Playing Stellaris also puts me in mind of Distant Worlds. I actually prefer the UI, graphics, and fonts of Stellaris, but Distant Worlds has a more epic feel: your galaxy can have a thousand systems, and tens of thousands of planets. I learned to play by starting with everything on automated, then gradually switching things to manual. That was a really fun way to learn the game.
I’m still enjoying Stellaris 2.2, but I’ll probably follow you over to DW in due course.
I hope you don’t mind me asking, but how did you “gradually switch things to manual”? I’ve started Distant Worlds multiple times, but am completely baffled by how to “play” it as initially everything is automated, and I find myself simply watching the game play itself.
I’m glad you asked! I had the exact same first impression when I started: the game just played itself, so why did it need me? I found my answer in this thread in the Matrix forums, five years ago:
http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3508583&mpage=1&key=automate
It suggests immediately going to options and switching most or all systems to “suggest” rather than “auto”. This means that the game will prompt you to make decisions rather than automating them for you. Once you get more accustomed to things, you can switch everything to manual. I followed this advice, but I left a few things on automate to make things easier for myself. I also followed the rather detailed tutorial the thread offers; it helped me a lot.
Being five years old, that thread may be somewhat dated now? I’ll have to fire the game up to see. But discovering how to change the automation settings made all the difference to me.
@Spock suggestion is a good one - I totally forgot about “suggestions” instead of automate, this could be made a bit more prominent during game setup or right when a new game launches.
In addition, I think this is a pretty good, relatively concise guide to get started: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=263885042
I would suggest to go with the Bacon mod (lots of cool changes but not many you need to actively know about - e.g. gravity wells change ship behavior but not how you order them around) and definitely the Das UI mod. I consider these two must use…
Funny you should post this today. I reinstalled last night (never gave it much of a serious try before) after many years.
I find the text to be too blurry, even at native 1920x1080. This is a common problem it seems, that was never able to be addressed properly. Unfortunate.
Yes, it’s one of the long standing issues (I think the game hasn’t been updated in 4 years?) of the game when run on newer systems. Like @Sonoftgb experienced, the game is very capricious about actually booting up on newer Windows versions, too.
For videos, Tortugapower’s minmaxing tutorials playlist helped me a lot get into the early game. I am not a minmaxer (and certainly not one of his degree), but he provided me a lot of insights about what to do in the early game.
Did you try the Bacon mod? As mentioned I only had a few menus with that issue, many look fine on my 1440p ultra wide monitor.
No I did not.
Thanks for the suggestion, I might give it a go.
Wow, so glad to see people returning to this game after the deep, deep disappointment that is Stellaris.
I watched all 13 of those Tortuga videos and took notes so you don’t have to. Fifteen pages of notes in fact, with screenies of the ship designs, that turn into a half-decent Getting Started guide to DW. Feel free to leave comments if I got things wrong.
Fun fact: he didn’t unpause the game until the 5th video!
Jiminy Cricket, this is wonderful!
Between these video tutorials and notes I might learn this game yet. This should be a game that I play but the learning curve seems so daunting.
Seriously, I’m a notes guy and these are fantastic!!
Thank you @tylertoo
Please keep in mind: the video series, and the notes, take you mainly through the first part of the early game, pre-warp, where you are only exploring your home system. In part 10 you should gain warp technology, but only low level, so you can only explore the systems closest to you. The series does not include the mid- and late-game, where you are intergalactic and have a lot more interaction with other races. But, at least it gets you a good jumpstart.
For what it’s worth, Distant Worlds 2 is in the works! I’m hoping to see it in 2019. Erik Rutins at Matrix posted this in September:
The game is coming together, but there is always a lot more to do. We are still working daily on development, art, design and data together with our artists and supertesters and the trials and tribulations of life occasionally knock us for a loop, but forward progress this year has been truly excellent. I have learned not to give estimates, but I am happy with the team we have and the progress we are making. We have been staying close to the latest milestone schedule we set for ourselves earlier this year and I expect wider testing will begin in the coming months. When we have more complete art in the game and we’ve made it through the first wave of testing, I expect we’ll have a lot more to share with you all.
I was dying to read this thread - hoping for more DW2 news - but find it’s not :(
You and me both buddy.
Yeah, I tried loading the game on my new 1440p monitor and wow, I had a hard time reading stuff. I just saw this on Steam today:
So I might try it with it.
So that will be free?
Got me.
The game should be able to run in windowed mode
Hope that doesn’t mean you have run the game in windowed mode. I’m not near my gaming PC to see if DW supports it (I play all games in fullscreen).
Wow this could be the answer to my prayers! If I could run Rome Total War at lower resolution but without the blurriness that would be AMAZING. I hate running Total War games at native resolution (2560x1600) because the units are all ants and it takes the sense of awe out of battles.