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So I caved and finally bought the overpriced game, and man was it worth it. I mean, I absolutely hate that I paid as much as I did for the game+expansions, but it's a really, really fun game, guys. It's just a loving shame that Matrix's pricing policies has all but killed any community for these games, because the mods for Distant Worlds could be amazing. It's basically MoO3 (done right) with a dash of the EU series. I've been playing as a human corporatocracy (SolCo) and have finally broken into the larger galactic scene after a terrible decade long war against the loving pirates. I'm left wondering if I should go a friendly sci-fi corporation route (ala KSR's Praxis company) or full on Bain Capital, invade foreign worlds, capture/enslave the populace, and continue to push towards the galaxy's center. I'm probably setting myself up a ton of revolutions, though. I already get ones right off the bat after founding new colonies thanks to this government style!
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Nov 12, 2013 01:01
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Even then I'd still hold off on buying the game because gently caress Matrix, man.
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Nov 12, 2013 01:10
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Clearly this game doesn't want SolCo to prosper because my scientists keep having critical failures in their research.  edit: Never use the auto refit suggestion. It refits everything. In your entire empire. At the same loving time. MLKQUOTEMACHINE fucked around with this message at 01:59 on Nov 12, 2013 |
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Nov 12, 2013 01:56
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Reason posted:Spaceward Ho! I think they released a slightly updated version of this on iOS.
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Nov 12, 2013 02:00
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Sky Shadowing posted:http://store.steampowered.com/app/261470/ Well before you say anything we've got to wait and see how much they'll charge for it. I understand that it contains 5 games, but they're games in a niche genre, are relatively old, and have really low production qualities compared to other games in the genre (and those other games charge way less than what Distant Worlds costs). No one on steam would buy the package for the normal matrix price.
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May 15, 2014 18:47
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Fausty posted:I was stupid and didn't make a backup folder. Can you upload the shading.png please? Attached to this post is a fix for the shading issue.
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May 25, 2014 22:11
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Phlegmish posted:I'm playing through the Tutorial but I'm still a bit confused about Resources. Basically, you should always build Gas Mining Stations on gas giants (makes sense) while building normal mining Stations on normal planets? Yep. Go after planets/moons/asteroids that have resource %'s over ~60% unless you are hurting for that particular resource. For the most part you can let the AI take care of building mining stations for you, though make sure you grab a source of Caslon (your primary fuel source for your early engines) ASAP. When you start building out into other solar systems it would do you a whole lot of good to manually order a mining ship to build a Gas Mining station at a planet with some Caslon. That way your civilian ships have a refueling station within the system and they can better auto-acquire resources for you.
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May 26, 2014 15:48
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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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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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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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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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Bouchacha posted:What are the tactical advantages to each ship class? Like, when should I use escorts versus carriers versus etc? Each of your ships should do different things, though you're free to make them all do the same thing (which would be dumb so don't do that). Escots - Cheap, fast ships that are used to escort civilians around Frigates - Faster military ships, I like to make mine into speedy, short-ranged brawlers that can get in and out quickly Destroyers - Stronger military ships, the backbone of your fleet and the ones that you usually put more weapons on, I like to make mine medium-ranged with a mix of torpedos/misses with whatever primary weapon I'm using (laser or rail-gun) Cruiser - Your first real big ship, from here on up you can really specialize things, I like to make my cruisers long-ranged, slightly less armored, but filled to the brim with missiles and torpedoes Capital Ships - Your biggest ships and you can do whatever you want with them, want a massive brawler that's armored like a medieval knight and packs a similar close-ranged punch? Want slow, ponderous glorified weapons platform that can obliterate whole strike forces on their own? Just design it! Carriers - Fighter-carries, their usefulness depends on how much you invest in the fighter and/or boarding assault tech branches Troop Transports - Only, ONLY put troop modules on these ships and no others, ignore the advice the in-game ship design tells you about putting troop modules on any other kind of ship But ultimately it depends on how you design your ships. You can max out all the ship sizes so that they're the same size, they just do different things (and cost a gently caress load of money), or you can undersize and specialize and potentially save yourself some cash. e: Combat in this game is kind of a black box, so do not feel the need to min-max like crazy when you're designing a ship. Just have fun and go into it with some vague idea of what you want that ship to do and how it will aid the rest of your fleet. You could, for instance, make a bunch of escorts with tractor beams that will tow in other ships towards your slower, but heavier armed ships. Or you could make a missile-based destroyer that hangs out on the edges of the battle field just blasting away, this kind of ship you could skimp on thrusters (but not turning engines! your turning speed's pretty important) because they won't necessarily be moving around that much. MLKQUOTEMACHINE fucked around with this message at 18:16 on May 27, 2014 |
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May 27, 2014 18:11
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Phlegmish posted:Thank you for the explanation. So your advice would be to manually organize my ships into strike forces and fleets and then to order those fleets to defend/attack X? And my fleets with the appropriate posture will automatically warp to the enemy intruding in their system even if the individual ships supposedly have Automation turned off? I am going to try this now. No, you can leave fleet/strike force organization up to the computer (you can start to organize your own fleets once you get a better sense of what ships you might want for your fleets). Just manually control the fleets by setting their postures and stuff, make sure that the individual fleets and strike forces are not automated.
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May 27, 2014 19:09
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MacGyvers_Mullet posted:If you automate construction ships, will they just go on building whenever there's money? Is this a good thing? Does setting construction to "suggest new ships and bases" stop automated construction ships from building on their own? They'll just gently caress around and do whatever, yeah. It can be a good thing because it will get you tons of mining stations, but you'll get the odd research station thrown up somewhere or another. Also you should still grab a construction ship from time to time and direct it yourself so you can build up defensive star bases around crucial gas mining stations (cause you'll be PISSED to lose it when your fleet's on some offensive and ends up marooned in deep space). Suggest new ships and bases only deals with planet-side construction of ships and bases IIRC. Construction ships will still automate regardless of what options you choose. evvv: Pirates should demand protection payment from you (if they don't then initiate diplomacy with them and request it, actually always try to request for protection early on because it's cheaper) and they're way stronger than your fledgling empire for a while. Pay them their protection money. MLKQUOTEMACHINE fucked around with this message at 21:48 on May 27, 2014 |
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May 27, 2014 21:34
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Phlegmish posted:What I did was manually assemble my fleets and then tell them to guard a particular solar system, leaving them on Automation. It worked alright, though I didn't get into any serious conflict except with some weak-rear end pirates. What I'm still having trouble figuring out is how you defend isolated mining outposts and freighters/construction ships. I built a separate fleet to protect those, set Posture to Defend and Range to Anywhere. They did absolutely nothing whenever I got attacked. I switched Posture to Attack, but still nothing happened. Set the posture to Defend and then the range to "Target" or "System".
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May 27, 2014 22:04
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Archonex posted:Personally, I prefer playing in the Shadows era with the strong, respawning, and many pirates settings on. Makes it feel like something out of a particularly dark sci-fi series. Especially with epic tech research times. Then I add the DW Extended mod in to get about 40 races in. I need to try out these settings.
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May 27, 2014 22:26
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Kilroy posted:So, I just picked up this game about 15 minutes ago. And, I start it up and it tells me to play the pre-warp tutorial. So I bring that up. Tells me to build a spaceport. I start building a spaceport. I get about 10% completed on that and some jerk with a spaceship comes along and demands money. Haha, yeah sometimes the pirates are dicks like that. What can you do, they're pirates after all 
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May 28, 2014 14:56
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My trouble is that the AI will never auto-upgrade a design you build, or it least it's never done that in my experience (I hope it's changed, please tell it has changed). So if you spend all your time researching rail-weapons the AI won't design ships with your tricked out mass drivers, but keep using the dinky pulse blasters you get at the start of the game. It's a little infuriating.
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May 28, 2014 15:45
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Bouchacha posted:How do the different weapon types compare? Is it something like a RPS system of counters? Different ranges and they interact with armor differently. Lasers are longer ranged, but get stopped by shields Rail guns are shorter ranged, but penetrate shields (but are only 50% effective against armor) Those are the two big divides in weaponry, really, as all the other weapons are just cool things that you don't necessarily need (but should get). I like to pick ~3 types of weapons to fully research and base my builds around, normally I'll pick laser or rail gun and two other weapons that compliment whatever path I chose (for instance, tractor beams help bring ships closer so that your rail guns get used sooner, this combined with assault pods is ridiculous).
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May 28, 2014 15:56
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SlyFrog posted:So are there any generally agreed upon "must have" mods for this game that you should install to make the basic gameplay better, even before you have exhaustively played the basic game? Play with Extended Universe because it adds a whole lot of new aliens which are fun to play with/against (for instance, there's a new race called the xHumans who are near-humans who hate normal humans and serve to break up the normal All Humanoid Alliance, so you get some fun situations by mid-to-late game). As for graphical overhauls, I am liking Das's UI, which was released recently, as it makes the UI A WHOLE LOT clearer/sleeker. Also GEM, or graphical enhancement mod. Basically this thread: http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3616942
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May 28, 2014 16:04
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Again, Distant Worlds' combat is best approached as a black box wherein you throw in cool ship designs (light, fighter pods on everything, because why not?) and then see how it plays out. Just put weapons on your ships and make sure you've got decent speeds (especially turning speed, I wouldn't let it fall past 11, maybe 10) and enough power to let your ships fire in combat. The game seems pretty overwhelming, but you're not supposed to sperg out over every little aspect.
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May 28, 2014 16:14
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Reason posted:Can anyone rehost the GEM mod from this post? It links to a mediafire page that has a captcha that wont load. Disable your ad block for the site.
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May 28, 2014 16:24
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By the way: It's not always good to retire ships you find floating around in space. Be sure to check out the ship's design and stats because sometimes a tech one level away is not worth sacrificing a 110FP ship that you find in your home system.
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May 29, 2014 01:20
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Dark_Swordmaster posted:WHAAAAAAT!? gently caress that guy, tell me there's a way to change it back! Just delete the race image stuff for them out of the mod's image's folder. Distant Worlds modding actually looks pretty approachable and as so far as installing the mods goes, all you really need to do is chuck folders into the distant worlds/customization folder.
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May 29, 2014 03:29
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Here's another protip that's not readily apparent: you can quickly cycle through the galaxy by pushing 'L' to lock onto something then cycle through bases/ports (P), colonies (C), fleets (F), exploration ships (X), and constructors (Y) without having to tediously scroll in and out. You'll just snap right there!
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May 29, 2014 05:11
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As a new player I'd honestly suggest setting your starting systems to Agreeable, and more strongly suggest setting it to Excellent. You can even give the AI's all good systems to potentially help them out tp
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May 29, 2014 12:51
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winterwerefox posted:I found a colony ship adrift filled with space dragons that love a lava planet. I dumped them on a 13% magma world in my home system. my civie sector proceeded to dump 300M humans on the planet. Will the fact that the lava planet is a homeworld type to the dragons take into account their pop numbers? I havent found a way to check planet quality for anything other than my own race. That was a waste of a colony ship. There's little reason to go after a low quality planet like that, especially if it's in your home system.
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Jun 1, 2014 14:34
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WYA posted:Why does my first pirate deal always go bad and they attack me anyways? Get the newest patch, it forces the pirates to give you a grace period before they can cancel deals and attack you. Mind you, they will always cancel deals at some point (unless you have very good relations with them, which is hard to achieve) because once you start settling other colonies they'll want to attack you for control of said colonies.
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Jun 2, 2014 04:50
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:- Anyone got any suggestions on music for the game? Internet radio sites or whatever? Install Adblock and make a Steve Roach station on Pandora.
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Jun 2, 2014 17:08
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WYA posted:The latest is 1.9.5 right? 1.9.5.1 The new patch fixes some rare CTD's and makes the font larger/more legible.
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Jun 2, 2014 21:08
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Shab posted:Thanks for the tips. I went from full automation, which was frustrating me in some of the decisions the AI was making, to full manual, which was somewhat overwhelming given some of the obfuscation of what's going on behind the scenes, and I wasn't happy with either. I just need to find that magic balance between the two. Try letting the AI do everything except research, ship design on military ships (defensive bases, escorts, frigates, destroyers, cruisers, capital ships, carriers, troop transport), colonization (set it to 'suggest new projects), diplomacy (also set it to 'suggest), and espionage (also set to 'suggest'). The game will be a lot easier to deal with. Don't feel like you need to update your designs after every new tech (unless it's something major like hyperdrive), accumulate like 3 to 5 new components, then go into design, select the ships you manually control, hit 'auto-upgrade design' (this just replaces old components with new ones) then manually go into the designs and make sure things are working/efficient.
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Jun 5, 2014 21:36
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Blinks77 posted:Always add more engines. While they're not the same, loading up one class of your ships with assault shuttles is always fun and a huge research booster. Not ship ramming, sure, but the next best thing.
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Jun 13, 2014 02:02
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Lowen posted:
Alternatively, if you have no colony ships that can reach an independent colony due to range issues, send in a starfleet to secure the system first and then an invasion fleet to take the independent colony by force. This works for all independents, IIRC, so have fun sending you mandudes to fight robots living on a lava world. You get a hit to your reputation if you do this and if you do it consistently enough you'll be known as that one mean dude who invades everyone.
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Jun 15, 2014 01:34
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Lorini posted:Wow, some pirates just canceled their 143 a month protection agreement and then wanted me to pay $1,135 (!!) a month. Uh no thanks. They changed some stuff in the new patch. Nah, that's always happened. From time-to-time the pirates will get uppity and realize they can squeeze more out of you as your empire grows.
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Jun 21, 2014 00:14
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I honestly have no clue how I'm going to salvage my current game with this loving 1k firepower pirate capital ship just sitting in my home system. Every half-year they'll just cancel the protection agreement and wreck some poo poo before I beg them to stop by paying them off at an even steeper rate.
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Jul 8, 2014 06:50
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Omniblivion posted:On top of the items already suggested, try setting up your space ports in regions. Alternatively you could just only build spaceports in/over places that need them, and not over every colony you have. You can get the commerce and approval bonuses by putting commerce centers and medical/recreational modules on your defensive bases instead. Saves you a ton of cash and you'll have less of a resource headache!
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Jul 9, 2014 22:09
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DarkAvenger211 posted:If I set ship design to not automated, will ships designs still update components to the latest? And will I still get prompts to retrofit? Nope, you have to auto-upgrade the components yourself (either by manually upgrading the design or clicking 'auto-upgrade design', this won't set the design to be automatically taken over by the AI however, just auto-upgrade any parts that can be upgraded).
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Jul 14, 2014 22:47
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Phlegmish posted:Okay, why do parts of my empire keep splitting off? The first time it happened I thought it was neat and it made sense since I had massive war exhaustion at the time. This time it happened during peacetime and despite my empire not having any real problems except a Notorious reputation. Not cool. Is it the Reputation that's caused this or is it just a random event? I think it might be your reputation, though don't quote me on it. I've found that in my games as an evil empire with a low reputation I've had more colonies try to split off. Best way to combat this is by having your planets well garrisoned and I like to go the extra mile by having a full troop transport based at each of my major colonies.
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Jul 22, 2014 21:00
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Familiar Foreigner posted:So, I got this game recently and played a practice game, then on my second game I got this: No you just have to tech up to the better warpdrives ASAP. Think of your homeworld as a hidden fortress!
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Jul 23, 2014 18:40
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Gwyrgyn Blood posted:I think the issue is that he set the max colonization distance to 1.5 sectors, so he literally can't expand anywhere except those ice planets. Then go full conquest and take some nearby colonies with your self-designed gently caress-off ships. 
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Jul 23, 2014 19:06
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