Thirded - definitely let us know how it goes as you move further into the game. I’ve avoided buying DW2 because of my total inability to find a road into DW1 (despite buying every expansion because it always looked so cool).
https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=10151&t=389806
The latest update 1.0.9.8, is a very important patch in my opinion. The fleet and design management changes are one of my biggest asks since release last year. I think this open beta will go onto the main branch pretty soon, too, in case you prefer to avoid beta.
I think that’s the version I’m running. Whatever is up on the Beta branch in Steam, in any case.
BTW, the solution to the issue with my suiciding ships was in the tactics screen, thanks for the help earlier. I think I had seen that before but probably thought that was for Automated fleets, rather than Manual. I figured a manual fleet would… well, be under manual control! :)
In any case, I reduced the engagement range to “same location” and now I’m able to get the captains the mental health assistance they clearly need.
Vin i remain interested even know I havent played this in a few months. Please let us know how it is.
it’s great imho, though i am no Vin - improving all the time, and really looking forward to some new races. the latest beta 1.1.0.9 is stable
That post was actually all of us hoping to hear back from @KevinC and yes, I’d be curious if he got further in.
I got distracted by some RimWorld playthroughs, sorry I dropped the ball there! Although, the fact that I was pulled away by another game perhaps says something about where I’m at with Distant Worlds 2.
I can say that AK_Icebear’s suggestion improved my experience with the game. I had some more context of what was going on and it was a bit less of a “I dunno, if you say so” clicking on advisor suggested actions. It also wasn’t overbearing in terms of the amount of micro or anything like that. I think he has a pretty good starting point that can be further tweaked by individual preferences.
I definitely enjoyed the game more but it still hasn’t managed to get its hooks in me. I went from “I’m bored and feel like a passive observer” to “I’m having a decent time with this strategy game”, which is a a noticeable improvement. Just not enough to keep me from going off to play other games before completing a campaign, apparently.
A big caveat to that is that I’m an outlier in that a fair amount of my game time is spent playing with friends or family, so Distant Worlds is at a disadvantage there in terms of my playtime. When I was distracted by RimWorld, it was because we started messing around with the multiplayer mod (as an aside, it works great and was a lot of fun).
In any case, the next few months for me are absolutely stacked with new game releases so I probably won’t get back to this anytime in the immediate future, but I do plan to pick it back up when an expansion launches and give it a go again which wasn’t a thing on my radar until I played with @AK_Icebear’s recommended settings.
For those that are interested, there is a developer stream tomorrow on the next big update dropping this Friday. I imagine some of that will be summing up recent public beta updates finally going to the main branch, and hope it will also include some surprises beyond what is just in the public betas. Even if just the former, the stream (or likely summary after - stream is up to 2 hours!) will probably be of very high interest for those that were waiting until some big update to give it another/first try.
Personally, I’ve found the public beta updates excellent. The current 1109 public beta has better performance and some very nifty UI improvements, and AI aggression dialed up to an appropriate amount on default settings. I have a few more UI nags on my wishlist, and hope they are added soon.
The performance was really incredible (very zippy in late game, without the obligatory “for a 4x”) a few public betas ago (1106?), but stability issues meant they had to claw back some of those improvements. If they can get that level of performance, stable, it would really be an incredible feat. But again, as is the current public beta is both stable and very playable for start to finish - with some typical 4x late game slowdown.
Did anyone watch this?
(Seriously hate the trend of developers/publishers putting an announcement of features in a 2 hour long stream - my brother in christ I won’t even watch a 2 minute video about what you’re doing - put it in text!!)
Erik posted a link to a link to a 12 page PDF with the patch notes and hooboy.
On the stream they mentioned:
- DLC in near future with 2 races: Dhayut and Ikkruro. The races will be more differentiated from those in the base game, and more differentiation to come.
- DLC expected later this year with 2 more races - he mentioned the names but I didn’t catch that.
- Expansion with larger mechanics/feature changes before year-end. No details yet.
- Most important (and why the above are all day-1 purchases for me) - they have made some underlying changes that they expect will lead to much better performance and AI in the next few months as those changes percolate from internal to public releases.
Oh very exciting!
One of my beefs when I last played (besides the tankers acting wacky) was the AI diplomacy. I remember stuff like this from older games and was shocked it was still existent in 2022: AI empires would randomly declare war on you even if they weren’t nearby. Years later, they’d offer a peace treaty. If I refused that THEN offered them the same treaty almost immediately after they’d tell me to pound sand.
I know AI is hard to program but this drove me nuts.
Here’s two hours with Erik Rutins, streaming and talking about the changes:
@BrianRubin posted a roundabout link to the patch notes, but he seems to think you want to go through Steam first. :) Here’s a direct link to the full list of changes.
I dare say it might be time to roll up one’s sleeves and revisit this?
Yep, looks like time to jump back in!
Thanks for the video link, Tom. I rarely watch dev videos like that, but I ended up watching the majority of Erik’s session. He’s one of the Matrix grand poobahs, so it’s great to see him so actively involved with DW2. I like his play-style: he automates some stuff, but he’s pretty hands-on. In general, I try to automate as little as possible.
I’ve spent a good deal of time with this since the Aurora update, and it’s the first time I’ve dived in since the release. You can probably scroll upthread to read my dismay at the state of the release version, which I eventually ragequit for how I felt it simply wasn’t working correctly.
And I think I’m almost ready to pronounce Distant Worlds 2 not only good to go, but a perfectly suitable replacement for Distant Worlds 1! Which I didn’t think would happen. For all the work that went into giving Distant Worlds 2 its fancy 3D engine – now that I’ve admired it in action, I see that work paid off indeed! – I didn’t think it would be able to live up to the intricacy, accessibility, and epic sprawl of the first game. But now that I’ve spent a fair bit of time with the latest Aurora update, I think publisher Slitherine and developer Code Force have proved me wrong.
First and foremost, everything seems to be running smoothly and the AI seems to be doing what it’s supposed to do. I’ve played two different pre-warp starts about 50 years into a 12-player galaxy. In my main game, I’m warring with a couple of other empires, playing nice with a couple of others, assimilating some minor races, scooping up raw materials from about a dozen different systems, and generally elbowing my way onto the galactic stage as I monitor and manage the flow of numerous resources, as I climb around the tech tree like a set of monkey bars on a playground, as I manage diplomacy, and as I even occasionally duck into the ship editor to stick a new component onto a favorite design.
In other words, I’m fully playing the game and the AI is neither falling apart or undermining what I want to do. I’m not seeing any of the inexplicable and frustrating AI actions that plagued the release version. Instead, ships do what they say they’re doing, tankers go where they say they’re going, damage is repaired, full tanks are kept topped off, new research stations and mines are built exactly where I’d expect, money flows as it’s supposed to (more or less…the economy here is definitely an economy!), and if I’m short of something like polymers or caslan or space otter eggs*, I can tell exactly why.
Furthermore, the ship battles are quite glorious! So this is why there’s a 3D engine in this sequel! Eat your heart out, Stellaris. Now I’m getting plenty of rudimentary but effective space p0rn with my even more effective spreadsheet p0rn. Which is what this is, at the end of the day: gloriously intricate spreadsheet p0rn!
And at last it seems to be working as intended. This is crucial, because the premise of Distant Worlds is that it’s an ant farm capable of running itself, and eventually inviting you in to tweak some things and take direct control of other things, at your discretion. But if the ant farm is never working in the first place, what good is your tweaking going to do? What is your limited control going to accomplish if the rest of the ant farm doesn’t fall in line?
These are the questions the Aurora update (If not earlier, but this is my first time playing since release) answers mostly with the simple act of…fixing the ant farm.
Of course, you’re still playing Distant Worlds and all that entails. So I can understand why people have struggled and sometimes just bounced off these games. They’re slow. Very slow. They simply don’t do “pacing”. Running at full speed, a pre-warp start on a default map size is going to take a couple of hours before you’re really playing a bona-fide grand strategy game (note to self: from now on, consider skipping ahead to a later start date). And even then, as with Paradox’s games, there can be looooooong stretches of nothing happening. Which is by design. If you want crackerjack pacing, the Old World thread is down the hall on the left.
(My recent time with Distant Worlds 2 was mostly spent running it in a window with a movie or TV show open in a window beside it, my attention only 20% on the game. Unless you start taking direct control of larger elements of gameplay, this is a perfectly cromulent way to experience a Distant Worlds game!)
I think the bigger issue now that the game works smoothly is documentation. It’s here and it’s thorough, if not somewhat scattered. I’ve had to infer things from tooltips that aren’t explained in the manual (figuring out that I couldn’t build resort bases until I’d researched passenger transports – ??? --nearly induced a ragequit), but the information is there for those of us who want it. I would normally say this game requires a lot of curiosity and initiative if you want to learn it, but there are (new?) “tours” for the main sections of the game: economy, military, characters, mining, colonization, etc. These are manageable six- or seven-screen non-interactive explanations that do a great job providing an overview of how things work. If you’re patient enough to play Distant Worlds 2, you’re patient enough to sit through the “tours”! They’ll give you a proper foundation, and from here it’s easy enough to figure things out with tooltips and maybe the occasional manual look-up.
I’ll jump back into the thread later to post more explicit stuff about my ongoing game. I would really love to stream and Tomsplain this, now that it’s working and I’m back to playing it the way I was playing Distant Worlds 1! But since I can’t do that, just a heads-up that I might be spamming this thread with images and commentary from my current game.
Because it feels pretty nice to be back into a Distant Worlds again.
* totally a thing in this game
Oh, baby! I’m getting ready.
Looking forward to it, and very glad to read how far it has come since release. Great work by a very small team (I think 2 programmers now that they added someone to help Elliot, and then whomever Slitherine has help with the art assets).
The second programmer is Tyler, who was a very early code modder and apparently has focused heavily on improving performance. It shows!
He also is a regular on Friday afternoons in the official Discord channel, hand holding budding modders. If that interests you at all, hit him up.
The official Discord channel has become very active suddenly. There are some apparent heavyweights from other space games modding communities now in the #modding channel, poking around. Steam recent reviews are now very positive. The DLC is out imminently, and Erik mentioned in his stream that even bigger performance improvements are in the works. This is going to be a great year for DW2.
FWIW this game is on track to take the top slot in my playtime ranking, exceeding front runners Oxygen Not Included and Stellaris, sometime this year - rising from not much last fall. As Tom noted, it tends towards slow games - I strongly recommend playing at normal speed, not the habitual 4x, once you are interacting with other empires. You absorb a lot more of the underlying narrative and interact more with the many mechanics that way - at least I do. And the slow periods are a good time for meditative scans of the ant farm.