Despite making it on our Top 10 Strategy Games list of real-time strategy (RTS) titles to look out for in 2022, Blackbird Interactive and Gearbox Publishing are still working on releasing Homeworld 3. Let’s see what the team has worked on to elevate their game and make it stand out among the rest of the RTS titles out today.

• Unit Damage - using the latest tech, better looking FX, and dynamic damage, they make the results of hostile engagements as thrilling as possible. Looking at the health bars of your ships is one thing, but we want you to see the scars of your hard-won battles. Broadly speaking, this can be broken down into three stages: weapon damage, ship damage and wreckage.

• Brace for Impact - Weapons come with four distinct damage types - Kinetic, High Explosive, Energy, and Ion. Each weapon has its visual treatment and effects on units followed by how each damage type would affect a ship hull.

• Battle Scars - Fighters are small and player’s can see a distinct camera-facing smoke sprite when Fighters take damage. Larger ships use a series of “damage sockets” placed around the hull where we can spawn required FX to help simulate damage.

• Wrecking Crew - They added a procedural "Ship Breaking" tool leveraging the power of a great piece of software called Houdini. This tool realistically simulates the different ways a ship hull will collapse under the immense pressure of an explosion. But that's just the beginning!

You can find full details on the Homeworld 3 developer update on their latest blog entry. Thanks to these updates, not only will they have a more realistic portrayal of ship destruction, but a much more visceral one too. It lets players witness the destructive fallout of their dynamic battles at a level of detail that wasn't possible before. And once the dust settles, the battlefield will be littered with accurately-modeled wrecks waiting to be scooped up by your Salvagers!

Homeworld 3 is slated for release in 2023 for PC via Steam and Epic Games Store.