Customer Reviews
A worthwhile purchase - By: , 26 May 2004 
I bought this book because I was having a hard time completing one of the later levels in Homeworld 2. For the most part it did not disappoint. It contains a brief introduction of the early events in the game and, in the appendix, an entire history of the Hiigarans which is rather well written & informative. These stories add to the storyline of the Homeworld series - something that has been very strong anyway. The book then highlights the key differences between the original & the sequel. This chapter can seem kind of redundant if you have played Homeworld 2 for any length of time before reading this book.
The next chapter details alll the ships on Hiigaran & Vagr fleets. They however forget to mention the Movers that you can build after a certain mission. Each ship has a list of strengths & weaknesses as well as a description of the ship & its use.
What follows this chapter is a on strategy & how to build up fleets. This information can be slightly superfluous in parts but it is interesting to see the different techniques that people use.
The next chapter contains tech trees & details of alll the ships & their upgrades. You do get the feeling that this is just to take up space as there is no chance that you will ever use it while playing.
The guide then gets to the missions. As you would expect the first couple of missions have quite detailed walkthrus but they become rather vague as the missions go on. In fact the instructions for the mission which I became stuck on could be condensed to "Don't waste money", "build lots of ships" & "destroy the bad guys". As you can expect, this isn't alll that helpful but I suppose it gives you slightly hints.
The multiplayer help that is provided is excellent however. Detailing some inspired tactics, this section can give great assistance in helping you win some LAN or internet games. If you are keen on playing this game online & still new to it, it might be worth buying this book simply for information contained in it. Overviews of alll the multiplayer maps are also displayed with strategies for winning on each.
I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in playing Homeworld 2 online. The multiplayer section is excellent as is the story sections of the book. These reallly add colour to the Homeworld universe. The only problem with this is that they exclude the events from Cataclysm for some reason. The blurb on the back of the book also lists "In-depth appendices, including cheats & ATK/DEF tables". I have been completely unable to find these cheats but a search of the internet will be able to reveal them anyway so it's no big deal. In short, this book is a little vague in the mission descriptions but makes up for it in the multiplayer sections & the well written story sections.
