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Distant Worlds (with expansions)

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
Spent too much time fighting the ai. After a while I worked everything out except the unit designer. That was still a fight with the ai or tedious to manually update. Possibly the reason my bases keep getting destroyed.
I don't think you're putting enough GUNS on your bases. Under ugly conditions, I've designed and constructed gas mining stations capable of defending themselves against a continuous onslaught from a massive AI armada. The area was so heavily contested that there were chewed up AI ships everywhere, quite a rare thing when you consider what it takes to disable an enemy ship without destroying it, leaving it dead in space to be ignored as a target.

Also could not get the ai to invade properly. Had to spend most of my time ordering and waiting for one huge fleet to refule repair load and invade home planets.
Invading is quite simple: Direct your assault transport to load up on armies. Then drop them onto the AI's planet. I am not sure why you would entrust a strategic decision like what to invade and when to do it to the AI...

Invading does not require any stations to ever be destroyed. In fact a successful invasion captures any orbiting station.
Which you then destroy anyway, because the AI sucks at building stations. After all, it completely failed to build a station capable of defending the planet. My new Gargantuan Space Port will do a much better job! Yeah, the original baseline models of "Small", "Medium", and "Large" spaceports didn't cut it for me. I designed both a Tiny space port, as well as the Huge, Gargantuan, and Colossal Space ports. I never actually got around to finishing the construction of a Colossal Space Port, but I did regularly deploy Huge and Gargantuan ones. But a 32000-size Colossal Space Port apparently just cost too much, and I was forced to settle for the 16000-ish Gargantuans instead. And man, were they a sight to behold: So enormous that they could blot out small planets, so deadly they could lay waste to everything in the game the AI could throw at it at once.

The speed at which ships warp is too fast to kill anything.
Install interdictor generators on your ships. They won't be running much anymore, and the AI's subwarp speeds leave something to be desired. Apparently they aren't into building mammoth battleships that should rightly be capable of devastating a planet with their rocket exhaust alone, with the result that my slowest battleship is about 4 times faster than the AI's comparable ships. And also about 4 times larger. Sure, the AI may be able to afford dozens of times more ships than me, but when his fleet meets up against one of my ships, his fleet is reduced to flaming wreckage while mine is completely unscathed, so WHO'S LAUGHING NOW?
 
Joined
Dec 28, 2012
Messages
6,657
Location
Rape

Hobo Elf

Arcane
Joined
Feb 17, 2009
Messages
13,999
Location
Platypus Planet
But stardrive has real mods which satisfy many tastes while DW does not.

It also has 0 content

How is it any different than most other 4X games?

It's not. It's just as banal and boring as 90% of them. Or, should I say, most recently released ones.

DW has insane modability as per the last expansion at least. I had abandoned it for a year, gonna pick it up and see what I can make.

Fair enough. I don't disagree with you although I did enjoy StarDrive for its ship building mechanics. Of course it is only bitter sweet fun that gets crushed by the atrocious combat.
 
Joined
Dec 28, 2012
Messages
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Location
Rape
I liked ship design too as well as the colony supply needs for growth. Combat, research and moddability (and the devs abandoning it for stardrive 2) killed it for me.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,819
Location
Italy
just tried it.
it would have been good if only it hadn't suffered so much of chronic lack of informations.
also the tech tree is too short.
that's shame because it's fun to start just by exploring your own solar system and end conquering thousands more.
 
Joined
Apr 3, 2013
Messages
2,071
Location
Siberia
Yup, hundreds of pop-ups appear when someone farts in general direction of your outpost, but when AI's colony ship enters your space or space controlled by your ships, you get nothing. Fucking space-rats cockblocked me 3 times in 10 minutes, got all suitable planets and now I have to wage war, build a shit ton of troop ships just to get what essentially was mine.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,819
Location
Italy
after reaching mid-game twice i had to ditch this game. it's just a mess of interesting features.
europa universalis works because every information in no farther than two clicks away and nothing is hidden; here you can have pirate bases right under your nose in plain sight and not knowing it because the interface won't help you.
in a game big like this one interface and clarity are essentials. it has neither.
 

Raapys

Arcane
Joined
Jun 7, 2007
Messages
4,960
Once you've discovered them, pirate bases show up as fairly large icons on the zoomed-out map.
 
Joined
Jan 7, 2012
Messages
14,152
Once you've discovered them, pirate bases show up as fairly large icons on the zoomed-out map.

Problem is discovering them. Once you've conducted the initial galaxy exploration run there's no auto-search for your explorers, meaning you need to manually check up on sectors to see if anything new has popped up.
 
Joined
Mar 3, 2010
Messages
8,819
Location
Italy
in my experience, those in deep space were showing as a thin blue cross. pirates active into your system are effectively hidden.
 

Raapys

Arcane
Joined
Jun 7, 2007
Messages
4,960
Maybe it'd be easier if you put those long range scanner things on your space stations?
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
in my experience, those in deep space were showing as a thin blue cross. pirates active into your system are effectively hidden.
I don't think pirates can ever spawn inside systems controlled by an empire. Pirates only spawn in areas which you haven't inhabited.

That's said, here's how you control Pirates:
The thing to understand about pirates is that they emulate the small-ship designs (Frigate, Destroyer, etc) of other empires. A pirate ship design is a snowclone of one of these designs, possibly YOUR designs. Therefore, if you design a well-made Destroyer, it will end up in pirate hands and make your life HELL, seeing as they don't have to pay the outlandish pricetags a player-made ship costs to build. If, on the other hand, you build your ships as capships, they'll be forced to come up with their own ships, which, in keeping with AI designs, are slow, weak, and undergunned. They pick a fight with one of your mining stations, there will be an expanding cloud of monatomic gas before you can even notice the problem. Let's just say I learned about this problem the hard way when I designed a REALLY nice Destroyer...never quite got around to BUILDING any, but suddenly they become Pirate Ships. They were an utter menace to the AI, destroying entire armadas singlehandedly, and had to be hunted down by a massive battlegroup, as they could outrun the battleships sent to kill them and outfight anything else, so the only way to bring them down was to surround them and concentrate enough firepower on them at once that they couldn't outtank it long enough to squeeze their way through and escape. Suffice it to say I never designed anything like that again.

It may also be possible to pollute the pool by designing intentionally bad ships you never build.
 

Blaine

Cis-Het Oppressor
Patron
Joined
Oct 6, 2012
Messages
1,874,662
Location
Roanoke, VA
Grab the Codex by the pussy
Distant Worlds is currently on sale on GOG. Considering the huge sticker price the game usually carries, this might be a good time to pick it up if that's been holding you back.
 

uaciaut

Augur
Joined
Feb 18, 2013
Messages
505
What the hell do you do with the spy/intelligence sytem? I've lost more spies to ~90% success missions than to low-chance missions, i swear to god it's like the system wants me to send all my spies on low-odd missions and save-scum till all make it out alive (which is really fucking often). I've decided to actually automate this part (as i do exploration mid-late game), but maybe i'm doing something wrong, any suggestions?
 

Blaine

Cis-Het Oppressor
Patron
Joined
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Messages
1,874,662
Location
Roanoke, VA
Grab the Codex by the pussy
What the hell do you do with the spy/intelligence sytem? I've lost more spies to ~90% success missions than to low-chance missions, i swear to god it's like the system wants me to send all my spies on low-odd missions and save-scum till all make it out alive (which is really fucking often). I've decided to actually automate this part (as i do exploration mid-late game), but maybe i'm doing something wrong, any suggestions?

Very bad luck, probably.

My first game of DW, I sent a spy to steal the Mechanoid galaxy map with a 34% chance, and he succeeded. Huge portions of the map were visible to me. In general, I've succeeded pretty much as one would expect with 80-90% success rates, so I can't give you any advice because that's never happened to me; my most recent game was as humans, so I did quite a lot of spying. I only had a few get caught, and none "went on vacation."

If you're sending spies to spy on the Ketarov, humans, or other intelligence-heavy races running effective counter-intel with their own spies, that might be the culprit. It's possible the calculations don't take into account 3+ spies sitting on someone's homeworld all running counter-intel; as perhaps they shouldn't, since after all, counter-intelligence is supposed to be conducted in secret.

Try spying on the typical galactic fucktards who only shit out troop generals and poop hats, and see how that works?
 

uaciaut

Augur
Joined
Feb 18, 2013
Messages
505
I have decided to purposely NOT research "Enhanced Resource Exploration" (the thing that lets my scout-type ships explore faster i.e. find what resources unknown planets have from further away) - to force the fuckers to get close to every planet so i don't miss out on ruins when i automate them.

Is this a brilliant idea or a completely retarded one pls tell me.
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
alright dudes it's the last day of the gog sale and I wanna know if I'm gonna like this shit

I recently bought Space Empires IV and it's good shit (mostly) -- I especially like the big ol' tech tree -- but the UI is pretty bad in the sense of it takes a lot of clicks to do basic, routine shit (examples: rather than put your relative resource income on the main screen with the current stockpile, you have to press F11 to go into a special report screen. Putting ships in a fleet together requires you to click on a ship, click on fleet transfer, click on create fleet, and then click on the ships you want to add to the fleet. As opposed to e.g. shift-clicking on the ships you want and then clicking 'create fleet' or 'add to fleet' or whatever. Colonising worlds also requires you to memorise what the planet you want is because there are no tooltips on mouseover, so fuck you if you click on Yavin III instead of Yavin II etc. etc.). This isn't a huge issue because I bought it to PBEM with a friend so time is not at a premium but all the futzing around gets tiresome in single player when I just wanna smash turns as fast as poss.

Anyway I want a 4x with a fair bit of detail (MOO1 still reigns supreme for simpler stuff, and probably always will), and this looks like it has enough autism to keep me pretty happy, but I gather that the interface is not all that great, so my question is, is it annoying in the 'lots of clicks' way as described above or is it just a bit obscure/ugly? Because I can deal with the latter. OK peace out

ps. commemorating 1000 shitty posts

QpGEbpL.gif
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
alright that's the excuse I wanted, cheers bro. I also got noomoo (for future generations, GOG were giving it away for free in the latest sale to anyone who spent >50 dollarydoos. ie. I didn't pay money for it) so... yep.
 

Grif

Learned
Joined
Nov 4, 2016
Messages
231
Been trying this out. Ho boy, I keep getting nuked ny pirates. Any tips on dealing with them aside from "pay them off till you're ready to crush 'em?" It gets annoying to deal with all the popups offering protection.
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
after a few hours of play, the interface isn't too bad. the main issue I'm having right now is the fact there doesn't seem to be any way to add ships to your current selection (in the manner of shift-click-n-drag in an RTS) other than adding them to a fleet and then painstakingly adding individual ships or small selections of ships to that fleet (all I wanna do is put all my troop transports in a couple of big fleets for easy invasions). Oh and there doesn't seem to be any way to delete items from order queues other than manual cancellation while the job is going on.* The empire management tools are pretty nice though, I like how easy it is to find specific resources from the F3 screen and then queue up a new mining base or colony to exploit it.

Anyway I played a quickstart game as the Sluken, which turned out to be a race well suited to my playstyle, and ended up at the top of the leaderboards without really knowing what I was doing (I had to reload a couple times due to fleets of 15 ships leaving the position I explicitly ordered them to due to one or two of them being damaged, and then the follow up invasion force being inevitably decimated. Fucking automation man), so I started again with a pre-stellar human empire and a lot of the automation stuff turned off. Ultimately my entire home system was decimated by a single pirate vessel (3x the shields and 5x the firepower of my own largest ships) due to having to pay roughly half a dozen different pirate factions protection money and so having no income. In conclusion, Grif I have no good advice for you.

* actually, on aggregate, the UI does suck. Ignore this post
 

Baptismbyfire

Liturgist
Joined
Sep 9, 2012
Messages
182
after a few hours of play, the interface isn't too bad. the main issue I'm having right now is the fact there doesn't seem to be any way to add ships to your current selection (in the manner of shift-click-n-drag in an RTS) other than adding them to a fleet and then painstakingly adding individual ships or small selections of ships to that fleet (all I wanna do is put all my troop transports in a couple of big fleets for easy invasions). Oh and there doesn't seem to be any way to delete items from order queues other than manual cancellation while the job is going on.* The empire management tools are pretty nice though, I like how easy it is to find specific resources from the F3 screen and then queue up a new mining base or colony to exploit it.

Anyway I played a quickstart game as the Sluken, which turned out to be a race well suited to my playstyle, and ended up at the top of the leaderboards without really knowing what I was doing (I had to reload a couple times due to fleets of 15 ships leaving the position I explicitly ordered them to due to one or two of them being damaged, and then the follow up invasion force being inevitably decimated. Fucking automation man), so I started again with a pre-stellar human empire and a lot of the automation stuff turned off. Ultimately my entire home system was decimated by a single pirate vessel (3x the shields and 5x the firepower of my own largest ships) due to having to pay roughly half a dozen different pirate factions protection money and so having no income. In conclusion, Grif I have no good advice for you.

* actually, on aggregate, the UI does suck. Ignore this post

Go to their Matrix forum and download the "AI Enhanced with More Alien Races" or something like that MOD. It's A MANDATORY MOD, and will enhance ur gameplay 1000X!!!!!!
 

Lord Rocket

Erudite
Joined
Feb 6, 2008
Messages
1,089
Considering I got utterly facefucked by pirates in a normal difficulty game I think I'll avoid mods that make the game harder, at least until I get a better handle on the game (assuming the mod you mean is this one. Although it doesn't have any new races so maybe it isn't). I'll try it out when I suck less balls though
 

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