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One thing I prefer to do is t split the private and state fuel sources once get that tech. It can get around gigantic wait times for fuel in the late game.
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May 26, 2014 16:23
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Thanks. I have another question, is there a way for me to tell which resources I am getting a steady supply of? The game already told me I lack helium, but I'd like some kind of overview as to how much I'm bringing in of each resource. e: being attacked by a pirate Capital Ship, it's destroying everything I have and I can't even make a dent in its shields. This is a pretty hardcore 'tutorial'. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 16:54 on May 26, 2014 |
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May 26, 2014 16:37
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Phlegmish posted:Thanks. I have another question, is there a way for me to tell which resources I am getting a steady supply of? The game already told me I lack helium, but I'd like some kind of overview as to how much I'm bringing in of each resource. The expansion planner has a resource summary that tells you how many sources of each and how much the resources cost.
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May 26, 2014 17:02
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I love Distant Worlds and have played since it first came out, but man gently caress its pirates. You're best off playing with the slider set to few or none, because even on normal you will feel constantly hounded.
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May 26, 2014 18:51
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Cantorsdust posted:I love Distant Worlds and have played since it first came out, but man gently caress its pirates. You're best off playing with the slider set to few or none, because even on normal you will feel constantly hounded. Just agree to pay them at first, always jumping on the chance to offer payment rather than have them demand it (it's much cheaper if you offer), then, once you start to get your hyperspace legs, pick the weakest pirate, cancel your agreements and throw everything you have at them (including hiring other pirates to off them). Slowly work your way up, pirate group by pirate group, and you'll have a bunch of safe core systems. Also design some defensive bases that are small enough that you can throw them up in space. Put them next to your major/important mining stations, like any of the gas mining stations you use to refuel from. I've thwarted whole pirate invasions with a few well built, well placed defensive bases. I'd set pirates to 'weak', though. I like playing on 'Many' and 'Weak' pirates because, eventually, the pirates will start to fight with each other so much that they'll fall over pretty easy to your or the AI's attacks. Occasionally, though, one set of pirates rise above the rest and amass a ridiculous fleet.
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May 26, 2014 19:24
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Zombie #246 posted:I believe itts a checkbox toward the botton of the main olptions when you hit esc ingame. I had to do that so my construction ships wouldn't run away as soon as I made them Found it! It's buried in a really odd place - escape. options, empire settings, very bottom of the window. Would be nice if it was easily accessible from the ... empire options screen without going through the menu/options button whatever, very glad to have found this!
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May 26, 2014 19:43
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Cantorsdust posted:I love Distant Worlds and have played since it first came out, but man gently caress its pirates. You're best off playing with the slider set to few or none, because even on normal you will feel constantly hounded. And yet playing as one is about as painful.
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May 26, 2014 19:46
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Just got this and played for about 2 hours in the first tutorial (pre-warp one). So far I'm really impressed, it's really cool seeing all the private ships doing their own thing after you've set up the infrastructure etc. Does the private sector run the risk of competing against the state? If so that'd be drat cool. Are there any fairly recent LPs? It would really help with regards to getting some sort of direction.
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May 26, 2014 19:51
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de_dust posted:Just got this and played for about 2 hours in the first tutorial (pre-warp one). So far I'm really impressed, it's really cool seeing all the private ships doing their own thing after you've set up the infrastructure etc. Does the private sector run the risk of competing against the state? If so that'd be drat cool. The game is hilariously poorly documented internally and externally. Each patch tends to change things. I found conflicting guides dating back to 2010 that were still being referenced on the matrix games forums. The game is way more difficult without understanding the underlying mechanics.
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May 26, 2014 19:53
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I'm going to give it another whirl tomorrow with Pirates set to Weak or something (I haven't even found that slider yet). One thing I have to say about the visuals on the main screen is that they can get really confusing. It's just a total clusterfuck near your main planet. I wish it was easier to tell the types of ship apart and that there was a clearer visual distinction between economic and military ships in particular. You almost have to use the hotkeys to manage them.
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May 26, 2014 20:30
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Phlegmish posted:I'm going to give it another whirl tomorrow with Pirates set to Weak or something (I haven't even found that slider yet). Press "D" and your ships will be outlined according to what they are: Triangles are Military Circles are Civilian Diamonds are Explorers Squares are Constructors Hexagons are Planets, Hexagons with Spikes are Bases One thing that might make your life easier is to just trust the AI automation, especially when you're just learning the game. Heck, even when you're good at the game your empires will reach a point where they're so large and so much poo poo is going on that you cannot sperg out nearly as much as you did early on. I'd argue that the thing that makes Distant Worlds such a great 4x is that the game impresses on you just how slow and titanic an interstellar government would be in reality. As for your home planet being a total clusterfuck, trust me once you get your bearings you'll see all that craziness as a sign that your empire's growing. One of my favorite moments in the game is when you just make that leap from dinky little planet to an emerging hub for trade and commerce. MLKQUOTEMACHINE fucked around with this message at 20:43 on May 26, 2014 |
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May 26, 2014 20:38
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Rhonyn Peacemaker posted:The game is hilariously poorly documented internally and externally. It's very true that its difficult if you don't know whats going on under the hood, but that's what the automation options are for. A few things off the top of my head that can really help a new player figure out how stuff works. 1. Resources are effectively infinite but are stored locally on your planets and starbases. You want to ensure a good supply of everything and generally leaving your construction ships on auto is the best option since they'll prioritise whatever it is you're short on. They will also build stuff for "free" as in they won't be spending the state treasury when they build mining bases like they'll do if you order them to build stuff manually. 2. Civilians move everything to where it's most needed, mining bases that are retrofitting to a new design don't need a construction ship but does need resources, this can sometimes cause bottlenecks if you manually upgrade your designs every blue moon. 3. Good designs are really powerful, but as a new player you absolutely should leave these on automatic until you know what you're doing. A popular min-max strategy is to design a cheap barebones starbase that's basically just a space dock with no weapons shields or armor because they're super cheap in maintenance and the hospital and entertainment modules will help new colonies grow. 4. Try to ally with races in your own sub group. Insectoids hate everyone except other insectoids, humanoids are generally tolerant however. 5. Always keep new colonies at 0% tax until they reach max population. This is a bit of a dumb system but sometimes you'll actually start stronger if you set your homeworld to 0% tax at the start and give it two years to grow while you just watch the screen doing nothing. When you set the tax back up to 40% you'll be able to expand at a ridiculous pace. But this is gamey so if you don't like that don't do it.
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May 26, 2014 20:44
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I got the game to run, but no I'm having an issue where it is putting parts of the menus and other things off the screen. There doesn't seem to be any options for resolution or anything. Any ideas?
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May 26, 2014 20:49
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Do you have updated graphic drivers?
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May 26, 2014 21:00
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I saw in one of the video LPs that if you go into ship designer you can change the graphic and size of the graphic on your ships too - might help if you want to differentiate them more, or make them smaller.
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May 26, 2014 21:35
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Dumb question, but how do I disband ships? I have run into a massive deficit.
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May 26, 2014 22:07
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de_dust posted:Dumb question, but how do I disband ships? I have run into a massive deficit. Probably an easier way but click on the ship, then right click retire->scrap
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May 26, 2014 22:41
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You can also right click and then give to -> any empire or pirate faction. Whenever someone bitches about me having a mining station in their territory I just give it away to one of their enemies.
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May 26, 2014 23:21
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Demiurge4 posted:A popular min-max strategy is to design a cheap barebones starbase that's basically just a space dock with no weapons shields or armor because they're super cheap in maintenance and the hospital and entertainment modules will help new colonies grow. I built one of these and a bunch of research stations around my homeworld. If I put med centers and recreation centers on each orbiting structure, will they all add up, or does only one station grant benefits to the planet? Also, I have a bunch of designs on manual upgrade but also set to retrofit automatically, and yet I've never seen this occur (not even the popup suggesting a retrofit that I sometimes see when everything is set to auto). Getting kind of tedious going through all my gas stations and retrofitting them manually. Is there a setting I've missed?
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May 26, 2014 23:22
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Hot Sexy Jupiter posted:I built one of these and a bunch of research stations around my homeworld. If I put med centers and recreation centers on each orbiting structure, will they all add up, or does only one station grant benefits to the planet? They don't stack. For retrofitting if you go into the ships and bases section (it's a button on the top right) you can bring up lists of ships or bases by type and then sort them by class so you can just select a bunch of them all at once and select retrofit.
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May 26, 2014 23:28
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Yeah, that's what I've been doing, but I guess I was expecting that if certain designs were set to retrofit automatically they'd retrofit . . . automatically.
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May 26, 2014 23:39
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Mining bases retrofit themselves over time, no need to do it manually. I think it happens at random because if they did it all at once the resource bottleneck would cripple your empire. Edit: In fact all civilian ships and structures retrofit by themselves. Only starbases, defence bases, listening posts and military ships require prompting.
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May 26, 2014 23:42
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The Graphics Enhancement Mod is a must-have, if only for the display changes it has for ships. It makes it much easier to tell the type just at a glance. http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3211317  You can pick and choose which assets you want replaced by this mod.
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May 27, 2014 02:10
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How do you keep empires out of the red once you discover FTL drives? the moment research is done my economy seems to crash into negatives fast
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May 27, 2014 02:47
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I'm looking to get back into this game after taking a long break from it. Is there anyway to set my ships to warp in at max range? I want to design my empire to use fast ships with few defenses and lots of weapons. I'm making the Minmatar basically. It seems like all ships warp at zero and start to brawl it out.
Travic fucked around with this message at 04:00 on May 27, 2014 |
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May 27, 2014 03:21
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Stevefin posted:How do you keep empires out of the red once you discover FTL drives? the moment research is done my economy seems to crash into negatives fast That's weird, around that time your economy should boom as you get tons of new income from new mines/faster travel.
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May 27, 2014 03:46
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I can't believe I didn't know this game existed until it hit steam, it's scratching that specific gaming itch where I get to watch an empire grow on a galactic scale. It's weirdly gratifying to see the private sector going off and doing its own things and being able to automate as much or as little as you want. It's super useful for not feeling overwhelmed with too many things at once.
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May 27, 2014 04:28
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Good to see it's still on the top 10 sellers, pulling in $50 a pop. I'm sure the dev is looking at the piles of cash coming in and asking Matrix "tell me again why this wasn't distributed on Steam years ago?"
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May 27, 2014 05:02
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Stevefin posted:How do you keep empires out of the red once you discover FTL drives? the moment research is done my economy seems to crash into negatives fast I have no idea what's going on half the time with the economy, but I go into huge amounts of red - numbers just to be pulled out by bonus income or whatever the hell the AI is doing. With automated taxes and the like I expect the automation going on tends to lower taxes for growth and only ups them at the last possible second - or lets trade do its work. Have you tried just waiting it out? Then again, if you're fully controlling most things yourself it probably doesnt apply.
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May 27, 2014 05:08
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nutranurse posted:That's weird, around that time your economy should boom as you get tons of new income from new mines/faster travel. Yeah I'm not sure. I do get more money par year, but some how some hidden factors I am loosing money through an un monitored black hole. I hit -50k and I scrap the game quote:I have no idea what's going on half the time with the economy, but I go into huge amounts of red - numbers just to be pulled out by bonus income or whatever the hell the AI is doing. I do play on auto and the automation has never moved the tax from 100% once on the capital planet in any game Oddly I did not fall in this money pit when there was no systems in range of current warp drive tech
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May 27, 2014 05:14
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V for Vegas posted:Good to see it's still on the top 10 sellers, pulling in $50 a pop. They've probably made more money in the time since Steam release than they ever made previously.
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May 27, 2014 05:16
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Matrix games president: "Wait...you mean more exposure and fairness to customers means more sales? ...I didn't know" -Later at home- *Head in hands sobbing* "I didn't know..."
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May 27, 2014 06:50
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Lets not act like Matrix wont spin this like taking 4 years to "refine and perfect" their "niche" product with their "loyal customers and appreciative fanbase" to create a "demand" wont be spinned accordingly.
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May 27, 2014 07:29
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I just want to read something like this but with more sobbing: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-all-our-games-are-now-cheaper.html That's Vogel of Spiderweb fame. quote:I'm a dumb person in plenty of key ways, so it took me a while to observe the key fact:
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May 27, 2014 07:58
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Bouchacha posted:I just want to read something like this but with more sobbing: http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/10/why-all-our-games-are-now-cheaper.html I remember getting Exile off a demo disc when I was around 12, two years later I think I got around the DRM and a whole new world opened up for me with RPG's. I've been playing their games ever since but never really branched outside of the Exile/Avernum series. I'm happy they got their heads out of their asses and are able to comfortably support their studio with all the indie money there is on steam. Plus they got in on Steam early-ish, before the dumb gold rush that greenlight brought. We'll see if the Distant Worlds dev see's all this crazy money (and I bet Matrix are taking a cut on top of Steam, heh) and decides he can make a pretty amazing Distant Worlds 2 with a few hires.
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May 27, 2014 08:07
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Westminster System posted:Lets not act like Matrix wont spin this like taking 4 years to "refine and perfect" their "niche" product with their "loyal customers and appreciative fanbase" to create a "demand" wont be spinned accordingly. The original release was pretty bad, but Legends (2 years ago) brought it up to much the same shape it is now.
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May 27, 2014 08:13
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Here's an interesting new thing you can do in the expansion: play in an existing galaxy map. My first game with the expansion I just did the pirate random quickstart and played as some Ackdarian age of shadows balanced pirates. I thought it would be a quick game because I was playing on the smallest galaxy possible, but I must have played for at least 15 hours. That's 4x games for you. I only stopped because I had met all the balanced pirate victory goals, had a criminal network on the backwater world of Ackdar 1 and had completed the process of using my mighty new planetary army (consisting of 4 infantry units) to invade any nearby independent or colony worlds, because my punny army sure as hell aren't going to invade any homeworlds, and when you're a pirate you're constantly at war with anyone anyway, so why not. But then I thought, why don't I just go completely legit and become a totally regular empire? Turns out that isn't really possible with the game editor. You can't magically convert a pirate empire into a regular one and there isn't any easy way to make a new empire and transfer colonies over. So I started a new game as a regular Ackdarian age of shadows empire and choose my old savegame as the galaxy map, also choosing to randomize basically everything in the hopes that it would balance things better. For extra fuckery, I had changed the theme to DW Extended while my original game was unmodded. It worked! Sortof. I've played for 7 hours, activated the Shakturi beacon, have yet to fight the resulting war, but met my victory conditions. I started on Ackdar 1, in the Ackdar system, so that aspect was a 100% success. I guess it just picked the largest world with Ackdarians on it. The first empire I met were the ancient guardians, who didn't exist in the pirate game. So it's good the game knows to put them in. There were some Keterov nearby but their capitol was one of the Ikkuro colony worlds I had captured in the pirate game, so that aspect got scrambled. My guess is the game just wanted to place some Keterov on a suitable swamp planet and didn't care if there were Ikkuro there. There were some Keterov in the pirate game elsewhere, but they were apparently replaced with one of the extended mod races, the Terrapin. My guess is this was another instance of the game not finding any existing population, and then looking for any marshy swamp planet. The new Keterov empire even had the maxed out population of 128M Boskara on the 10% quality lava world in the same system. The only reason that exists is because I found a Boskara colony ship as a pirate and wanted to put it somewhere I had control over rather than somewhere actually good. I'm not sure if that world started as independent and got cultured, or if the Keterov started with two worlds since they were both in their starting system. It was still nice to see one of the most notable landmarks from my pirate game, Ultimate Shithole Lava World. I ran into a few outright glitchy things though. I found a planet belonging to my old pirate empire, which was nice to see because it's one of the ones I conquered, and the pirate empire had my old flag and name and everything. Sadly they didn't show up on the diplomacy menu, didn't build any ships or do anything, and kept spamming a report about finding the new empire as long as I had ships nearby. So I had to conquer that for my sanity. I also found a world belonging to an Ikkuro empire roughly where the Ikkuro empire was in the pirate game, but they don't show up on the diplomacy menu either and don't seem to do anything. Their star system also showed up as being controlled by the new Keterov empire even though it wasn't anywhere near any of their colonies. I've seen zero independent colonies, and I've only seen a single independent cargo ship. There don't seem to be any pirates either, even though I had them set to few/respawning. There was a Securian empire near Ackdar in the pirate game, which just disappeared during import - they didn't turn into independents or a glitched empire or anything, their entire civilization just vanished leaving a completely empty uncolonized desert world. I don't know, maybe I accidently set pirates to none and independent worlds to none or too few? Maybe all the independent worlds are placed elsewhere in the galaxy and it just ran out. I haven't explored everywhere yet. So yeah, I'll probably finish this game by trying to win against the Shakturi, once their war events kick off. I have a doom star being repaired, that will help. After this game, my next will probably be giving the ancient galaxy scenario another try. After that, I'll start another shadow age empire using my ancient galaxy scenerio save, from after the galaxy shattering war  .
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May 27, 2014 11:12
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I somehow won a game without really knowing what I was doing. I must say, even though you're supposed to be handling the military side of your empire, I had no idea what my ships were doing throughout the game. I got a few colonies going in other systems, started building ships there, but as soon as they were built they vanished, mostly to my home system but I found a couple of them aimlessly flying through space as well. How do I get them to stay put and defend the system that they were created in? For that matter, how do I rebase my ships in a different system? I felt like I had almost no control over them, which was frustrating. Turning automation off for individual ships is not an option either, because they will even stop refueling. There needs to be a level of control where you can say 'do whatever you like, form fleets whichever way you feel like, but at least stay in this particular system and don't retrofit halfway across the galaxy when there's a perfectly serviceable spaceport right here.' I couldn't figure it out.
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May 27, 2014 17:42
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Phlegmish posted:I somehow won a game without really knowing what I was doing. I must say, even though you're supposed to be handling the military side of your empire, I had no idea what my ships were doing throughout the game. I got a few colonies going in other systems, started building ships there, but as soon as they were built they vanished, mostly to my home system but I found a couple of them aimlessly flying through space as well. How do I get them to stay put and defend the system that they were created in? For that matter, how do I rebase my ships in a different system? I felt like I had almost no control over them, which was frustrating. Turning automation off for individual ships is not an option either, because they will even stop refueling. There needs to be a level of control where you can say 'do whatever you like, form fleets whichever way you feel like, but at least stay in this particular system and don't retrofit halfway across the galaxy when there's a perfectly serviceable spaceport right here.' I couldn't figure it out. Yeah, leave individual ships on automation. The major way you interface with your military is by using fleets and strike forces, specifically by changing their postures. With fleets you can set their home base to important places, set their position to defend or attack, and then choose their range of operations (target, system-wide, sector-wide, anywhere). Same thing with strike forces, which are smaller (4 ships by default, I set it to 5 ships in my empire policy screen) and used to protect valuable-but-not-so-valuable things. So you can set up a bunch of strike forces to guard your home world by putting them on "Defend-Home Base Only" "Defend-System", while you manually control your fleets or set them to "attack-nearby targets" and then give them a target. As for retrofiting, never ever use the automated retrofitting option for your military ships. When you auto-retrofit it retrofits ALL your ships, so it'll pull in ones that are halfway across the galaxy back to the nearest shipyard. Go to your designs screen and change option under the 'retrofit' header to 'manual', and then you can go to your ships & bases screen (f11) and just mass-select whatever ships you want retrofitted manually. It's a bit tedious, but once you get the hang of it you'll be able to do it in little to no time (also don't retrofit after every technology, that's a waste of time and money, just wait till you've amassed a number of upgrades). The way I do it is I sort my military ships by fleets, retrofit the non-fleet ships first, then I switch over to the 'fleets & strike forces' menu from where you can tell ships to retrofit on a fleet-by-fleet, strikeforce-by-strikeforce basis.
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May 27, 2014 17:53
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What are the tactical advantages to each ship class? Like, when should I use escorts versus carriers versus etc?
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May 27, 2014 17:57
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