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Zilkin posted:Ugh, how do I deal with pirates in pre-warp start. They quickly require more money than my one system empire can afford to pay, and if I don't pay they pf course just blow everything up. Eg. in my current game it hasn't even been ten years since the start, and I got two pirate groups harassing me. Other already has 97 ships including cruisers which I can't even build, and the other 40. The pirate settings for this game were normal amount, and normal strength. I just paided them off and when that didn't work took the beating. Kept my taxes low and growth high and ran deficits when possible. Ended up with 2-3 wipes of everything but my home world. Slowly built my defense out from the home world and when I got to max population I jacked up the taxes and was rolling in money. Expanded from there.
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May 29, 2014 19:25
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Is starting in the age of shadows recommended? The game tells you to start in the classical age if you're new. I'm always doing that because I'm not yet at the point where I can make an educated decision about my strategy, but I wouldn't want to miss out on anything.
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May 29, 2014 19:38
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I would start classical because AoS is a much harder experience and you have to claw your way to technology you take for granted in a classical start. AoS is work from the start and classical will let you learn at your own pace.
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May 29, 2014 19:43
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a!n posted:Is starting in the age of shadows recommended? Start in classical if you're new to the game. Distant Worlds has been out for years and years, and the expansions are intended to add more content for regular fans. While it normally makes sense to start a new game with all the latest and greatest content, the shadow era is really only for veterans who like the idea of fighting off pirate hordes pre-warp. For newbies it's just going to be a frustrating experience that doesn't at all reflect the base game. You're not missing any core content by starting in classical, which starts at the same point as most other 4x games instead of in the galactic dark ages of banditry and misery.
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May 29, 2014 19:51
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If one thing does confuse and kind of amuse me about this game. It's ship roles not, really, doing anything. I can call something an escort and have it be larger than a capital ship if i wish.
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May 29, 2014 20:46
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I love the gigantic array of goofy races. Ice dinosaur people forever, lets conquer the galaxy! 
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May 29, 2014 20:50
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The official patch is out on steam. I loaded one of my old games and played for a little bit. All my automation settings were reset to defaults  . When I exited the game I got a bunch of steam achievements... They aren't all the right ones though, it looks like it may have switched a few of them around between the game and steam. Blinks77 posted:If one thing does confuse and kind of amuse me about this game. It's ship roles not, really, doing anything. I can call something an escort and have it be larger than a capital ship if i wish. If you leave ship/fleet automation on, the different ship roles will get different assignments. Escorts and frigates tend to get escort missions, everything else tends to go in fleets and get offensive missions. Also cruisers and capital ships get rad automatic names like "Rotal Firestorm", destroyers and under get boring serialized names. But yeah, I'd like to see some sort of enforced difference between escorts/frigates/destroyers/cruisers/capital ships.
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May 29, 2014 20:52
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But then you'd miss out on the "THAT'S a 'FRIGATE?!". Also not being able to mount fighters on everything is not something I could endure. Those things are huge.
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May 29, 2014 20:59
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Lowen posted:If you leave ship/fleet automation on, the different ship roles will get different assignments. Escorts and frigates tend to get escort missions, everything else tends to go in fleets and get offensive missions. This has yet to happen for me. The game will sometimes set them to defend remote stations but that's it. To deal with space slugs/beetles I had to manually create a fleet, enter every capable ship into it and select them as a target. The automatic AI just didn't want to bother despite civilian cruisers and builders getting hit. 
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May 29, 2014 21:14
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Xoidanor posted:This has yet to happen for me. The game will sometimes set them to defend remote stations but that's it. To deal with space slugs/beetles I had to manually create a fleet, enter every capable ship into it and select them as a target. The automatic AI just didn't want to bother despite civilian cruisers and builders getting hit. I don't think space monsters and single enemy ships are considered valid targets for fleets, though I've seen single ships attack them. Fleets and bases of pirate factions and enemy empires you're at war with are valid targets for your automatic fleets. Also every time you give your fleet a manual order it disables automation for that fleet, you might want to immediately press a after you give the order. It'll still do the thing you told it to do first, before getting another mission.
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May 29, 2014 21:20
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Lowen posted:The official patch is out on steam. Patch 1.9.5.1 Changelog posted:Hi everyone, EDIT: whoops someone posted it last page - browser missed it. Mad Wack fucked around with this message at 21:29 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 21:26
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Archonex posted:Pirates in the Age of Shadows are waaaaay different from pirates in the classic or ancient ages. They're a nuisance in those two, where they're essentially on par with empires in the age of shadows. I just tried another Age of Shadows game and the same thing happened, finances in the red and pirates constantly attacking me. Either I try to pay most of them off and then I have no money or they capture/destroy my mining stations and disrupt my shipping, and then I have no money either. It was the early game and I'd already encountered more than twenty different pirate factions, I'm not kidding. I can't believe this is how the game is meant to be played, it's loving impossible. Even if it's possible to eventually get the upper hand, it's just tedious to constantly be bombarded with attack messages. I think I'll stick to custom games from now on. axelord posted:I just paided them off and when that didn't work took the beating. Kept my taxes low and growth high and ran deficits when possible. So you kept your taxes low until you had a huge population? It's gamey, but gently caress those pirates, I might try this as well. How did you keep them from spawncamping your home world, and how did you eventually build up your defense? Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 21:30 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 21:27
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Phlegmish posted:I just tried another Age of Shadows game and the same thing happened, finances in the red and pirates constantly attacking me. Either I try to pay most of them off and then I have no money or they capture/destroy my mining stations and disrupt my shipping, and then I have no money either. It was the early game and I'd already encountered more than twenty different pirate factions, I'm not kidding. I can't believe this is how the game is meant to be played, it's loving impossible. Even if it's possible to eventually get the upper hand, it's just tedious to constantly be bombarded with attack messages. I think I'll stick to custom games from now on. I'm currently playing a custom game with few and weak pirates. That seems to work for me at least. They still get pretty strong, but not strong enough to wipe you every 5 years. Edit: Oh yeah, and I also basically just didn't building any fleet for them destroy. Just large spaceport and defense station at my home world which I kept refitting as necessary. Those kept the pirates in bay until I had enough tech and money to really start expanding. Zilkin fucked around with this message at 21:33 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 21:31
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Phlegmish posted:I just tried another Age of Shadows game and the same thing happened, finances in the red and pirates constantly attacking me. Either I try to pay most of them off and then I have no money or they capture/destroy my mining stations and disrupt my shipping, and then I have no money either. It was the early game and I'd already encountered more than twenty different pirate factions, I'm not kidding. I can't believe this is how the game is meant to be played, it's loving impossible. Even if it's possible to eventually get the upper hand, it's just tedious to constantly be bombarded with attack messages. I think I'll stick to custom games from now on. Age of shadows isn't how the game is meant to be played, it wasn't even an option until the 3rd expansion came out. It makes the game harder for normal empires and easier for pirate empires. Don't do an age of shadows start as an empire until you have more experience playing one in the classic era. There are a number of tricks I habitually use that make an age of shadows start easy. But I had played the game for 100s of hours before the shadows expansion even came out. Likewise don't to a classic age with a pirate empire until you have experience playing pirates in AoS.
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May 29, 2014 21:44
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That makes sense, I think I just have the mindset where I want to start from nothing and grow into a transgalactic empire. I assume I'm just frustrated because even with my lack of experience I don't really see what I could have done differently. I tried to expand as quickly as possible, build the appropriate mining stations, colonize, but my finances were constantly in the red and pirates were harassing me non-stop, pretty much putting me in a vicious cycle of stagnation. I will play Classic from now on, now that I realize you're not missing out on much.
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May 29, 2014 21:53
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Question for more veteran players: Is there a reason why in every game there are always a handful of empires that never expand beyond one system? When I first started seeing this I was playing only Pre-Warp starts, and figured it was just the AI getting confused. I've played a couple Classic starts now though and even then there are still always a couple empires that just don't ever grab a second planet. I've seen this happen with empires nearby early in the game too, so it doesn't seem to just be a matter of all of their colonizable planets being gobbled up already. Very frustrating, as it seems almost always to be the non-insectoids who show this behavior, leaving Team Insect with a pretty serious advantage in territory and power.
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May 29, 2014 22:02
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Known issue? Figured i'd run it by here first. I also downloaded the mods: DW Extended, Explosions, GEM, new Shipset and TG Sound, if any of these are known to have issues. Ah, it seems in my long time using steam, i got had by this: https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=4361-MVDP-3638 First time for everything i suppose. Thyrork fucked around with this message at 22:25 on May 29, 2014 |
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May 29, 2014 22:19
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MagnumOpus posted:Question for more veteran players: Is there a reason why in every game there are always a handful of empires that never expand beyond one system? When I first started seeing this I was playing only Pre-Warp starts, and figured it was just the AI getting confused. I've played a couple Classic starts now though and even then there are still always a couple empires that just don't ever grab a second planet. I've seen this happen with empires nearby early in the game too, so it doesn't seem to just be a matter of all of their colonizable planets being gobbled up already. Very frustrating, as it seems almost always to be the non-insectoids who show this behavior, leaving Team Insect with a pretty serious advantage in territory and power. Sometimes empires are really picky about what planets they colonize, especially when colonization tech is low and they can only colonize certain types of planets. Things take a while to get going in this game. You'll find, though, that rapidly grabbing a bunch of colonies isn't that helpful when they start in the hole income-wise and take a bunch of resources to develop. Growth on your own home planet is still a major factor throughout the game.
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May 29, 2014 22:24
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When should you build small, medium, or large spaceport? So far I've only build large at my home planet, and then medium ones at all my colonies for defense.
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May 29, 2014 22:24
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Thyrork posted:That was extremely strange, Kasperski detected something wrong with the distant worlds exe and has fixed it, removing it in the process. Scrubbed my PC afterwards with both Kasperski and MalwareBytes but now i am somewhat suspicious. Antivirus will often false positive on binaries that are uncommon (not widely distributed, they check to see how many users have seen a given file via hash and if the count is low they treat it more suspiciously). It will also false positive if you have heuristics turned on. Finally AV can get cranky about shader injection / overlays, key mappers or hotkey programs, etc. If Distant Worlds had any malware in it you can be sure it would be widely known and discussed. It would also be quickly patched. While I can't say for sure, I'm 99.9% confident that it was nothing.
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May 29, 2014 22:27
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Zilkin posted:When should you build small, medium, or large spaceport? So far I've only build large at my home planet, and then medium ones at all my colonies for defense. You can always start out small and upgrade later. There's an option to refit them or something if you right click.
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May 29, 2014 22:27
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Rakthar posted:Antivirus will often false positive on binaries that are uncommon (not widely distributed, they check to see how many users have seen a given file via hash and if the count is low they treat it more suspiciously). It will also false positive if you have heuristics turned on. Finally AV can get cranky about shader injection / overlays, key mappers or hotkey programs, etc. It was nothing, User ignorance on my part. https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=4361-MVDP-3638
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May 29, 2014 22:45
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Phlegmish posted:I just tried another Age of Shadows game and the same thing happened, finances in the red and pirates constantly attacking me. Either I try to pay most of them off and then I have no money or they capture/destroy my mining stations and disrupt my shipping, and then I have no money either. It was the early game and I'd already encountered more than twenty different pirate factions, I'm not kidding. I can't believe this is how the game is meant to be played, it's loving impossible. Even if it's possible to eventually get the upper hand, it's just tedious to constantly be bombarded with attack messages. I think I'll stick to custom games from now on. Yeah someone else mentioned taxes effect growth so when the planet reaches max size bumping up the taxes has no real effect and nets you lots of dough. As for defenses started with a star base and just slowly expanded. Couple of defense stations surrounding it a couple frigates so on and so on. Even if I took losses my population growth gave me the tax base to quickly bump up taxes and rebuild. Then afterword I just dropped taxes and let the pop continue to build up. Seemed to work ok.
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May 29, 2014 22:56
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MagnumOpus posted:leaving Team Insect with a pretty serious advantage in territory and power. Team Mammal is usually a drat sight more cooperative than Team insect, and Team Humanoid is downright incestuous, so early efficiency gains from the Hive mind tend to cancel out later, especially if you start chatting. The diplomacy is actually pretty drat good in this. Phlegmish posted:That makes sense, I think I just have the mindset where I want to start from nothing and grow into a transgalactic empire. I assume I'm just frustrated because even with my lack of experience I don't really see what I could have done differently. I tried to expand as quickly as possible, build the appropriate mining stations, colonize. Yeah, you can totally expand out of your finances very quickly. The first stages of the pre-warp game are quite sedate because you're speed limited. Once that's out of the way, and if you aren't watching like a hawk, the automation will start prioritizing planets from underneath you. Basically, if I see my income figure go red, I pause expansion for a bit. Resorts are crazy good for generating cash. I went from a 40,000 deficit in one of my games to a 150,000 surplus in another, and it's all about the rate of expansion. I also rely on paying pirates rather than building any defenses until I've got a solid cash base to work with, then it's usually sub-destroyer until I break out of the home system.
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May 29, 2014 23:10
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Thanks for letting me know, Matrix.quote:It's been out a week only and it's already a phenomenon. A Steam top ten charter since release, Distant Worlds Universe is storming the gaming world!
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May 29, 2014 23:39
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I'm finding that missiles aren't tremendously effective in this game because it's tough to make a ship that is actually fast enough to stay out of other weapon range while also doing a meaningful amount of DPS.
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May 29, 2014 23:39
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Zilkin posted:When should you build small, medium, or large spaceport? So far I've only build large at my home planet, and then medium ones at all my colonies for defense. I figured they automatically upgraded, I didn't even know it was possible to choose.
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May 29, 2014 23:43
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Hav posted:Yeah, you can totally expand out of your finances very quickly. The first stages of the pre-warp game are quite sedate because you're speed limited. Once that's out of the way, and if you aren't watching like a hawk, the automation will start prioritizing planets from underneath you. Basically, if I see my income figure go red, I pause expansion for a bit. Resorts are crazy good for generating cash. I know it costs money to build mining stations and colonize, but the only way to get more money is by getting more resources and a bigger tax base, right? The Age of Shadows start is kind of a catch-22 for me and I don't really know how to solve it with what I know about the game. I mean, regardless of expansion my cashflow in the last game still would have been in the red simply because my maintenance outweighed my tax income. As for resorts, do you need to research a specific tech for them? It often seems impossible to build them in the beginning of the game. e: oops, double post
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May 29, 2014 23:54
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Phlegmish posted:
Research the entertainment tech. That gives you a module to put onto resort designs. Build resorts, mines and gas mines. The more of them there are, the more ships the AI will build, boosting your income.
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May 30, 2014 00:03
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What does the number after planet and star types mean, e.g. "Desert planet 29.4k" or "Main sequence star 99.1k"? Is it something to do with resource quantity? Phlegmish posted:That makes sense, I think I just have the mindset where I want to start from nothing and grow into a transgalactic empire. I assume I'm just frustrated because even with my lack of experience I don't really see what I could have done differently. I tried to expand as quickly as possible, build the appropriate mining stations, colonize, but my finances were constantly in the red and pirates were harassing me non-stop, pretty much putting me in a vicious cycle of stagnation. You can just do a custom game where you start in the pre-warp era but turn pirate numbers & strength to low (or off entirely, if you prefer). I finally gave up on my AoS game despite getting pretty far because it was just too drat exhausting. I started in the center of the galaxy and had more than a dozen pirate clans around me. At any given moment in time something was under attack, and many planets were just 24/7 brawls as me and several pirate fleets fought for supremecy over them. I was slowly making progress against them, but the sheer volume of poo poo to deal with made it agonizingly slow. I don't think I even bothered interacting with the normal empires - they were a complete irrelevence next to the constant, uninhibited and all-out pirate attacks. I feel like ships should be harder to build or something because the rate at which they were churning out deathfleets was just unreal. Thank god for the silent alert mod, at least. Also I think if you turn off the AoS storyline in the victory settings screen it removes a lot of the early scripted stuff, like that racketeer who always pops in to say hi right at the start.
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May 30, 2014 00:04
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V for Vegas posted:Thanks for letting me know, Matrix. Wasn't there a $10 "preorder discount" until tomorrow anyway? So the celebratory sale is just extending the preorder discount for another week?
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May 30, 2014 00:08
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Panzeh posted:I'm finding that missiles aren't tremendously effective in this game because it's tough to make a ship that is actually fast enough to stay out of other weapon range while also doing a meaningful amount of DPS. I find them useful on static defences. Because the enemy will be coming towards them or whatever it is they're guarding, manoeuvering isn't an issue, and the greater range of the missiles means they can bring them under fire much sooner. They aren't that great at actually killing enemies due to being fairly weak and 50% less effective against armour, but as I largely view static defences as a means of warding off attacks (by forcing retreats) or delaying them until help can arrive, it's not a huge problem. They're also useful for attacking static objects (like bases) when used enmasse. Drunk in Space fucked around with this message at 00:21 on May 30, 2014 |
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May 30, 2014 00:17
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Dallan Invictus posted:Wasn't there a $10 "preorder discount" until tomorrow anyway? So the celebratory sale is just extending the preorder discount for another week? I have a feeling the conversation was "oh jesus christ look at all this money we're getting through steam we've gotta extend this NOW!"
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May 30, 2014 00:21
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Zilkin posted:When should you build small, medium, or large spaceport? So far I've only build large at my home planet, and then medium ones at all my colonies for defense. There's no good rule of thumb. Spaceports are useful for Remember that the civilian market will 'rent' dock space from you to construct private ships. So having a decent quantity of dockyards available will keep the private sector healthy as well as prevent bottlenecks - it sucks to sort through and construct your emergency destroyer fleet when you have to move them to the head of a long queue of small freighters and passenger ships. I like to build at least a medium to act as a logistical base for my fleet anchorage systems, because I often send an entire fleet at once to refit and it sucks waiting more than a year for them to travel to the nearest shipyard, wait in line, go into drydock etc. e: A medium at every colony is excessive though. Go check your budget screen and see how much you're spending on spacedock maintenance. Panzeh posted:I'm finding that missiles aren't tremendously effective in this game because it's tough to make a ship that is actually fast enough to stay out of other weapon range while also doing a meaningful amount of DPS. Missiles are a good standoff weapon in the early game when you can afford to have your light ships kite enemies for months but you can't really afford to replace them. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 00:39 on May 30, 2014 |
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May 30, 2014 00:23
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Dallan Invictus posted:Wasn't there a $10 "preorder discount" until tomorrow anyway? So the celebratory sale is just extending the preorder discount for another week? The $10 release discount expires today.
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May 30, 2014 00:24
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Turns out that many more people are willing to pay $50 (-$10 per expansion) for a game than $60 + $40 for every expansion! Who knew?
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May 30, 2014 00:54
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Phlegmish posted:I know it costs money to build mining stations and colonize, but the only way to get more money is by getting more resources and a bigger tax base, right? The Age of Shadows start is kind of a catch-22 for me and I don't really know how to solve it with what I know about the game. I mean, regardless of expansion my cashflow in the last game still would have been in the red simply because my maintenance outweighed my tax income. Since you're having so much trouble with a AoS start, if you want I can upload my current AoS save so you can see what a sturdy empire looks like. That might be useful for puzzling things out. It's about 30ish years after the start. I've got a fairly large empire (One of only two multi system empires, though both are superpowers.) for the early game and i've exterminated most of the pirates nearby. So that gives you some breathing room to learn the game. I'm also easily pulling in 200,000 even with a huge fleet of ships and stations, along with private military stations for my fleets to refuel and retrofit at. So you can do a fair bit of dicking around without stuff going up in flames. If you want I can even use the editor to give you a bit of a boost so it'll be easier to learn the game without much pressure. That ought to help you get some time to learn how AoS era mechanics work. Only thing you'll need to do is run it with the DW Extended mod. Archonex fucked around with this message at 01:32 on May 30, 2014 |
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May 30, 2014 01:27
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One of the big problems people might be having is also trying to control and micro-manage everything yourself. This is insanity.
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May 30, 2014 01:49
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It's hilarious that Distant Worlds has only been on Steam for a week and what has shown up in future releases? Pandora: First Contact, which is another Matrix store exclusive. God dammit Matrix, we told you to get on Steam for years and this massive pile of money you're seeing could have been four times as big if you'd gotten in before the greenlight clown car.
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May 30, 2014 01:58
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| # ? May 24, 2024 21:37 |
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There were 2-3 guys who would argue on the original forums for this game about how more exposure for this game was an awful thing, and how steamtards couldn't handle a complex 4x game lol.
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May 30, 2014 02:57
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