[Flipside]

I thought they were both great, though I recall that Cataclysm didn't go down so well with Relic themselves, but I found it to be a good game, and, quite frankly, the soundtrack of Cataclysm was better than Homeworld 1 apart from Agnus Dei, at least in my opinion And for all of Relics coolness towards it, a lot of the features of Homeworld 2, like being able to give orders from the Sensor screen, and being able to accelerate time were introduced in Cataclysm.

[Hades]

It's also kinda ironic how Cataclysm wasn't made by the same people as the original and yet it's a far better sequel than Homeworld 2 ever was.

[MP-Ryan]

Hrmmm.  Never played Cataclysm.  Something for GOG to add to their catalog.

There were two things that really annoyed me about HW2:
1.  The inability to capture beyond your ship limit.  Honestly, that's part of what made the original so much fun was figuring out how to cap every enemy ship in the mission.
2.  Auto-end of mission feature.  Used to be you could bulk your fleet at the end during the final resource harvest.  HW2 wrecked that and forced you to find creative ways to not end the mission while you built your fleet to the cap.

Though the auto-mining feature at the end of each mission was nice.

All-in-all, I thought the original was much better than the sequel.

[Flipside]

I always felt Homeworld 2 tried too hard to recapture the atmosphere of HW1, which is a common weakness in sequels, "The recipe worked first time, so why not do it again?". The thing about Cataclysm is that it used the same Universe, the same style, but didn't try to just make a bigger, shinier version of the same story, it steered away from Prophecy and Destiny and portrayed the Higarans more as I would imagine them being after reaching Homeworld, re-fracturing into their various Kith. Without the promise of a future to hold them together, old social habits die hard.

I also hated the auto-end feature in HW2, half the fun of HW1 was trying to build a fleet to cope with the next mission with the RU available (which were considerably more limited in the original). I remember in Homeworld 1 that I used a Cloak Generator and a few Salvage ships on the outskirts of Higara, and managed to capture about 60 Ion Frigates using just those and a lot of patience, drag a few Frigates out of position with Interceptors, get them to chase you about halfway back to the Mothership, and then unleash the power of the Salvage Corvette on them