There is no Problem in Homeworld that Can't be Fixed With Salvage Corvettes

Those of you familiar with Homeworld already know what I'm talking about. Listen up, rookies; this technique will save your sorry asses a hundred times. Gearbox made a lot of improvements to the look and sound of Homeworld but they've left the AI and mechanics largely intact. I started testing my old strategies as soon as I could get the game up and running. There are plenty of dastardly strategies you can use to gain the upper hand: cloak fighters still mop the floor with corvettes, mining resource fields still works to cripple your opponent, and the salvage corvette is still the most powerful ship in the game. Yes, that's right. Salvage-fuckin'-corvettes.



You get them right at the start of the campaign and you'll use them throughout the 16 missions to collect data from various wrecks and relics on your mission home. They're easy to forget; unarmed and unable to repair ships. If you've only kept a few around to pick up this or that thing, you've been missing out. These peppy little bastards are a total game changer. Use them right and you'll end up with a much larger fleet, use fewer resources and stop some battles before they even start.

Salvage corvettes use their clamp-thingies to latch onto the hulls of enemy ships. Get enough of them on a particular enemy and they will happily haul it off to the mothership where it will be "re-educated" to serve your fleet. What exactly transpires in the hangars when these ships arrive, I have no idea, but it probably isn't pretty.

These frigates spent all their time focusing on my destroyers while the salvage corvettes moseyed right up and took them off.

Almost everything can be captured; fighter to frigates, corvettes to capital ships are vulnerable to the lowly salvage corvette. Larger ships take more corvettes to carry them off. Frigates take two, destroyers take three and cruisers and carriers take six. Since they're cheap to build, their numbers can be replenished easily. Losing a few in any encounter is easily worth the return in frigates and capital ships you capture. even losing three (at a cost of 220 RUs per corvette) to capture one frigate (at 800 RUs per) saves you over 100 RUs. Luckily, you won't have to worry about losing too many.

Lookin' good there, pal.

The salvage corvette is unarmed. I'm not sure what the AI's target heirarchy is, but it doesn't seem to care about the lowly craft. An assault frigate will fire at a group of fighters all day but ignore the two slow moving corvettes latching themselves onto the hull. Go figure. Once the ships are yours, wait a few seconds and they'll pop out of your mothership with a brand new coat of paint.

Mine.

The salvage corvettes are useful in almost every possible situation. take up positions in a resource belt and snatch your enemy's collectors before they can do anything about it. They don't ping as being under attack, so it's likely that you'll get away scott free before they even notice what happened. Capture an enemy carrier or cruiser and the game is pretty much yours. In under an hour, I built up a fleet of twenty+ frigates and capital ships. Hell, you can capture your opponents salvage corvettes to add to your repo-army. It's a bitter irony, but it feels sooo good.

You can't go wrong with these guys. Trust me, if you have a problem anywhere in the Homeworld,  liberally apply more salvage corvette to the effected area.