Distant Worlds

Seems like you and I have some similar taste in games, my friend. Cheers :)

I’m waiting to hear some word of mouth reviews on this before picking it up, but I’m definitely interested.

Me too, but the initial impressions on the forum over there are pretty positive. This looks like it hits all of my good/right buttons, so if it gets positive word of mouth, I’m on it. :)

Meh… tried to buy it, but Digital River’s site doesn’t appear to get along with Firefox.

This is on my to-do list, I’m really hoping it will finally replace Sword of the stars, when Armada 2526 failed so miserably at the job.

I picked up a copy (and backed it up on my patches USB pen) along with Armada 2526. Happy weekend for me :)

Do you not have IE?

I use firefox and it worked for me. I just used a credit card and didn’t even try it with paypal. Maybe you have an add-on that’s causing the problem?

Anyway won’t really be able to play it much until Sunday. :(

I’ve been having problems ordering it as well. I’ve tried using Paypal and an actual credit card, and I’ve tried all the major browsers, but I always get an error when I try to complete the order.

Erik that works for Matrix said if anyone has problems to send the order number it generates and a description of the problem to [email protected] and he’d take a look at it, but except for his initial reply I haven’t heard anything back yet.

Just ordered using Opera and it worked fine with me. Downloading it now, but won’t be able to play it until tomorrow, but I’m very excited. This looks to be one of the better 4X games to come along in a while, if the initial impressions on the forums are to be believed. :)

Downloading now. Used Opera to negotiate the site/ordering process and had no problems. Very intrigued by this one.

Heh, maybe this is their sneaky way to get more people to use Opera. ;)

Opera r00lz.

So I skimmed through both tutorials (basic/advanced). And started a new game and. . . shit there’s a lot going on here. There’s a huge amount of automation that you can turn off as you go. Theree are two empire components, actually: public and private. Public is you, the player (Acting through the government). Private is your people. You benefit from them but can’t control them (and that includes research; you can chose to build research facilities but they’re self directed).

Also, many ships start automated. Further, as you play suggestions will appear, e.g. “Our military advisors wish to build a space port at Xultha Dego 2”. You can say yes, no, or zoom to the location and decide after checking it out.

There is an expansive galactopaedia with links to it everywhere. Where Civ 4 uses the a universal icon with the understanding that it will take you to the page for the thing you click on, this game uses descriptive links. Often several. The game even opens to a basic explanation of gameplay on the galactopaedia (you can shut that off, of course).

There are central screens from which you can direct colonization/ship building and the like. I cannot right click on a star in the main map and say “someone explore this” alas.

Are you liking it so far, peacedog? Does the universe feel as alive as they say it does?

It’s impossible to pass judgement right now. I feel hands off in playing, which is a different experience.

There are plenty of events that crop up during play. I had a mining station get attacked by a something. I’ve got pirates harassing exploration ships. I’ve sent some military patrols out to help with these things, but that’s been my biggest self-directed action.

In rough order, I agreed to:

  1. Build two seaprate types of space stations in different locations.
  2. Bolster my fleet with 3 destroyers, 2 frigates, and something else.
  3. Build a space port at a newish colony.

All at the behest of advisors. I’m going to build more exploration ships when I load it back up, so I can really jump start exploration. I’ve unconvered some special events - one was a credit reward, the other a colony ship with sleeping ancient race dudes good at research. I’ll check in on it when I load it back up.

Game creation is impressive. There are 5 or 6 galaxy sizes(smallest is dwarf, 150 stars), 4 galaxy shapes (spiral, eliptical, ring, irregular), and a bevy of additional options. You can play with research speeds, special event frequency, # of space creatures, # of independant empires, the “state” of your starting empire (size, tech development) as well as enemy empires.

Oh, you can zoom from th galaxy map down to an actual planet. However, this process isn’t particularly smooth (nothing like Sins). The devs are clearly pushing their engine to the limit. I do like being able to do this.

This sounds pretty sweet so far, with this(possible), Elemental and CivV my gaming needs look set to be filled very full. Please keep up the play impressions they sound very interesting.

Distant Worlds or Settlers 7 for me this weekend… I can’t decide… peacedogs AAR is inching me toward DW… though maybe I should just finish up my recently bought steam JC2 (not Jesus… Just Cause 2!)… and just bought Torchlight for 5 bux on steam… omg, i am a steam specials addict now!

Well, I investigated a ruins.

And released a Giant Kaltor. It seems to be making quite a mess, much more than the sand slugs. But it looks delicious, so I’ll see about killing it.

I sent a rather massive fleet to a pesky pirate base. As they were enroute my advisors popped up to suggest we attack it. Well, ok, I mean I already told them to you know? So they did. It went fantastic. So then I sent them to attack another base waaaaaaay over there. And as I was waiting for this to happen (there are game speed controls but they are totally bizzare. The “>” button slows down the game. the “>>>>” button speeds it up. They could have chosen better chocies. Anywya, I’ve seen .25, .5, 1, 2 and 4x. There may even be a 1.5), I started noticing “Ship XXX running low on fuel” and my fleet was nowhere near the pirate base. Eventually the fleet ships with fuel got there and got beat up, and I have this string of ships sort of hanging out on the edge of the system and beyond.

So I figured I’d design a resupply ship. Well apparently I did it wrong because while I selected resupply as the role and added all the components I had to add (there’s basically acheck list based on role type) and some extra ones, you know,for good measure (engines and fuel cells and stuff), I can’t get them to do anything. So I screwed them up somehow. I really need to resupply the ships (I guess?) somehow. At times the game can be frustrating when you want to do this one specific thing.

The screen for colonizing (also mining/resource hunting) is nice. You can zoom to a planet on the list, right-click on it, and sleect “build a colony ship and colonize”, and you’ll be informed where the ship is being built. It’s not necessary, though. You can just click on a planet on the list and select “colonize” and the same thing will happen. If a planet is already targeted the colonize button is greyed out. It’s a swell feature; we’ve long passed the point where space 4x games needed to start thinking from a macro perspective. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with all the automation yet (and I think there will be a good deal of micro without it, albeit some of it through superior interface enhancements), but the fact is we should be colonizing in this manner and not “build scout, manually select scouting, build colony, manually select planet”. In DW at least, that’s basically a two step process (build scout, let it do its thing, find a colonizeable planet and engage; though with all automation on your worlds will probably beat you to the punch!).

So I had this really sweep colony world and I got beaten to it by the green empire. And they’re ridiculously far ahead of me in all score measures (more on that in a moment). There’s no catching them in site. I’m flooding the galaxy with scouts but I simply cannot find many worlds to live on. Some planets are never colonizeable, but you eventually tech up to be able to colonize more worlds. As such, I’m trying to bulk up my research efforts. I can’t pick what gets research, but I can boost the efforts.

Now, with the minor races, apparently you can colonize a world they live on even if you couldn’t normally (e.g. tutorial says you can never colonize a volcano world on your own). You can try to colonize such worlds and assimilate, or take it by force. The latter will hurt your reputation, and the former can be resisted.

As for scoring, the game has typical end game objectives (territory, population, one other one I am forgetting - and these have custom percentages you can enforce - military, I think a tech option. Oh, a turn limit where I think high score wins And you can forgo all victory options and chose sandbox, which I am doing now). You can also set some other sort of time restriction (I think a minimum time before the conditions can be met).

Damn, that sounds pretty awesome, peacedog. :)

Dear yellow race: I have no idea what the megasomething something something technology is. I would love to buy it. Seeing as I have 50k credits roughly (my income is really healthy, though I’m not sure how it works. I’ve got +218k income. I look up occasionally and the available credits goes up, but not by near that amount), I’m still 1.9 million short of the purchase price. So, uh, sorry about that.

(that was a little odd; I’ve already done some tech brokering, and not seen anything go for a crazy price. Also, I wish there was a galactopaedia link for the tech on the diplomacy screen, but there isn’t).

Also, Kaltor are space lobster. Seeing that the only variety I have encountered is the Giant Kaltor, that should make for a shitload of good eatin.

I hope this is one which gets some time on Three Moves Ahead, it seems to be getting a lot of love over at Matrix Games. I’ll be spending some time with it this weekend.