Struggling to defeat Warsage from Homeworld 3? This guide will give you all the strategies and fleet composition tips you need to beat him on the first try (and get an achievement while he’s at it).
Preparing to defeat Warsage
The Warsage is a battlecruiser named that acts as the boss at the end of ‘Mission 09: Warsage Citadel’. She doesn’t emerge from hyperspace until you destroy the seventh and final hangar full of docked ships. For the best chance of success, make sure you have prepared the groundwork before completing this objective.
Firstly, make sure you have captured all available ‘data needles’. While not mission critical, this will dramatically increase the range of your sensors and allow you to know if there are enemy ships still in the area of ​​operations. To capture, move your ships within range and you will see the capture bar as shown below. If at any point the status bar changes to “Disputed” or “Uncapturing”, you will know that there are enemies nearby.
Once you have established dominance over the ‘data spiers’, make sure you have cleared the area of ​​all enemy ships. You should especially keep an eye out for enemy transports or aircraft carriers. This is vital because if any of those ship types are still in the area, they will continue to make attack ships and frigates to attack your mothership while your forces are occupied elsewhere.
Once you have destroyed the remaining aircraft carriers and transports, you can safely order your resource collectors to remove resource units and salvageable remains from the map. Start with the wrecks, as they are urgent and will be reduced to nothing before you know it. There are four key resource patches and they are worth 12,000 RU each. This is more than enough to rebuild your fleet several times over.
Building your fleet
The main goal when building/rebuilding your fleet is to ensure you have the maximum capacity of Torpedo Frigates (if you haven’t looked into this option, do so now). You should have 15 of them. They will add necessary range and power to your attack on the Warsage, as explained below, and the fight can be incredibly complicated if you don’t have them.
If you have resources left over after bulking up your Torpedo Frigate section (and you will if you’ve managed your gathering correctly), focus on maximizing your attack ship populations and any high-damage, single-target ships you have ( like the Ion Cannon). Railgun Frigates and Corvettes).
Make sure you have enough for a single probe (50 RU) and launch it under the sections of broken station plates floating beneath the Warsage. This will allow you to see exactly what it has in store for you in terms of turrets and escort ships, without being close enough for it to detect and disable the probe.
Assault on Warsage
At this point, both the terrain and your fleet are prepared for the confrontation. Select your torpedo frigates and, with your attack ship acting as escort, fly directly upward between the three citadel structures. Make sure to keep them out of the Warsage’s range, and once they are in position, activate your torpedo frigates’ ‘Missile Thrust Boost’ ability. This dramatically increases the effective range of your weapons while reducing your speed. They are now free to start bombarding enemy positions.
Your first target should be resource gatherers. This may seem counterintuitive, but if left alive, they will continually repair the Warsage, making it extremely difficult to kill. Once down, he advances toward enemy escort ships and gun emplacements. Only then should you start attacking the Warsage directly.
With escorts and turrets out of the way, order the remaining frigates and destroyers to begin the close assault. Warsage has powerful weapons and a self-healing feature that passively heals him. On higher difficulty levels, this makes him extremely difficult to kill, and it only gets harder as you lose ships and the amount of damage per second your fleet can output decreases. However, with the above strategies, before long it should be nothing more than a glow.
That should have you covered, but if all this talk of space combat has you wondering what it would be like aboard one of these ships, why not check out MyFullGames’ guide to Starfield ship interiors?