Homeworld was by far the superior game of the three. Cataclysm was just stupid on a number of fronts, but still fun enough to play. Homeworld 2, despite the graphics and the hype, had an uninteresting story, forced flow, and an insane difficulty level; there were no tricks you could pull to beat a mission, you just have to sit there, manually click each target you want to focus your firepower on, and prey that the backup battlecruiser that you're building can get to the frontlines to relieve your 20% hull integrity dreadnaught that you fail the mission if you lose. There's very little strategy, and no reward for doing anything right. In fact, there's practically no way to handicap yourself enough to make some of those missions bearable, and some (specifically Thaddis Sabah) are only possible if you fail them enough times for the computer to give you a very small break, which is IMHO a reflection of poor mission design. It should always be possible for a player seeing a mission for the first time to beat it if he is good, and that's simply not the case with HW2. Quite frankly I don't even know how the entire campaign got through QA. Really my only gripes with Cataclysm are that its units are a tad too specialized for my tastes and require tedious micromanagement just to hold their own in battle, and the fact that the unit cap is on a points system instead of the class system used in HW1. It discourages the use of combined arms terribly, as I repeatedly found myself having to retire everything in my fleet as soon as a more powerful warship class became available just because I needed to free up room under the cap. But if you enjoyed HW, then I'd say give HW:C a try. HW2 is a waste of hard drive space (I've never replayed the main campaign, which is saying something as to its quality) and all of the mods that use the engine overdrive the engine with detail and become slideshows (yes, Warlords, that is for you).
