i’d be interested in what you think if you did give it a brief go
I found it mostly bug free but it didn’t really wow me. I liked DW2, but either too many hours of DW:U or me simply changing in the many years since I played it likely contributed.
But for sure I will play DW2 again.
fair enough. i think for me it’s a little more ‘connected’ rather than ‘abstracted’
I started playing again, spurred by the new patch. I didn’t have too many issues before, but it seems smoother and less buggy. However…
I find my refueling ships to be somewhat braindead. I’ve got a fleet of maybe 10 frigates and 4 fuelers (and realized these need to be set to Automatic) and the refueling ships will fly off to some distant source of Caslon instead of looking for it nearby.
I’ve got 2 small spaceports and the game - without asking or warning - upgraded both of them to medium spaceports. I don’t see any automation setting that seems to apply: I have ship construction set to “Ask” and in designs - I also have “Role Upgrade” for both spaceports set to “Manual”.
Neither of these are game crashers, but I don’t feel like wasting money on a larger port when a smaller one will suffice.
Here is a screen shot. My first fleet is moving to kill a pirate base, but 3 of my refueling ships are stopped at the waypoint I picked while the 4th is flying back to my homeworld for more fuel.
I think I need to shelve this game again. Still too many weird things that go on and no way to explain them. My screen shots above were confusing, but once I went to war: my tankers flying to rear area to retrofit was simple unacceptable. Yes, I can put them on manual mode but I don’t want to micro them.
I’ve had a number of settings switch with no warning (like auto-refit changing from Manual to Auto), a research bug that stopped me from researching Long Range Scanners, and so on.
Is there a way to upgrade construction ships to at least Roomba-level AI? I just realized I’ve had my initial construction ship stuck for lord knows how long, bumping into the moon next to my home planet over and over and over. It’s trying to build a mining station and I’m assuming it’s maybe trying to build it on the other side of the moon from where it is currently located but it is to stupid to not try to fly through the moon?
Is there something I’m not understanding or is the game seriously in this bad of shape still after all this time?
EDIT: Hurray! It took years of in-game time during which I researched skip drives and even warp bubble generators, but eventually it made it around the moon to build the mining station.
It’s too bad it took longer for it to work it’s way around the moon than my 2-hour refund window. Hopefully the game is not quite this level of piece of shit after 9 months of post-release bugfixing?
I’ve never experienced that problem with pathfinding, even in pre-release beta. I don’t think that’s a normal experience.
One point in your account that stands out, however, is that you were sending your construction ship around without a skip drive - travel within system takes months or years in that case! It may not have been pathfinding, but rather just an incredibly slow pace of movement. This is one grip I have with the game - there should be a pre-skip drive engine for the pre-warp game which at least has decent movement within your starting system. There is at least one mod to this affect.
Edit: If you are just now thinking of hopping on to DW2, I suggest waiting on learning to play the game until the next BIG update, probably in January. It will have some big changes that resolve almost every QOL issue I have with the game.
This was the moon orbiting my starting planet so the distance wasn’t great. I had already built the Research station without issue on the same moon. But to clarify, it was definitely pathfinding as I watched it try to fly through the moon repeatedly, turning around, and making another approach right into the moon. Each time it shifted a fraction of a degree until it finally worked its way around the obstacle. It was basically a 937-point turn to get to where it needed to go, haha.
I’ve seen the same issue at least one other time, but since I had several construction ships at that point it wasn’t too big of a deal.
It’s kind of now or never, unfortunately. I have the week off of work and the mental bandwidth to learn a new complex game now. Things are going to be crazy busy come January! Hopefully I can get a handle on the game as it is now and enjoy the nice improvements next month. :)
And I have to say, despite the frustration I expressed (it was a bad first impression, given what I had heard about the many issues the game faced at launch) the game is grabbing me. Which is an improvement from DW:U, which I couldn’t get into despite multiple attempts. Part of that is likely do to scaling UI and improved visuals so I’m not suffering eye strain/fatigue like I did the prior title.
In any case, hope any denizens of the thread don’t mind if I post some questions here, I’m sure I’ll have a bunch.
EDIT: Here’s my first. With regards to Mining Stations, do I only need to look at the Abundance % or are there other factors, in terms of how efficient it is to extract resources? For example, if I have a Steel resource with 40% abundance on a planet and an asteroid with 40% abundance, is there a difference? I ask because when looking through the behavior options or notification settings I thought I saw I could tell the game not to prompt me to build mining stations at asteroids (although I’ll be damned if I can remember where I saw it now. Maybe it was a fever dream. :)).
I think there is no difference between your two examples - the abundance % plus your mining tech determines the amount mined per second. I’d like if resources were finite, depending on object size, but alas that isn’t (yet) part of the game. I think in general you will find higher abundance percentages on larger objects.
Regarding asteroids - there is a filter in the build new mine menus to show all locations, or exclude asteroids. Asteroids tend to have more basic construction material, like steel, so are more important in some early games but much less so later.
I tried again a few months ago. While it was fun, I had extreme issues with fuel tankers: they’d fly around without logic and I couldn’t rely on them to refuel my ships.
I also felt the diplomacy AI was still wonky… empires would offer a peace treaty to me but refuse the same treaty when I offered it.
Would love some suggestions for folks who really get into DW:U and/or DW:2. I get the general concept they’re going for here, where much of the mundane stuff is automated away and you get to play President/Emperor/Whatever as opposed to being a city planner and deciding where to place a library. I’m down with that, I think it’s pretty cool.
That design – or at least the way that design is implemented in this series – leads me to kind of fall through the cracks though. I’m not sure how well I can explain it, but I’ll try. And I’m hoping some vets here can provide some pointers and direction that might help me find the hook in this game. I really do want to like it.
I’m playing with default settings, and I’ve started and stopped 3-4 games now. I watch what the recommended research is, but as I’ve got more familiar with the tech tree I’m re-prioritizing stuff there. But a lot of the other recommended/automated stuff, I’m not really sure how to take part of that manually or if I should bother. For example, I could manually control my exploration ships but I’m not sure why I would. The AI seems to do a well enough job most of the time, and I really don’t find it interesting enough to remember to constantly check in on my exploration ships and make sure they aren’t idling around some gas giant for six months. So that one I’ve left automated and playing manually doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of interesting decisions. Am I wrong there, or do vets share similar thoughts?
For ship building, the game suggests I make ships and it seems to do an okay job. Build another exploration ship. Time to build a third construction ship. I’m assuming part of the calculation for this is making sure my economy to support these things, but I have a hard time collating that information myself. How much is a construction ship going to cost me, really? What about the stations I’m building? Especially since I can’t just look at my balance sheet, since so much of my income early on is coming from the civilian sector building ships. But how do I know how reliable that income is? Is it going to dry up in six months? Did I get a big surge all at once leaving me flush with cash but it’s not something I can rely on? I don’t have a feel for that AT ALL, and since I don’t have a feel for it it doesn’t seem to make sense to overrule what the AI is suggesting most of the time. I’m assuming it’s looking at numbers and making calculations that I don’t even know how to do, so I largely let it do it’s thing.
Now comes the decisions to build out mining stations and the like, which the game will also helpfully suggest. I realize building ones closer are going to be smarter especially when I only have weenie hyperdrives, but after about 12 hours with the game I still have NO feel for the ~79 resources, outside Caslon. I look at the Resources screen and sort by production shortage and that makes sense. Hey, this one is in red, maybe I should build a mine there (of course the advisor will already recommend that). But what is profitable or not? I’m not even sure what this means:
Is $4.50 credits the amount it’s currently generating in revenue? Is it price per unit? Should I prioritize things that have higher credit amounts? In this case, Tyderos is the highest price at $4.50 but I also have 0 demand for it, according to the game. And how does the price equate to actual income increase I might get as Dear Leader? Is it some fraction of this based on civilian economy trading this resource, or is that value something that I would get directly?
I could continue rambling on but these are the kinds of questions that I face a lot while playing the game. I feel like the information space is pretty muddy and I don’t have enough info (or rather, I probably do not know how to properly synthesize the information I do have) to make informed decisions. So when the AI advisor prompts me with “Hey boss, we should build a mining station here” I usually just say “Sure, you probably know better than I do”. But by doing so, I’m also not getting any better understanding of the underlying mechanics and since I’m mostly passively participating in the game instead of actively taking a role, I get bored.
I mean, it’s interesting enough in an antfarm-watching way, but is that what the draw is? If so that’s fine, but I feel like I’m missing all the strategy in what people effusively praise as their favorite strategy game. So I just kind of spin my wheels for a while, get bored, and start a new game with a goal of this time trying to understand things on a deeper level (and failing to do so).
So… any tips/advice for someone in my situation? Would be super helpful. I’m keeping a positive attitude here and just hoping that I need some nudges in the right direction to “get” what people like about the game.
This was my problem with DW1, and I haven’t made the effort to see if its any better in version 2. Curious what folks who have played DW2 think about this issue.
Nice, it’s good to know that it’s not just me. Hopefully some savants will swing by the thread and help us out. :)
Definitely not just you.
What you just decribed is also my experience with DW1. I suspect it’s a lot of folks’. It’s hard to learn a game when it basically plays itself. In order to comfortably override the existing automation you’d need to know more than it does, which would require having more experience with the game, which would require overriding the automation.
You just concisely summarized my issue in one paragraph where it took me nine flailing and rambling about trying to describe. :) Maybe I should quote you at the top of my post as a tl;dr, haha.
For what it’s worth, your nine paragraphs are what provided enough perspective and focus on my experience to make that summary possible. :)
My issue with lack of clear feedback extended to when I’d manually control things, with most automation set to suggestions only. For example, I’d order a ship to go to system x, and it would start out that way, then turn around and come back. Turns out it didn’t have enough fuel, but there was no such feedback at the time I set the order to head that way.