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I really like this game but the pacing of it is awful. You can beat everyone in tech by just upgrading your starting starbase with more tech labs. I increased mine from 10 of each to 25 of each and it barely costs anything and the homeworld retrofits fairly quickly. You'll be researching so fast you can't keep up with the upgrades and you can just tramble any opposition with long range lasers. Still, if you start a game as a starting empire in a mature galaxy the AI will have advantages that will keep you on your toes. But its still way too rough for me to enjoy it thoroughly, why does one goddamn pirate frigate cause every single civillian vessel in the system to jump 10 lightyears in a random direction?
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Nov 24, 2011 02:49
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I've had a chance to play a bit with legends. Things I like: The territory system is well done, it makes systems near your colonies your territory, and prevents nearby AI from taking YOUR goddamn planets. Leaders are dumb though, they give flat bonuses but they don't have any core values. A govoner won't reduce corruption or give any inherent bonuses unless it's one of his attributes. So because of this I had a fleet admiral who reduced maneuvering and speed by 10% and did nothing else. I loaded his dumb rear end on a frigate and send him at 3 space lobsters. The game is more balanced though. Techs cost more and the events can really change up the game. I had swamp colonies get a critical breakthrough and then It proceeded at 3x speed so I managed to expand early.
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Nov 24, 2011 19:42
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It's really perplexing, they could potentially double their lifetime sales by putting the game on Steam for $20, expansions for $10 and the whole bloody lot for $35 or something. Even Spiderweb studios have put their Exile/Avernum series on Steam.
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Aug 22, 2012 12:54
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PUKED posted:If anyone hasn't checked out mods in a while the Graphics Enhancement Mod is amazing, I've been using it + the Gloom Mod + Explosion Mod + Tampa Sound Mod and it makes a massive difference.  This is excellent, and I do believe the mods are even compatible. Going to check both of these out, thanks!
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Feb 2, 2013 21:41
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My only issue with Distant Worlds is the global bank. If resources were stocked locally on planets, then I would actually have to care about my mining stations mid to late game. As it stands, my global resource bank reaches insane levels that any spaceport, anywhere has instant access to. If resources were subject to local shortages I think the game would be a lot more interesting.
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Feb 7, 2013 21:12
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Research is really easy to abuse in this game, there really should be some kind of limit. Essentially if you're feeling gamey you can just re-design your starting star base and refit it with 24 (or more) of each lab and watch your tech fly ahead of everyone else. Distant Worlds is a great game, but it does suffer from being too sandboxy. Thankfully the new Shadows expansion is supposed to be more modder friendly so maybe we can finally start changing up some of the core concepts of the game.
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Feb 27, 2013 08:42
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I play the game on very hard which gives the AI substantial bonuses, and I also use very volatile. I'm tempted to start setting the galactic volatility lower, so there are less inter-empire wars to give them a chance to expand, and just play an aggressive race to piss everyone off. Even on very hard the challenge is very small if you know how to cleverly design ships.
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Mar 2, 2013 12:04
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I usually make my escorts and frigates suicide boats. I'll load them with basic shields, lots of speed and agility and give them close range weapons. Lasers or rail guns are equally good for this purpose and then I give them a never retreat order and point blank. This lets me swarm enemies with cheap and easily replaced ships that will do heavy damage and let my heavier boats sit at range and do their thing.
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Mar 4, 2013 19:31
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But why would anyone choose Matrix Games over Gog or Steam? A-Sharp was vehemently against Steam for the longest time but they eventually made bank with King of Dragon Pass on iOS. I don't have numbers for Gog sales but I imagine they're quite decent. There really is no data to suggest that Distant Worlds wouldn't be crazy successful on Steam for a $15 pricetag.
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Apr 2, 2013 08:35
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Bouchacha posted:Yeah it's really bizarre. A-Sharp and Spiderweb were both vehemently against the low margin/mass sale approach until they made all the money from it. I would think those two high-profile converts would be sufficient for a semi-mainstream title such as Distant Worlds to pursue the same strategy. I forgot about Spiderweb. I'd be really curious to know how much money they made from Steam, compared to their lifetime sales before Steam. I played the original Exile games (before they became Avernum) and I went ahead and bought the new ones on Steam just for convenience because they were cheap anyway. I do kind of prefer the old ones though, they simplified the classes and stats a lot for the Avernum upgrade but the better graphics and UI is a good tradeoff.
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Apr 2, 2013 13:13
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It's going to cost $40, isn't it?
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May 20, 2013 23:30
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Lorini posted:And it's up. $19.99 promo price. Boughted, I was gonna buy it at $40 anyway because I'm their target audience  Can't wait to start some piratical enterprises. I need to come up with a good name for smugglers to match Keisiari's Space IKEA.
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May 23, 2013 15:32
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I've messed around with the normal empire in age of shadows start and it's fairly interesting. You begin with a single planet with only 3bil population and no techs, you begin by building a small spaceport and some slowboating exploration ships and find the two ruins in your system, one of them will unlock ftl research. The first is a warp bubble and it's pretty slow (speed 2000 vs 15000 for a regular ftl drive) and uses twice as much energy as a normal drive so your range is also low. This basically means you're confined to your home system and maybe one or two neighbouring systems. You won't have access to a lot of resources but the home system always has the same layout. You begin on a moon around a gas giant with 2 other moons, so you have access to fuel and steel, lead, gold for your slowboaters. Any other resource has to be imported through neutral traders and they have been massively overhauled. In age of shadows pirates start with good FTL and will monopolize resources and supply you, you can ensure a steady supply by handing out a contract where you pay extra for resources. So basically for a long time you'll be an underdog, your home system sucks, your ships suck, your weapons suck and your ftl drive sucks (tech costs are massive to break out, warp bubble is 240k research but the first level proper drive is 960k with the upgrade being 240k). Pirates will be very strong so you need to build platforms and decent fleets to stay competetive.
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May 24, 2013 08:31
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HiKaizer posted:Help, how do I not be awful at this game? I started a pre-warp game and decided that having researched a bunch of military techs and just having discovered hyperdrive I was ready to take on the pirates. I was wrong. They just used a tractor beam and destroyed all my ships in seconds each. Pirates are really strong in the early game, only take them on if you found a decently equipped destroyer or maybe a cruiser. They'll generally leave you alone too, pirates no longer blow up mining bases, they just raid them and steal your money and resources (they'll still damage them though since they need to pop the shields to board). So if you ignore the pirates you should be fine for if you can live with the odd raids. Colonizing their independent colonies really pisses them off though, I recommend you either park a supership there to protect it while you build a base or at least put up a mercenary contract to protect it. Your money flow will be really crap in the early game and your ships weak, so I can't recommend building your own until you get to midgame. Most independents also end up being poo poo, since the pirates like to raid them all the time which kills population. The best independents I've found have 400mil and the worst hover around 10-30mil.
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May 24, 2013 16:50
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Yeah I started a game as the Ackdarians and somehow lucked into 6 goddamn independent colonies near me, 4 of which had 1bil+ population. So I rushed those down and now I'm in a war with the Sluken and like 4 different pirates are constantly raiding my smaller colonies. My largest colonies are fairly safe, I've got a decent sized spaceport on each of them with smaller ones defending the newest ones. But the pirates don't loving care, the new gravity weapon shits all over your shields and armor so even the strongest stations can be taken down by a relatively small pirate fleet if it's left undefended. I'm not entirely sold on the pirate bases yet, they seem a bit gimicky and I have no idea how to dislodge them. I had an advisor pop up and ask for permission to start a ground war against one in my colony and that caused my militia to attack the fort. Which ended up benefiting from the armored bunker facility and since the militia is population, that pirate based wiped out 250 million ackdarians before going down  Edit: Resource shortages are also abound, I expanded too fast and I'm feeling the heat from that. Your colonies consume strategic resources to fuel their growth and I foolishly upgraded my mining base designs which caused every single mining base in my empire to decide it needed to refit itself and now my entire civilian fleet is bogged down trying to supply them and those resources can't go towards building more right now. This also spams my notices but I'll get around to filtering my messages soon. Demiurge4 fucked around with this message at 02:52 on May 25, 2013 |
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May 25, 2013 02:50
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HiKaizer posted:Does the game differentiate between militia and standing forces? Because the tutorial recommended landing troops and if they're different to militia, maybe your troops weren't good enough. Militia troops are basically your population, they're always green and fairly weak against all things. You can build infantry at the game start, they're a lot stronger in both attack and defence and you can research 3 more troop types. These are armored troops (tanks) who specialize in attack, special forces who have a higher chance of piercing planetary shields and bypassing defences and can disable the shields to let you bombard. Lastly you can research planetary defence troops, they're hard to transport because they're very big but they will try to shoot down landing craft before they reach the surface.
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May 25, 2013 10:18
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Well as expected there's a ton of bugs in the game, apart from clone troopers having 2.4 million defence strength I think the worst bug I've found is that using boarding pods on abandoned ships will immediately claim and activate them regardless of how damaged they are. If they have a hyperdrive, great they'll go repair themselves, if not you can still repair them without fear of another empire grabbing it. I just found a pirate constructor that had almost finished a desolation moon. 20 boarding pods later it was mine with 9 components still unbuilt.
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May 26, 2013 21:03
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I got really boned with my latest Age of Shadows start, I'm using increased tech costs (320k base compared to normal 120k) and as a result I've been stuck with slow hyperdrives for a number of years now. I have 2 systems within easy reach of my homeworld and it's a mixed blessing, one system had two independent colonies that I was able to invade and take over, but none of the systems have a gas giant with caslon so my only source of fuel is smugglers. I'm making do however and I'm just having a blast, I love the fact that I'm highly dependent on the smugglers right now. As for the guy above with problems, you probably have automatic ship building on, and your AI is trying to build a military. You can turn that off or increase taxes but if you're having difficulties with the age of shadows start I recommend you use normal tech levels. There's a few big differences between normal and pre-warp starts and one of them is that your home system is incredibly poo poo in the pre-warp because it's designed to be that way. In a normal tech start your home system will potentially have double the planets.
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May 28, 2013 08:54
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Sankis posted:Okay, so is there any kind of in depth economy guide? Even after having the basics explained to me, I just can't understand how to make money and keep making money. Even controlling my taxes for all of my planets and adjusting it based on population, it's just constantly fluctuating. Even with automation turned off, it's fluctuating. One moment I was making 40k per whatever period of time the next it sank all the way down to -120k and I was constantly in the red. I've looked over the in game "How does my empire make money?" poo poo many times and as far as I can tell everyone is trading. I also have hundreds of little private sector ships buzzing around and dozens of mining facilities all over the place on a variety of resources. I'm guessing I'm just expanding too much but there's no feedback if that's the case. Well, except the falling income but it's not exactly telling me why. I feel like I've finally got a grasp on starting out okay but this games economy is just so confusing and poorly documented. Basically, what I do is secure the most important strategic resources in the game. With a shadows start I'll build 3 slowboating explorers and check things out, meanwhile I'm building constructors and sending them to build mines. The most important resources for you in the early game are steel and caslon, caslon is your fuel and steel is used in almost everything. My strategy to doing it is to just send a constructor and scrap it when it's done if it's on the other end of the system. I also like to superboost my homeworld by saving up a bunch of money at 40% tax rate (this is easy as there's not much to spend it on in the early game) and when I have around 80k I'll reduce taxes to 0 and watch my population explode. In my current game I got my homeworld to 21 billion before I even left the system and that was around 180k income. Pirates will only raid weak planets, station at least 3-4 troops on new colonies and expand slowly so you can leave fleets in orbit to protect it. Design a barebones stardock for your colonies with at least a tractor beam and a bunch of weapons to take out small raiders. You'll still get raided by big fleets occasionally though. Basically if you're in the red you're expanding too fast, military upkeep especially is a killer. Expand slowly by invading independents and secure them before moving on. I recommend enforcing a colony distance when you create a game because it'll let you avoid AI's stealing your targets but also allow them to be more defensible themselves.
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May 29, 2013 11:43
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FileNotFound posted:Is fleet refueling still buggy as gently caress? I've never really had a problem with refuelling. Do you use the energy collectors to power passive systems? They're really excellent for military ships since they won't use fuel when idling in systems. Are you complaining about pathing for refuel trips? Mining stations and even space ports have finite storage so you can't expect to be able to refuel a large fleet at a gas giant. When you click refuel the fleet will go to the closest point with enough fuel for the whole fleet.
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Jun 2, 2013 15:50
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Travic posted:I'm really starting to get into this game but I have a few quality of life questions: Ships are built according at the biggest shipyards I think. If you are only building 10 ships at a time they will probably queue at your homeworld. If you're building 50 they will be queued elsewhere as well, be aware that oftentimes smaller shipyards are not well stocked with resources and there can be production delays. Colony ships and construction ships are built on planets not stations. To see the production use your construction yard window and click planets. The AI is really poor at taxes, it will try to balance taxes so colonies are at least happy but it hurts growth. The best way to go about it is to set taxes to manual, put every colony to 0% and put it to 5 below their happiness when they reach full pop. Your income will explode to hilarious heights. Quite often I start a new game, put my homeworld to 0% and build bare minimums, only increasing taxes when I need an infusion and relying on civillian income otherwise (when they build ships). When the planet is at 12 billion set it to 40% and never worry about money ever again. Doing this feels gamey however since you will have a crushing advantage over your less developed AI neighbours who don't have your income.
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Jan 9, 2014 15:13
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I know everyone is sick of talking about the price of the game, but a modding expansion absolutely needs the game to be more easily available or it'll fall flat. This is the best 4X game out right now but nobody besides hardcore fans really know about or play it. You want this game to get to as many people as possible to entice modders to play with it. This also comes back to which features are actually in the expansion. I really hope they go for the Minecraft approach where you can do literally anything with the game because if they try to limit certain things it just won't hold up.
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Jan 13, 2014 00:16
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You can set the AI to build troops on your planets according to its population. You should do that because "impenetrable" doesn't seem to be a correct descriptor when a single transport can conquer your planet.
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Jan 13, 2014 16:30
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Rudi Starnberg posted:SO I had one of those ruin event popups, leading me to a colection of derelicts. I thought maybe thye would be automaticaly captured the way ships that you randomly bump into are, but they weren't. No problem I though, I'll just research and build a ship with boarding pods. Send construction ships to repair them. It's gonna take ages but it'll get done. I think if you equip your constructors with more fab units it makes them work faster?
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Jan 24, 2014 16:26
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Esroc posted:Thanks for the info, I didn't see any indication of Super Weapon use whatsoever, but I've since moved on from that game session and it hasn't happened again, so whatever. No it just takes a really long time to fix them up. You'll be able to see them improve slowly. It's the same for all derelicts really.
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Mar 26, 2014 07:28
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King Doom posted:You really haven't played for awhile, have you? one of the biggest most requested features recently was a way to disable the fifty billion YOU HAVE A RESOURCE SHORTAGE messages you get every second. Yeah but he's right. Resources are effectively infinite and if you design your own stations you will never want for anything ever. The AI is programmed to fight over the super resources but that's about it. Once you your empire hits critical mass your resources will continue to stack up in your galactic stockpile and you won't ever be able to build enough poo poo to experience anything beyond short local shortages. It's my primary gripe with the game, designing your own stuff is cool but it's also hilariously broken when you can just poo poo out a station with 300 labs on our Homeworld and never need to build another one ever again.
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May 15, 2014 14:41
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gently caress you Matrix games, never again. Every step of the way it wanted me to sign up to their newsletters as well but gently caress that. Steam says the unlock is in an hour, looking forward to it so I can see what's new and explore the modding tools a little. I had a great idea for a scenario two years back but it wasn't possible with the current modding options. Here's hoping there's some way to stagger tech unlocks that doesn't involve exploration, maybe population or economy goals, I want to make a fun sub-light speed quadrant where humanity explores the galaxy 
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May 23, 2014 23:57
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I'd like a way to create national wonders, perhaps the only way to do it is to set up racial wonders like the zenox galactic archives?
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May 24, 2014 20:37
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Fausty posted:I don't own the steam version. If you own Universe you can get the steam version for free.
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May 25, 2014 17:19
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V for Vegas posted:Ugh, just spent a few hours cultivating a nice little sub-light empire only to find out that I'm surrounded by 5 bug empires who out tech me by miles and proceed to wipe me out. No more 'random empire' games. I want to mod in a new drive tree where nobody gets super fast stuff, just more efficient stuff. I wonder how the civilian AI will handle it though, it'll probably fly halfway across the galaxy in half an hour if it's got the range for it.
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May 26, 2014 01:53
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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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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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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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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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Phlegmish posted:Is it worth it to colonize planets in the 40-50% quality range, or are the penalties too severe? I colonized one in a system that I already owned with a nice development bonus from ruins. 50% is the break even for profit from the colony. I think development bonuses can push it over if you're in the 40% range though.
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May 30, 2014 23:17
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I hope a sequel keeps the core of the game, but runs on a completely new engine that isn't built in java or whatever the hell the dev used for this game. I do like the game but I find myself constantly getting frustrated by how the AI acts and how some basic game mechanics are pretty dumb. It would be nice if the economy actually simulated supply and demand so that new colonies would import lots of raw resources to build themselves up and it wasn't just based on population. That way you could specialize planets and it would be especially cool if they moved away from how races are restricted by planet type. I mean really, what do lava lizards even grow and eat on those worlds?
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May 31, 2014 02:13
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The Dhayut portrait also went from scary as gently caress spiders to some guy with a weird helmet.
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Jun 1, 2014 00:18
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The problem with troops after Shadows came out, is that they added a bunch of specialized bullshit where the idea is that you land special forces first because they dodge interception fire and attack installations and planetary defence units in the back line. But the fact is that you can't separate them into transports so you just throw everything at a planet at once so even if your special forces take out the shields you'd be an idiot to bomb the planet with your whole army down there.
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Jun 1, 2014 22:44
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I like the short range blaster for the early game because I love fast suicide ships that never retreat and will just keep on shooting. If all you ever build is frigates loaded with those you will be able to take almost anything on.
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Jun 4, 2014 01:39
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It would be nice if weapons had a specific use and property but there's not much difference between missiles and torpedo's apart from speed, both types of laser merge into the titan beam and so on. If some weapon types had better damage against certain types of ammo or shields that would be a nice touch, shield types could be modified to absorb a certain damage value with no loss of integrity at the cost of lower maximum shield capacity which would make high power lasers attractive. Torpedo's could be the anti-shield weapon and missiles the anti-armor and so on. Right now the different shield types are worthless and you beeline into the one with the best max shield strength and ignore the rest until you decide to go for the super shield. Edit: Oh and reactor types could use some love too. Make fusion the efficient civilian choice that uses less fuel when the hyperdrive is active and give the other one a bonus to shield recharge and weapon damage.
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Jun 11, 2014 18:14
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