Homeworld 3 is for spaceship strategy sickos

polygon.com:

One of the biggest draws of the science fiction genre is that it gives us access to big spaceships. There’s other stuff, too, about imagining alternate futures and pasts or thinking about new forms of life, but there’s an awful lot of big spaceships, and if you’re like me you think those big spaceships are cool. Homeworld 3 is fundamentally a strategy game about really, really big spaceships and the cultures that pilot them. You are more than likely in or out based on that premise alone.

These spaceships are the central organizing principles of the games. The first told the tale of an oppressed people and their journey from a desert planet to their original homeworld, and the second was about dealing with a threat to that world in the form of a technological warlord. Homeworld 3 continues the story of the Hiigaran people, who face a new threat: something out in space is killing inhabited worlds, wiping out billions of people. The galactic empire is crumbling at the might of this faceless threat. Someone has to stop it.

The game puts the player in the combined shoes of Imogen S’jet, who is neurally welded to a massive spaceship, and Isaac Paktu, a military commander. They are sent out beyond the known realms to find the threat, and they do it in their large space boats.

I’m belaboring the ships because, look, they’re cool. Homeworld 3 puts a lot into scale and detail. Each mission takes place in these massive maps with huge, cyclopean structures around them, and you perform whatever task is in front of you by navigating that terrain and (generally) blowing up your enemy. The scale is so large that things move slowly. The pace of the game is generally glacial.

At the same time, you have this capacity to zoom in very far to see the actual action that’s occurring. You can watch your corvettes swing past an enemy destroyer in immaculate detail, following up with torpedoes from a flanking ship that you pulled up behind the unsuspecting enemy. This zooming back and forth