Finished Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. I started this like a year ago, stopped like 5 missions in because I got distracted and came back and took a minute to get back into it.
Overall really liked it. Atmosphere is top notch and it nicely translates the Homeworld persistent fleet and mobile base concept into a C&C type RTS. It also is fairly tight 10 or so hour runtime with little filler, where most if not all missions feel like they advance the story in some way. There's one exception and I'll get to that in a moment.
One of the best and the worst bits is the persistant fleet concept coupled with the finite amount of resources in any give mission. In general, units can die extremely quickly and if you make a bad call or get caught napping, you could lose a substantial chunk of your forces and have to spend a lot of resources to replenish them. Since everything carries over to the next mission, if you have enough losses you could find yourself in a situation where you go into the next mission with minimal resources and units and at some point it's better just to restart the mission or reload a save to avoid a death spiral. On the bright side, if you load a mission from the menu screen, you have the option of picking "Start with default fleet" which overrides anything you carried over in favor of a presumably balanced fleet/resource state.
It makes the whole thing stressful because you can often feel very desperate for resources, especially in the later game where the best stuff uses a rarer resource in addition to the common one. It incentivizes harvesting every scrap of resources on a particular map before finishing it, though that does tend to make missions take longer because you don't want to leave anything behind.
However, that fits the game perfectly. From the get go, you're told your desert aircraft carrier was rushed into service(3 months ahead of schedule) because the crazy desert nomads, the Gaalsieans, launched a full scale attack against your bases and the choice was to launch the carrier underprepared and underpowered or be caught at the dock when the attack came. The very first mission has you doing basic checks(teaching you how to do the basics) at home base while at the same time hearing loudspeaker announcements in the background of other bases being attacked up and down the frontier. As soon as you leave the base, you see video footage of the base you just left being wiped out by an attack and you have to make an emergency stop at a depot to meet a transport plane with your senor array to be installed and last minute supplies picked up as survivors from other attacks begin trickling in to join up with you. It's made clear from the start that you're more or less on your own out in the desert and can expect little support from home, so it's just your carrier, whatever you can scavenge from various shipwrecks in the wastes and occasional assistance from another carrier which escaped from a different base and is traveling parallel to you for much of the game. But it allows a nice power escalation as you slowly upgrade your carrier with supplies and tech you find along the way, so you start with a barely functional carrier and end with something akin to a battleship that can launch full air wings and cruise missiles.
So remember I mentioned most missions seem to move the plot along and there's little filler? So late in the game, it's mentioned you're getting critically low on food and water and need a resupply from home to avoid dying out in the desert. Transport aircraft full of supplies are sent and you have to secure a long mesa that the planes can land on. One of the planes lands safely as the other carrier shows up to assist. However, as the 2nd and 3rd are coming in to land, the other carrier decides to suddenly betray you and shoot down one of the others and damage the third(which can be salvaged). The penultimate mission is a battle against the other carrier with the same units and abilities you now have and...it's fine, but it feels like it comes out of nowhere. There's a couple really subtle hints they might not be totally on your side in the game but it turns out you have to read the backstory in the manual, which explains there was a big war called "The Heresy Wars" some time back between clans and you and the other carrier(which belongs to a different clan) were on opposite sides on that conflict. Apparently they haven't gotten over it and decide to fuck you over hard because religious reasons.
And yeah, Religion is a big part of the game and one of the reasons it's so fascinating. The Gaalsienas are religious fanatics who insist on killing you because they believe that by going into to space you're making god very very angry and he will punish everyone in his wrath for trying to leave Kharak. To them it's a holy war and you are Infidels trespassing on holy land that they control. There's a lot of mythical and religious allusions you can draw from all of this and honestly one could write an essay about it. And it's fascinating because in a way they're right.
In Homeworld, it's revealed that the reason the people on Kharak are there to begin with is because they lost a war in the distant past, were exiled and promised never to use hyperspace again in a legal surrender treaty, whereupon breaking the treaty carried a death sentence for the entire people(thus the genocide that happens early in Homeworld). The Gaalseans remember this as part of their religion as a doomsday prophecy, which your side apparently forgot or dismissed as mythology. And when you reach the end of the game and find the Khar-toba, the remains of the initial ship that brought the people to Kharak long ago, scans reveal an ancient city buried in the sands around it. It's flat out said that this is the first city, from their mythology. It's basically like the wierdos who insist that ancient myths about gods are basically just about aliens and noah's ark was actually about a spaceship, except in this case the wierdos were actually right and they found the spaceships to prove it.
The big issue with the in-game reveal that the other clan is going to betray you is that you pretty much have to read the backstory in the manual to really get that context, because the subtle hints in game are very easy to miss if you're not paying close attention. I appreciate the fact the backstory is explained in great detail in the manual while the game only tells you what you need to understand the story in the game, I feel like expecting you to have read the manual to understand that twist is asking a bit much from the average player.
Aside from that, there are some weird retcons for the series(the idea that the hyperspace core in the Khar-Toba keeps pulling passing ships out of hyperspace, sometimes teleporting them deep underground is a bit weird and for some reason the Taidan don't do anything about this despite allegedly knowing that it's been happening for decades if not centuries) but honestly I'm not very bothered by them and it generally fits as a prequel to Homeworld rather nicely. There's a couple rough edges connecting the lore but nothing terribly bothersome for me anyway. And honestly I feel it's not as bad as some of the weirdness in HW2.
