In the Fall of 1999 life was good and classes were starting again
at North Carolina State University. Among the thousands of
students getting back to college life were some computer-minded
miscreants who had previously lived together in suite 414 of Wood
Hall. That Spring they had wasted entire weeks of precious life
on Action Quake2 and had even started putting [414] in front of
their game names. This semester they were scattered but still in
touch and two of the former 414's, squirrel and Quaker, were
sharing an apartment. Their still campus-bound friends told
squirrel and Quaker about a new game they had warezd called
Homeworld, a real-time strategy game boasting a 3D playing field
and some of the best game controls any of them had ever seen.
Everyone was psyched.
Quaker and squirrel bought copies of Homeworld and prepared to
take [414] into a new frontier. But almost as soon as they
started the other members burned out or got distracted and [414]
was left as a clan of two. The two played around, learned some
tricks, and suddenly they realized they could win games, even
against old hands from the beta. They played and waited and
watched.
After conquering in a breakout match set against the feared 7th
Rank, [414] arrived on the scene. Suddenly everyone wanted a
piece of Quaker and squirrel. 7th and other clans asked them to
join, others wanted to be part of [414]. The squirrel/Quaker duo
became the team to beat. At this point [414] could have easily
become a cult of personality like 7th, recruiting luminaries from
the community with great fanfare. Instead squirrel and Quaker
decided to keep the armada as small and elite as possible. They
got to know another rising star, DrBooty, and quickly recruited
him. Another [414] veteran, TheWolf, picked up Homeworld and was
soon on the team. [414] had no ranks, no awards, no leaders, no
meetings, no hassles, just game.
Individually they were good. DrBooty, Quaker, and squirrel all
made extended stays in the top 5 of the 1v1 ladder. But together
[414] was unstoppable and remained undefeated in match play. Some
armadas fell, others rose: 101, DD, Co, AoK, ND, Chiken, BDU.
Still [414] remained at the top.
Then as quickly as it had risen, [414] faded away. The v1.04
patch changed many rules of strategy. The ladders and the
community went into a slump. Winter break came and brought new
distractions. Quaker and squirrel left for Unreal Tournament,
DrBooty and TheWolf went their own ways. [414] was gone, leaving
this website like a perfectly preserved artifact. Think of this
place as a monument to past glory dedicated to all who shared the
thrill Back in the Day.
Here's to SubAtomicCascade, author of the first ever
comprehensive Homeworld Strategy Guide, father of the 15-minute
Heavy Cruiser, and strong ally of [414].
Here's to SoulBlighter, a young punk who received some truly
spectacular beatings at the hands of an emerging [414] and grew
into a solid player. ;)
Here's to UberJumper, and all from the community who tirelessly
gave their time and energy to make the game more enjoyable for
everyone.
Here's to the other armadas who never stopped challanging us to
be the best.
And last but certainly not least, here's to DeViL-PaNdA, aka
ZERO1, [414]'s mysterious tormentor who pushed us all to the
absolute limit with his incredible tactics. Our hats are off to
you, dude, whoever and wherever you are.
I can't even begin to list or even remember everyone who made the
experience what it was. Let's just say you know who you are and
thank you. Peace.
[414]squirrel
SteelRat of the Dirty
Deeds Armada has set up a mailing list on his server for
discussing the future of teamplay in Homeworld. Right now most of
the discussion is about the idea of setting up an armada council
that would be attached to
RSL in some fashion.
Register by sending email to
teamhw-request@steelrat.com
with SUBSCRIBE in the body of the email.
The Depths of Homeworld
MOD Center
I just read on the President's
Special Committee on Pr0n that DoH has moved their hosting
over to the Irregularly
Shaped Petrified Elephant Testicle. Depths of Homeworld is a
project led by Tempest and Blackstone to unravel the undocumented
mysteries in Homeworld's code and thereby trigger the genesis of
user-created Homeworld mods. To me this sounds like a really good
idea since Relic seems so amazingly uninterested in tweaking
broken aspects of game balance (*cough*supportfrigates*cough*).
The team seems to be making good progress so far, unfortunately
little of the info is making its way to their makeshift page.
Hopefully the site will get some big-league content once things
settle down for them. Keep an eye on these guys.
Oh, irony of ironies! Guidestone and the other news pages start
to post again just as we stop posting. Well, I guess there's always
something to fill in the gaps. It's Finals time for me, and Squirrel
is packing up and preparing to return to his distant homeworld of
Indiana, which means future updates to the page will be
few and far between until Spring Semester. Heaven forbid that Real World interfere with
our gaming. We know so many of you enjoy the SOTD and find it a
valuable source of information, and we'll do our best to try
and update it some during Christmas break, but don't get your hopes
up. Well back to work for me. Merry Xmas everyone if we don't post
again before then!
The [414] page has a new layout, something better than before we
hope. The Ship Of The Day is still on the old layout, maybe I'll
change that if I ever get around to it. I also added some new
links I want everyone to notice:
Homeworld Map Emporium
run by jacelor, a very snappy site. Jacelor tells me that he and
BP-Llama plan to merge their two maps sites soon to create one
great big honkin' map-o-rama. Yay!
StarLance Homeworld
League is by far the most promising of the ranking systems I
have yet seen. They're still in beta right now, but they're
working hard to get ready for prime time. The admins Remeo and
Loyal seem very responsive to suggestions from the community.
They're dead-set on making this league work.
Homeworld Tournament
Trail is another ranking system still in development stages.
[BDU]Manus and Vinnie-AoK run this weekly tournament on Saturdays
SteelRat of the Dirty
Deeds Armada has set up a mailing list on his server for
discussing the future of teamplay in Homeworld. Right now most of
the discussion is about the idea of setting up an armada council
that would be attached to
RSL in some fashion.
Register by sending email to
teamhw-request@steelrat.com
with SUBSCRIBE in the body of the email.
The Depths of Homeworld
MOD Center
I just read on the President's
Special Committee on Pr0n that DoH has moved their hosting
over to the Irregularly
Shaped Petrified Elephant Testicle. Depths of Homeworld is a
project led by Tempest and Blackstone to unravel the undocumented
mysteries in Homeworld's code and thereby trigger the genesis of
user-created Homeworld mods. To me this sounds like a really good
idea since Relic seems so amazingly uninterested in tweaking
broken aspects of game balance (*cough*supportfrigates*cough*).
The team seems to be making good progress so far, unfortunately
little of the info is making its way to their makeshift page.
Hopefully the site will get some big-league content once things
settle down for them. Keep an eye on these guys.
Oh, irony of ironies! Guidestone and the other news pages start
to post again just as we stop posting. Well, I guess there's always
something to fill in the gaps. It's Finals time for me, and Squirrel
is packing up and preparing to return to his distant homeworld of
Indiana, which means future updates to the page will be
few and far between until Spring Semester. Heaven forbid that Real World interfere with
our gaming. We know so many of you enjoy the SOTD and find it a
valuable source of information, and we'll do our best to try
and update it some during Christmas break, but don't get your hopes
up. Well back to work for me. Merry Xmas everyone if we don't post
again before then!
The [414] page has a new layout, something better than before we
hope. The Ship Of The Day is still on the old layout, maybe I'll
change that if I ever get around to it. I also added some new
links I want everyone to notice:
Homeworld Map Emporium
run by jacelor, a very snappy site. Jacelor tells me that he and
BP-Llama plan to merge their two maps sites soon to create one
great big honkin' map-o-rama. Yay!
StarLance Homeworld
League is by far the most promising of the ranking systems I
have yet seen. They're still in beta right now, but they're
working hard to get ready for prime time. The admins Remeo and
Loyal seem very responsive to suggestions from the community.
They're dead-set on making this league work.
Homeworld Tournament
Trail is another ranking system still in development stages.
[BDU]Manus and Vinnie-AoK run this weekly tournament on Saturdays
and players can accumulate points in an ongoing ranking system.
Read over the rules and ask the admins (they're on WON alot) if
you have any questions.
Fuck this.
I'm not in a hurry to sign [414] back up for Case's Team Ladder.
Also, I withdrew from the 1v1 ladder today. I still want to play
Homeworld but I'm done with ranking systems until I find one I
like.
As some of you have no doubt noticed, I have withdrawn from the
ladder. (Yes Manus, I did report before I left :) Why?
Surprisingly not because of WON's issues, (Although those are
still damn annoying. Getting that 414-7th game started the other
night sucked alot) but because of what the 1v1 matches have
turned into. First of all, 99% of the time they are played on
Subjugate, the most massively centralized map of them all. Not
only that, Subjugate is also a novelty map. It's the only map
that you start with more than one research ship. You start with
FOUR. Four research vessels! I'll admit that its fun for a while,
and its the only map where things like Turbo Missle Destroyer and
Turbo Heavy Cruiser are possible. However, its old. Place on top
of that the fact that the Tourney only plays that map as well,
(And why is that? Why should a Tournament be played on a novelty
map? Why not something like Radial or Talas?) and you find that
1v1 games of Homeworld are actually 1v1 games of Subjugation.
Note: Hyperspace Arean has 4 Researchers too, but the map plays
differently because of it's size, so it doesn't matter.
Second, I'm sick of the unbeatable strategies. I'll admit that I
played alot while the Defender twink was in effect during v1.03,
but even the Defender could be stopped by a good player using a
slightly modified swarm and kamikaze scouts. It happened to me a
few times. Since the patch was released, it took about a week for
people to hit on currently the second most powerful strat: the
Support Frigate strat Squirrel mentioned Saturday, where you
produce 6 or 8 SF's and mircomanage them all to hell. After Manus
beat us with this one a few times, we realized that the biggest
swarm would in fact have enough power to win against the SF's. In
fact it probably is the only strat with the power to do so. The
problem is that the SF player only has to build 40-50 Light
vettes throughout the entire game. These vettes, healed by SF's,
would live long enough to keep the size of the swarm in check, so
it would never reach the critical mass neccessary to take down
SF's. So we started thinking. Solution? Salvage corvettes
supported by SF's. If you can't kill the frigates, steal 'em.
As it just so happens, we weren't the only ones to hit on this
idea. The innovator of innovators, the one who taught us the
power of kamikaze scouts back in 1.03, the head PaNdA himself,
Zero1, used this strat on
squirrel just a few days ago. Ow. This man has it down to an art.
This, boys and girls, is the absolute king of the strats right
now. No Vinnie, not even your super-powered SF strat can stop
this one, I'm sorry. The SF's can heal the Salvagers far faster
than any strike craft or frigate could ever hope to do. The ONLY
way to take down the salvagers is with Kamikaze vettes. And not
just any vettes, you have to hit them with Repair Corvettes. Why?
Repair vettes are the only Vettes that move fast enough, produce
fast enough, and have enough mass to take out salvagers at a 1:1
ratio. Sick huh? The RV's are also cheaper than the SV's so you
come out ahead in cash as well.
Support frigates are broken, I will give you that. In our
opinion, two things need to be changed in the next patch which
would probably fix everything.
1.) Support Frigates should NOT be able to repair Corvettes
without docking. I don't understand why this isn't the case
already, but it should be. Right now the vettes only need to dock
with the SF's when they're low on fuel, which rarely happens in
the 1v1 games. And since they can repair, the repair vettes are a
useless unit. Why run around with 5-6 RV's supporting each
salvager when two SF's can do it better and faster?
2.) Bomber research time needs to be reduced somewhat. Right now
they take about 300 seconds to research. It should be reduced to
about 250 seconds. They're a great unit, but it takes so long to
reseach them (300 for plasma + 125 fighter chassis + 75 fighter
drive = 500 sec) that a Swarm's Critical Mass is reached some
time after the other player has produced several Support and
Assault Frigs. If they arrived on the scene just a little
earlier, a swarm would be able to decisively win against
frigates.
Quaker and I happened to be on WON tonight and much to our
surprise, who should show up but Athexx, MadHatter, and
RipperT of The 7th Rank! After several false starts we finally
got a 2v2 scrimage going with Athexx and MadHatter (which 414
won) followed by a rematch (which 414 also won). Here are the
recordings:
414 vs 7th, game 1
414 vs 7th, game 2
Both games were on Talas Crossroads. 4-player Talas has four
dust clouds in a diamond pattern in the center. Each side
controls one cloud and the other two are disputed. Both times
we knew we had to own those clouds if we were going to win,
and own we did. Since Talas is a rather slow-starting map,
Quaker and I each went with a total of only four collectors
each and one controller each. Later, once we had three of the
four central clouds secured we found we didn't need any
more.
For offense 414 went with a mighty Swarm and it worked
wonders. Athexx and MadHatter concentrated mostly on frigates
which were quickly devoured by our Scouts, Interceptors,
Bombers, and Light vettes. In the second game 7th caught on
and MadHatter sent several Gravwells at us, but by that time
Quaker's swarm had eaten almost all of 7th's collectors and
the game was pretty much in the bag.
Once again, thanks to 7th and we hope to meet you on the
field again soon.
Hmmm... after a week of playing version 1.04 I think I can
safely say that Support Frigates are the new king. We all
knew that SF's were totally broken in 1.03, but Defenders were
even more broken. Now that Defenders have been toned down
there is no escape from the nightmare of Support Frigates. For
those who don't know, all you have to do is build six or so
Support Frigates and have them heal anything that is being
attacked. You have to have some good micro-management skills
to pull if off, but if you do it's damn near invincible. One
thing that can stop the SF strat is a fleet of bombers, but if
some corvettes or a Missle Destroyer make the scene, the
bombers are toast.
Oh, and did I mention that SF's can heal corvettes without
docking them? Broken.
What irks me is the way people are trying to guard this strat
like it's some government secret. People have actually told
me not to post this. WTF is that? As if a good player isn't
going to figure it out? Watch
Manus beat the hell out of me to see what I'm talking
about. The idea behind this strat is pretty obvious. Another
thing that irks me is people who say you shouldn't use this
strat. What? It's not a bug, it's part of the game. If you
want to win games, this is the strat to use. You can damn
well bet your opponent won't have a moral dilemma using it.
Anyway, in other news, Manus's weekly tournament is tonight.
Check out the
tournament page for details. This week the fun starts at
17:30 EST. I'll be there, as will Manus[BDU], Vinnie-AoK, and
lots of other Homeworld badasses. All games are played on
Subjugate with MEDIUM resources, so you might want to
practice.
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![[414] Armada](./images/414banner.jpg)
