How other ships will behave, what conditions will cause the enemy to start attacking and what direction they will arrive from etc...

The multiplayer ideas are generally good, and I use them more than the single player level suggestions which I find of less use. I found that a few ships were left unexplored (the drone frigate and the defence field frigate are mentioned but there's almost no info on whether they are useful or not or how to use them).

Your mileage may vary, but if you play this game a lot, and have tried many different ideas already, you will probably have used most of the strategies presented here. You'll already know what ships work against which others, what works well as an escort etc...

Happy hunting.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars West Virginia Should Get Off His Pedestal, December 21, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Homeworld: Prima's Official Strategy Guide (Paperback)

I have to politely argue "Reader from West Virginia's" point. I found the guide to be extremely helpful and integral in helping me progress through the continuing levels of the Homeworld game. It must be a burden to be so perfect as the reader from West Virginia that he found nothing useful in this book.

Every chapter and paragraph helped this first time real time strategy (RTS) player in enjoying his experience in this genre. Yes, the game would seem like common sense to experienced RTS veterans. To me, I needed this book or would have otherwise walked away from the game without every finishing it. Not being raised in West Virginia I'm not as smart.

The book provides "strategies" and no cheats. It won't give you the victories, you have to earn them still. How it does this is by educating the reader on how things work in the fleet's food chain so to speak. An example would be the asteroid fields. The book recommends a particular formation to use that is more effective than others. It also gives you some tips as where to place your capital ships while proceeding through the field. Things that don't readily jump out to the novice. The mission accomplishment is still up to you. You can also read the book cover to cover and not worry about any spoilers as to the games plot line.

A very highly recommended book by this reader.