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4X Distant Worlds 2 - RTwP 4x space strategy sequel

TripJack

Hedonist
Joined
Aug 9, 2008
Messages
5,132
https://www.slitherine.com/game/distant-worlds-2




https://af.gog.com/game/distant_worlds_2?as=1649904300

matrix finally released a tiny bit info about this one, guess it's coming out next year :incline:

https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4737456
First, we confirmed that Distant Worlds 2 will be a 2020 release and there will be a beta test starting sometime next year. Watch this forum for more news on that.



A Teekan Spaceport in orbit around a planet

We’ve been working on Distant Worlds 2 for more than four years now and we thought it was time to start giving you a few peeks behind the curtain. There is much more we’ll be showing over the coming months, but we’ll give you a first look today.

Please note that the screenshots included here are not from a final, polished release build so will in places include some unfinished areas and missing or placeholder art. There is much that is still subject to change between our current development build and the release.

In general, our goal for Distant Worlds 2 was to make a better Distant Worlds 1, with a new and modern engine. That is a pretty tall order given that by the time we got to the final Distant Worlds: Universe release, about nine years of development and design had gone into Distant Worlds 1.

Distant Worlds 2 is based on an entirely new 64-bit, multi-core capable 3D engine which provides us better performance and the ability to create even larger galaxies with more to explore, more stories to tell and even larger battles. In addition, it allows us to support a fully scalable interface.


A Mortalen Spaceport with component slot markers turned on

For this first peek, we’d like to speak briefly about Ship Design. In this screenshot, you can see the ship design interface and a view of a Mortalen Spaceport.

In Distant Worlds 1, ships were two dimensional units basically defined by their size. Size determined how much could fit in a ship. Each component that could fit in a ship had a size and while you needed some minimum components to get a ship to work, beyond that you could put in whatever you wanted, as long as you stayed within the maximum size. Your size was also essentially your bag of hit points and any damage that wasn’t soaked up by your shields or your armor started destroying components.

In Distant Worlds 2, ships are a bit more interesting.


A Mortalen Spaceport with component slot markers turned off

For one thing, they are now three dimensional models. For another, ships now have a hull, which has its own armor rating and ability to take damage, as well as additional space that can fit components.

That additional space is divided into slots, which are organized by the broad component category they are intended to fit. When a ship takes a hit, assuming it gets past the shields (which now can allow some damage to “leak” through, but also can have some base resistance against small shots, similar to the reactive rating for armor) and the armor, it may hit the hull or it may hit a component.

If your hull is too badly damaged, your ship will be destroyed. If you lose the wrong components, you could also be effectively dead in space, but not necessarily destroyed.

When you are deciding how to build a ship now, you first research a hull, which defines the hull armor, hull size and the size and number of components it can fit.


This is a shot of an Ackdarian Construction Ship

Some of these component slots are external (for example, all the weapons and engine, the hangar, some of the defenses). In the case of an external slot, adding a component there is actually reflected on the 3D model of the ship. A ship with four weapons will have four visible weapons, whereas a ship with one will only have one. A ship that has filled out all its possible engine slots to be as fast as possible will visible have more engines, and so on.

In many cases, this means that you can see significant differences in the ship model based on the design style chosen for a particular ship. It’s worth noting that you almost never have enough available space in the hull to fill every possible slot. As with Distant Worlds 1, you can choose to specialize a ship in one or a few areas, or to try to balance its capabilities across all areas.

Within the ship design interface, you can easily view the different categories of components, review the component slots in your selected hull and also see the visualization of the ship and the component slot locations in the center. The right side allows you to see a summary of your ship’s capabilities in a variety of areas.

There’s more to say about ship design, but that’s all we will cover for now. We’ll leave you with a few screenshots that show a bit more of the game.


This is an Ackdarian Spaceport in orbit around an Ocean Planet


This is view of the planet Sreloor 5 and its moons


This is view of a red gas giant with a mining station in orbit




This is a peek at the main interface, still work in progress, but showing a system view in the center, various main interface dialogs in the top left, including the Military one which is open, the selection dialog in the bottom left with some information regarding the selected Mortalen Destroyer, a summary of the planets, ships and stations in the system being viewed in the bottom center, map overlay toggles in the bottom right and victory, settings, message and speed controls in the top right.
 
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jebsmoker

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Nov 17, 2019
Messages
2,578
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In I helped put crap in Monomyth
this looks *amazing* for an indie 4X, not gonna lie, although i always found the low-fidelity 2D visuals in the original game to be very endearing
 

Raapys

Arcane
Joined
Jun 7, 2007
Messages
4,960
Not sure I like the Hardpoints idea. I've never really found that to be an improvement over MoO's original 'fill all the free space' approach.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
:necro:

Steam page.



There will be gameplay reveal livestream today.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1531540/view/3059601183983534832

Distant Worlds 2: What's New
Distant Worlds 2 v. Distant Worlds: Universe


Distant Worlds, the critically acclaimed 4X space strategy game is back with a brand new 64-bit engine, 3D graphics and a polished interface to begin an epic new Distant Worlds series with Distant Worlds 2.

Major Improvements and changes from Distant Worlds: Universe:

- 64-bit multi-threaded 3D-based Engine and completely new architecture and code base removes previous memory limitations and performance bottlenecks, allowing large galaxies and better performance overall as well as excellent compatibility with modern hardware and operating systems.

- A vast, immersive and dramatic galactic environment rendered in 3D with ships, stations, weapon effects and animations all a major step forward from the classic 2D Distant Worlds.

- A fully scalable and re-designed User Interface, fully integrated with the map view to allow the player easy access to relevant information and much better awareness of all the activities going on in and around their systems.

- Improved AI both for AI opponents and player AI assistance and advisors

- Seven playable factions at release, each with a full 3D ship and station set as well as full animated character art: Humans, Ackdarians, Mortalen, Zenox, Boskara, Teekans and Haakonish. These were chosen from the original factions to cover a wide variety of playstyles, especially when combined with the available Government choices: Democracy, Feudalism, Republic, Monarchy, Mercantile Guild, Military Dictatorship, Technocracy, Hive Mind.

- Improved Diplomacy, including many possible first contact outcomes and more options for trade and treaties as well as tracking of diplomatic reputation by empire.

- Expanded Resource system with resources varying in rarity and luxury resources offering other bonuses beyond just colony development. Resources are also somewhat less abundant and require more effort to extract. The more rare Construction resources allow you to unlock the best technologies and components. Additionally, with access to enough of the right luxury resources, significant benefits can be gained including pushing colony development well past 100%. Resource stock levels can be automated or controlled in full at each planet at station.

- More fine-grained exploration, including sensors that in the early game can’t fully cover the width of a system. Ships may be visible but not identifiable. Unexplored systems in sensor range may show how many planets are there but require actual exploration to determine type and resources. Specific locations can now contain both what can be seen on the surface level as well as other hidden ruins or bonuses that will only be found with additional exploration (though improved scanners and better survey teams, or ongoing mining or colonization).

- Galactic nebula clouds form difficult barriers, giving natural 'geography' to the galaxy. Ships navigate around these by default because hyperjump movement inside nebula clouds is much slower and other damaging effects can occur. Hyperdrives now also have a maximum jump range for a single jump. This means traveling to distant locations often involves “star-hopping” through multiple star systems rather than just following a straight-line route. This creates additional challenges and choke-points in the galaxy.

- Expanded influence over state funding choices, allowing prioritization of maintenance and reserved income as well as bonus funding.

- More options for automation, now down to the ship role level. For example, Construction ships can be set to Full Automatic control, to Auto-Build Mining Stations or Auto-Build Research Stations or Auto-Salvage, etc. Exploration ships can Auto-Explore, Auto-Scout or Auto-Spy on Enemy systems. In addition, at the Policy level you can now choose whether your Advisors Suggest and Execute (they’ll act on the suggestion unless you tell them you disagree) or just Suggest (no action will be taken unless you explicitly agree).

- A more detailed damage model for space combat. Components can now be partially damaged but not destroyed, weapons can have bleed-through damage against both shields and armor, shields can have resistance allowing flat damage reduction as well as a chance based on the shield type to allow some damage through. Ion weapons now have specific damage against different component types, intercept weapons (point defense) now have different ratings against multiple target types and can engage seeking weapons, fighters and bombers and even direct-fire or full-length beams if they have that capability.

- Research by default is both blind (only see the next projects that link to the ones you have already researched) and has probability-based pre-requisite and fall-back paths (alternate paths to unlock projects) which means that each time you play, the Research tree can vary and the paths many not be the same. This can also be changed in the setup options to allow for full visibility and fixed paths for more predictability.

- Research bonuses now not only speed up research in a particular area, but also are required to unlock key technology threshholds to progress further in the research tree. You can gain these bonuses from research locations built at important scientific locations. For example, progressing to Fast Jump Hyperdrives now requires a 20% minimum research bonus in Hyperdrives. Research projects may also now require an initial investment of credits or resources prior to initiation.

- Ship and Base Construction will now only commence once all required resources are available. This prevents incomplete construction waiting for resources to be delivered.

- Population policies can now be set for each species at each colony.

- Independent colonies now often have unique bonuses and otherwise non-playable species and will engage in diplomacy with you for trade and possibly to join your empire. Alternately, they can be conquered and assimilated by force, but no longer will just sending a colony ship be enough to bring them to your side.

- Fleets and Armies can now have defined templates and ships within a fleet will act according to their roles in fleet engagements, with some ships attempting to form an outer perimeter while close escorts stay with the capital ships focused towards the center. Fleets now also have more tactical settings and options to help fine-tune their control and automation.

- The interface is now designed to work alongside the galaxy map. Only the ship design and research screens are full-screen. You will find that when you have a part of the interface open, let’s say a list of ships, the objects in that list will be highlighted on the map and hovering or clicking on an item in the list will “ping” the map at its location or give it an extra highlight. This makes it quick and easy to get a sense of where everything is and what it’s doing.

- Full 3D Ship Design with ship hulls that unlock up to a certain size and have a variety of component bays. Components can be placed within a matching bay and external bays, such as for weapons, are fully visible on the model when a component is placed there. Typically it is difficult to fill all slots for a particular hull, allowing for specialization choices within the maximum design size available. Ships hulls now also have a separate hull and armor rating, which can absorb some of the damage that gets past armor and shields but whic may not hit a component. Compared to Distant Worlds 1, ships are generally more durable and require more effort to destroy.

- New weapon firing and hit effects, including particle effects, to bring your custom-designed ships and 3D space battles to life!

- A new Message system with full message filtering settings as well as a complete message log and the usual alert and pop-out messages depending on the importance of the event.

- New Map Overlays for Resource Flows, Migration Flows, Tourism Flows, Location Badges (which summarize most of what you want to know about a system or planetary location at a glance) and Diplomatic Relations.

- A new Storyline which calls back to the original Distant Worlds, but with new previously unseen threats in each era of the game and more for each faction to find and explore about the lore of the Ancient era of the galaxy and the specific role of their ancestors as that history unfolded, leading to the cataclysm that destroyed the Ancient era, brought on the Age of Shadows and eventually the current era, where planetary civilizations are venturing back to the stars again.
 

Alfgart

Augur
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Feb 7, 2006
Messages
390
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Dev stream with gameplay and tons of info


So far, it looks like an updated DW:U with better graphics and UI, and that makes it perfect
 

sser

Arcane
Developer
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Messages
1,866,661
Also an exciting part is... Starship Troopers reveal in 1 week.
 

Mefi

Prophet
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waiting for a train at Perdido Street Station
Sounds like release date for this may be slipping again. According to Slitherine, they're in a 10 day period of trying to figure out what the beta feedback means for the release date. WIth releasing on Steam too there's that obvious pressure to minimise the jank in a way which isn't there when they can release on Slitherine's own site and spend time post-release tidying up.
 
Joined
Aug 27, 2021
Messages
698
Will this one be as full of promise and as inept on the delivery as the original?
No, it will be worse.

I played quite a few games of Distant Worlds Universe, after they had all the time they needed to patch it and fix things and what have you. It had some interesting experiences and some puzzle solving early on to figure out how best to allocate taxes and such, but it was not a finished game.

The AI was braindead. It couldn't even defend itself against the stupid pirates, never mind other factions. So yeah, you can automate things, but only if you don't give a shit how they turn out.
The text was too small. It couldn't be resized. How is this ever a thing? How do you fuck up displaying text? But I could work with it, so although it was annoying it wasn't a gamebreaker.
Late game, the notification spam was absurd. Like 5 notifications every second about some stupid fucking thing.
The combat was kinda dull, but it worked well enough for its purpose. I dunno, fleet balls teleporting on top of each other is boring but so is stellaris combat so I dunno. Maybe it's fine.
The economy stuff didn't really completely work. It was a really neat idea and the civilian economy is what made this game stand out in the first place, but it didn't scale properly. If you had a sprawling empire resources just wouldn't get where they needed to be.

You could set up macro orders, like marking targets to attack and letting your ai commander handle it. This was a great idea. It didn't work at all in practice, the AI was just too shitty at the military part of the game. Defense orders could also be created. These seemed to just not work period.

The pirates at the beginning of the game were obnoxious. You start off utterly defenseless, the first thing that happens is the pirates come and extort you. Fine, that's cool, gives you an early game problem to solve. The initial contact seems coded to be reasonable for that part of the game. But, later, more pirates can come and also make demands. And it takes a while before you have any chance of fighting them off.

The solution the playerbase seemed to come to was to pay off the pirates whenever they show up, then immediately cancel the ongoing payments. Rinse and repeat every single time pirates hassle you, until you can kill them. A cool early game problem turns into a micromanagement hell devoid of meaningful decision making.

The ship design was cool, I love being able to design my own stuff in a game, even if it's utterly pointless. One of the many reasons I enjoyed SMAC so much. The fact that I could design civilian ships and bases, then throw weaponry on them that I wouldn't have to pay upkeep for seemed silly. Realizing that they pay the upkeep cost to me was hilarious, but indicates another poorly implemented part of the game. Surely I am not supposed to get a shitload of money from forcing the civilians to put more guns on their mining bases. That makes no sense. Still, it kept the pirates from being too annoying.


Also, more minor but still relevant, the sounds and graphics were awful. I don't mean there weren't enough polygons or what have you, everything just looked like a cheap asset rip off. When building a starbase, it made the wood sawing and hammering noises straight out of warcraft 2. I overlooked this stuff but it certainly didn't help the experience.

I played the shit out of distant worlds, I wanted to like it, I wanted to find the right way to play and set things up so it lived up to its potential, but there was too much holding it back. The devs never fixed so many glaring bugs. Every single thing had rough edges and annoyances. The devs played dumb regarding feedback and bug reports, and tried to hide behind the game's complexity (It's not that the game is buggy, you just don't understand the right way to do it).

I won several campaigns on the hardest difficulty, but since the AI is so terrible you're basically just playing against yourself and trying to find better ways to win faster, or what have you.
 

Space Satan

Arcane
Vatnik
Joined
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Messages
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Space Hell
slitherine_logo_6.png

Know the Mark of Mediocricy
Hate the Mark of Mediocricy
Shun the Mark of Mediocricy
Treat the Mark of Mediocricy like Kalypso
 

Mefi

Prophet
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waiting for a train at Perdido Street Station


As was expected really, although yet another wave of beta testers for anyone interested in trying it out. Marco, Slitherine's marketing manager, was saying last week that the crunch was already on for the team trying to meet existing beta feedback so I kind of hope that moving the game into next year will give them time and space not to be doing that while still getting it to a place where it won't be review bombed for being a buggy mess on release.
 

Norfleet

Moderator
Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
Surely I am not supposed to get a shitload of money from forcing the civilians to put more guns on their mining bases. That makes no sense. Still, it kept the pirates from being too annoying.
I would go overboard with this at times to the point where enemies would show up and feel the might of this fully armed and fully operational battlestation. Yes, I installed a frikken Death Star lazor on it.

The game came with the classifications of Small, Medium, and Large spaceports...I ended up expanding this into Huge and Gargantuan Spaceports. I had a PLAN for a Colossal Spaceport, but it never ended up getting built.
 
Joined
Aug 27, 2021
Messages
698
I predict it will be laughably bad. Like, missing assets, blatantly incomplete, completely nonworking mechanics. I predict it'll ship completely broken, a half ass patch will come out that fixes 1/8th of the issues, then they'll fuck off for 6 months, at which point they'll try to sell us DLC.

I bet 200 kodex kool kredits, which I do not have.
 
Joined
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Kangaroo Island
I predict it will be laughably bad. Like, missing assets, blatantly incomplete, completely nonworking mechanics. I predict it'll ship completely broken, a half ass patch will come out that fixes 1/8th of the issues, then they'll fuck off for 6 months, at which point they'll try to sell us DLC.

I bet 200 kodex kool kredits, which I do not have.
so just like the base game before 4 expansions?
 

LizardWizard

Cipher
Joined
Feb 14, 2014
Messages
991
I predict it will be laughably bad. Like, missing assets, blatantly incomplete, completely nonworking mechanics. I predict it'll ship completely broken, a half ass patch will come out that fixes 1/8th of the issues, then they'll fuck off for 6 months, at which point they'll try to sell us DLC.

And it will still be more fun than Stellaris
 
Joined
Aug 27, 2021
Messages
698
I predict it will be laughably bad. Like, missing assets, blatantly incomplete, completely nonworking mechanics. I predict it'll ship completely broken, a half ass patch will come out that fixes 1/8th of the issues, then they'll fuck off for 6 months, at which point they'll try to sell us DLC.

And it will still be more fun than Stellaris
Well, obviously. That sort of goes without saying.
so just like the base game before 4 expansions?
I don't understand the reference. I only played distant worlds universe, so I'm not entirely clear on what it was like before that. Did they do that with the original distant worlds?
 

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