Homeworld/YMMV

• Broken Base: Several, and all are violent. The most notable are listed below:
  • The divide between those who think Cataclysm is a good part of the Homeworld universe, and those who are so horrified by it they refuse to even consider it canon.
  • The divide between those who like Homeworld 2 and those who don't.
  • The divide between those who believe the Kadeshi were wiped out, and those who believe they are still alive. (Found in all its violence here.
  • There is a significant amount of debate over whether using the Salvage Corvette is |"fair" or not.
• Breather Level: After each level of Homeworld 1, the player can choose to sit around and do whatever they like, such as collect resources or build ships. In addition, a few missions (such as missions 09 and 11) feature very little in the way of combat or difficulty compared to the previous mission(s). The game drew some criticism for how long these breather segments could last.
  • Homeworld 2, on the other hand, removed manual exiting of a mission zone in favor of just giving all the resources that were left in the area, then leaving... even when it made no sense, such as being given thousands of kilometers worth of unharvested resource pockets while fleeing an explosion that creates a massive spacial hazard, with seconds to spare.
  • One of the points where Cataclysm was praised was the option to increase time-flow by up to 800%, as it stuck to the first game's way of dealing with mission endings (though it often left the player with a significantly stronger force coming after their hide, as an incentive to move on.)
• Complete Monster: The Taiidan emperor. He sticks to the shadows for much of the game, but the Cataclysm manual paints him as a power-mad and paranoid ruler who was becoming violent and erratic. He orders the destruction of an entire planet - YOUR planet - with over 300 million inhabitants because it's people violated a long-forgotten treaty signed thousands of years earlier. What really seals the deal is how his government attempted to used the video footage of the destruction as a propaganda piece. The Taiidani people found this repulsive, which gave the rebels helping you in the game the support they needed to overthrow the government.
• Demonic Spiders: The Keepers in Homeworld 2. They're carrier-sized battlecrusiers with two fast-firing ion cannons, armor that shames anything you've got and then some, the ability to launch powerful drone fighters that can take incredible punishment, the ability to go to hyperspace and bounce to the other side of the field should those fighters be destroyed (where it will launch more), and finally the ability to phase out of the game itself and return with full health should you damage them enough. It's intentional, of course, as both instances of them appearing are siege missions and you're not supposed to win, just hold out until the plot lets you proceed.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: The Kadeshi. Despite appearing in only two missions from the first game and ultimately getting completely wiped out by the player they are quite popular.
• Freud Was Right: In Homeworld 2, take a look at Sajuuk for a minute, forget the fact that Karran is in control of it (heck, you can skip that part if you want), and ask yourself: is whoever in control of that ship compensating for something?!
• Game Breaker: The Salvage Corvette in the first game went Off the Rails quite quickly, as it could steal the enemy's Game Breaker ships. The first major example was the Kadeshi multi-beam frigates, which can shred pretty much anything because they have four Wave Motion Guns, while the most expensive ship the Kushan could build at the time only had two. The research-station mission had valuable capital ships cut off from any reinforcement by a super nova, making it (relatively) easy to capture large numbers of them--but the worst was Mission 14, with dozens and dozens of Ion Cannon Frigates ripe for capture (the last example was intentional on the developers' part, given what you have to blow up in the very next mission).
• Hilarious in Hindsight: In the original Homeworld game, the main antagonist is a galaxy-spanning dystopian empire which responds to any planet which opposes them by carrying out an order of Exterminatus deploying an atmosphere-destroying device and is ruled by a very long-lived Emperor who seems to possess psychic powers. Guess what game Relic made a few years later? Possibly crosses over with Shout-Out, given the circumstances.
• Inferred Holocaust: The backstory of HW2 averts this regarding the ending of HW1. It's revealed that the Taiidan living on Hiigara were allowed to evacuate, leaving the planet free for the newly returned exiles from Kharak to resettle and rebuild their homeworld.
• Magnificent Bastard: The Beast in Cataclysm whoever it is. Among others, it used an infected Republican cruiser to lure a convoy's escorts so it is vulnerable to attack, used one of your captured ship's controller to switch off a sentinel shield grid, sending a captured previously friendly ship you met to lure you to it, and most of all, manipulating the Imperialists into doing its bidding which includes repairing the Naggarok's drives, giving it the Cruise Missile designs, and making them do most of the fight with the Hiigarans in general.
• Narm: "Bring Sajuuk to bear!"
  • The NAGGAROK's 30 second long Big No (it's been suggested that this isn't really the Naggarok screaming, but every Beast ship in the Galaxy feeling the pain of being lobotomized by the Naggarok's destruction).
• Spiritual Licensee: The game was originally intended as a Battlestar Galactica (The Original Series) game, but it did not work out in the end, forcing Relic to alter the universe and characters slightly. The story is still there though.
  • Somehow the game also taps into the feel of the re-imagined BSG despite predating it: the game's mood and the heavy spirituality matches the re-imagining more than the original Battlestar Galactica. Same with the physics and the way ships do battle. Arguably, Homeworld is the combination of the more fantastic elements of the original Battlestar Galactica (aliens, wave motion cannons, an evil Empire) and the more stylistic elements (lack of goofiness, a more serious mood, spiritual feel, the way battles are conducted) of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. And it works!
    • Also, compare the "Unbound" (S'jet, her Vaygr arch enemy Makaan, etc.) with the "Hybrids" piloting the Cylon Basestars in the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. Their portrayal is eerily similar, down to the Machine Monotone voices. It's as if Ron D. Moore played Homeworld and got a bit inspired... (but granted, Spaceship Girl is a nigh universal sci-fi trope these days).
    • "As if"? The First Hybrid was played by Campbell Lane, who voiced the Bentusi. If that was a coincidence, it was one hell of a coincidence.
• Surprise Difficulty: The first two missions in Homeworld 2 consist of "Build a ship! YIPPIE HOORAY!"... Then "build a building, build some ships, kill an enemy scout"... Then the third mission is "Destroy an enemy fleet twice your size on one side of the map, while another enemy fleet just as large warps in on top of the only mineral field on the map, killing your miner and thus preventing you from building another fleet, while your main fleet is wholly occupied with the first fleet."
• That One Level: The convoy escort mission in Cataclysm most notably. The catch, it is not exactly hard at all, but rather the high amount of Nightmare Fuel involved.
  • "Help us! HELP US!!!"
  • In the traditional sense, Mission 14 of the first game. The objective is rather simple: blow up 8 hyperspace inhibitors so you can jump closer to the Higaara system, and while they have a good amount of HP, they have no guns of their own. Unfortunately, the game ensures that brute force will not work here, with a dynamically adjusted fleet guarding the inhibitors, and somewhere on the order of 150 Ion Cannon Frigates guarding the inhibitors in sphere formation (by comparison, your unit caps limit you to about 20 frigates total). While there are many ways to approach the mission, any method that keeps your fleet safe from the sphere also takes an impressive amount of time, and it's not uncommon for players to spend several hours on just one attempt at the mission.
  • Asteroid mission 6 in Homeworld 1. It's boring, long, and without any enemies to fight or engage with, just destroying asteroids that don't fight back. It's little wonder that the demo of Homeworld 1 skipped the mission and replaced it with a special "Assault on the Turanic Raider Homeworld" mission.