Is this update enough of a shakeup to turn any naysayers into admirers?
I just installed it. Looks neat. Now someone do some tutorial videos for 2.0 :)
As others stated, you lose buildings and pops due to collateral damage and bombardment. Fortress buildings can be conducted to prevent this loss until it gets destroyed, IIRC.
Decided to poke around for a little bit. Fun so far, but the early game was always fun. It does play very differently.
Curious if you can still research all the alien life forms you have found at once. That always seemed silly, but it’s probably better for playability. On the other hand I am not finding anywhere near as many alien life forms so far. Used to be you would find a few in the first hour, but I have only found one in that time.
It certainly takes longer to start finding lots of aliens, and I believe that is because borders expand more slowly than they used to (especially for the AI, as they don’t seem to branch out as aggressively as player outputs often will).
Also, the last time I played was 1.5. Have they dramatically reduced the number of habitable planets sometime between then and now? If so, what a great change!
Yeah, I’ve only found four habitable planets in my game so far, I feel like on Utopia I’d have at least twice that many colonised by now.
Likely not, if they’ve played Distant Worlds, but I’m looking forward to revisiting it and seeing how much has changed.
Eww, no.
Eeww you!
Speaking of that, any news picked up by Space Game Junkie HQ about the sequel? I wish they would be a little more forthcoming.
Some random questions. I played quite a bit (Steam says just over 100 hours), but haven’t played in quite a while.
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I can’t seem to build another Science Ship. It doesn’t show up in my list of ships and if I go into the Ship Designer, there’s nothing there that suggest I can design one. Is there now some tech I need to research to be able to do that?
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I also can’t seem to build a Colony Ship (I seem to recall that originally you needed to research the Colonization Tech, but then they got rid of that … did they add that back in, am I misremembering?). I don’t have any Colonization Tech in my list of available techs to research.
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I see options to either “Explore System” or “Survey System” if I have my Science Ship selected and I right-mouse on another system. What’s the difference between Explore and Survey?
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Build it on your home planet not your shipyard. Caught me out too.
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Same again, or click on the planet you want and choose Colonize.
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Survey forces the analysis of all planets and bodies, explore just visits the system.
Civilian ships can be built at any colonized planet, but not a star port shipyard which is military only.
Explore system is a quick fly by the system to allow your other ships to enter it, but will not reveal any anomalies or other features. Survey does what it did before, but is obviously slower than explore-only. I assume expore is preferred I’d you’re trying to make a beeline to an enemy, or looking only for colonizable planets.
Thanks @Wo1verine and @AK_Icebear I definitely was not going to figure out that that was on the Planet not the Spaceport with the miliatry ships. That seems weird, and I would have completely been stuck without you guys.
Wow, so they did! They made a pretty decent effort this time around.
And this was in it. Don’t be too proud to re-enable it, those who haven’t played in a while. :)
IGThf style aar+review:
WoT incoming.
Started a Gestalt whatever + Hive Mind intelligent+strong species, +1 influence civic.
600 systems, 1.25x habitable planets, 3.0x primitive species, 2 fallen, no advanced ai, 4 arm spiral, 1 tick less hyperlane density than default (quite close to the left end of the slider), the rest on default.
First time I ran out of influence to grab a new system was like… 3 hours into the game, most of it spent in speed 3.
Starting conditions for me: Decent home planet. System in a pipe. To one side, the pipe is like 8-10 system long, 1 wormhole in the 3rd or 4th system. Then it’s forked out to 2 lanes, with 4 and 6 systems, then they kind-of merge together again. The 6 long road contains a gateway somewhere. A 500+ roaming crystal fleet in the forking system. To the other side, 2 systems, both having one home planet style habitable, sizes 13 and 16 I think (smaller than the home planet). The 3rd system is another crossroad, to one way, the next system contains a 3k amoeba fleet, can bypass it, buth the 4th system contains 3x 600+ amoeba fleets, one of them on the entrance, so it was blocked for a good while. The other way is a 6+ long pipe with an other empire at the end, gateway in the 2nd system. Managed to grab 5 systems, then built a frontier outpost on the border with 2 platforms, expanded to 6 through the game.
The science ships while set to evade are very stupid in actual evading… They sometimes retreat to the next system, sometimes to the first claimed one, sometimes to my home planet. It seemed random.
You can’t build an outpost if there are hostiles in the system, even when they aren’t really menacing or not on the lane-to-lane line, but whatever.
Starbases are interesting. At first, I thought the limit is not enough. About 10min in the game I thought it’s unnecessary much. At the “end” it was a hard decision where to put my last (and 12th) one. The base one has 2 buildings (the upper slots) and 1 module (the lower ones), or the names switched, don’t remember. You want at least 2 shipyard slots every 15-20 distance because movement is really really Really slow… Starbases in systems with colonized planets and/or something else (primitive planets? enclave stations?) can build trade hub slots (4credit each, +2 if offworld trading something module installed), so inhabited systems want to go with that. If you do not manage to take a crossroad system (or you want to expand further), you’ll need several of those fortified ones. All-in-all, your starbase limit is either unused, or not enough.
I like the new starship design with the power source having it own slot. It takes care of the shield+power minmaxing stuff and having armor as a different way of shielding also feels as a good option to fill up the slots when running out of power for more shields. Yes, I still prefer shields over armor and might be a wrong practice down the road.
The fleet manager is nice, but I don’t like the way it queues up ships when not enough minerals to buy everything. It seems, as if it’s trying to spend as much mineral as possible. Example: I need 3 corvettess, 150m each, and 1 destroyer, 280m. I have 310m. Clicking the reinforce button, it will queue 2 corvettes, as they cost 300m, more than the destroyer’s 280. I’d prefer if it tries to queue up as much as possible of the most expensive ones. When minerals are left over, it would try the next one, then the second, and so on. :’(
The planetary building side also feels strange. In other games by this time I had several empire unique or special buildings, but not one here. Sure, I tend to play either spiritualist or materialist empires and they might have these special ones, and maybe I skipped some basic techs, like the one for the military academy. A the moment I have the basic science one (with it’s 3 upgrades), the mineral mine, that other mineral improvement, the energy plant, gene clinic, heritage site (+1 upgrade) and the bunker. Feels lacking.
Got 2 or 3 enclaves in my empire, but can’t interact with them due to my gestalt hive mind civic. :’( The nomads arrived very early. Tried to sell me 5 cruisers for 2k energy. Got 600 atm and already thinking I’m super rich (compared to my older games). Farmed up 2k energy if they ever try to sell them again, but no, they simply left the galaxy.
Even though I set primitives to 3x, I still found only one in my 70+ system empire.
The new edicts are… The only worthwhile for influence I found is the starting Map the Stars for 100inf. It’s going most of the time. The Farming subsidies might be useful if you’re in a tight situation to prevent starving until you find a permanent solution. But it costs 200inf, a lot more expensive. Then, there are 3 using food as cost. The +20% growth speed for 100 food is very good and feels cheap, it’s going non-stop. Then there’s a +25% leader experience gain for 50 food, and another one I dont remember for also 50 food. Theye’re are cheap but situational I think.
The AI is. No idea. There are rivalries flying left and right, some NAPs also. But only a single war I could see ending with white peace, no territorial gains. By the end all empires except one were “Inferior” to me. One neightbor’s home system had a 1,8k fleet while mine was 8k. This was the time when I was seriously considering a war myself, but it needs to be postponed because of the following event…
My game night ended, when my 71 big, 8k+ strong fleet entered an amoeba system with 22k+somehundreds fleets and went poof during and autosave. No combat alert, no after combat report, nothing. It just disappeared from the Military Fleets part of the outliner, from the fleet capacity usage, and the reinforcing ships got their own fleets. No “missing ships in transit” popup (or what it’s actually called). The whole happened during an autosave. So there is at least one gamebreaking bug.
I’ll let you know soon. ;)
I hope you’re happy, reinforcing Paradox’s DLC strategy.
I wouldn’t go so far as happy, but I am content.