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nessin posted:Can't see it while at work, but did they put up a deal for the base game and first two expansions? quote:For newcomers we have an amazing bundle offer. Get the entire Distant Worlds series and all its expansions for just $69.96! To get the bundle just add any Distant Worlds title to your cart and the bundle will be offered to you. That’s a saving of nearly 40% off the base price! Edit: Beaten! Arg
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May 23, 2013 15:46
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Can you safely add in mods without breaking save games in this game? Just wondering if I should just go ahead and dump in some of the graphical/UI mods or if I can safely try out the vanilla game and add stuff in as I go.
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May 31, 2014 22:51
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That's pretty much what I figured would be the case, thanks.
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May 31, 2014 22:59
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I'm a tad confused at how you start a custom scenario, if you wanted to start a custom scenario in say Legends or Classic, do you just disable the story events for Shadows or what? Couple other minor questions. - Does the Steam overlay not work for this game? I can't even tell if the game is using DirectX what with the wacky windows GUI components. - Does the autorun actually do anything important? Because it doesn't work for me at all, just a black box. :I - Anyone got any suggestions on music for the game? Internet radio sites or whatever? Gwyrgyn Blood fucked around with this message at 06:49 on Jun 2, 2014 |
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Jun 2, 2014 06:39
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Thanks for the answers so far, couple more quick ones: - I Colonized an independent colony, and there was a pirate base under construction on it. Can I attack it now and crush it easily or will it still be stacked with troops? - There is a pirate ship that I guess is warping in and out rapidly? I'm trying to kill it with my regular fleet but having no luck as it just zips out after its shields get low. Warp Inhibitors should stop that and let me kill him right?
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Jun 3, 2014 06:35
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Lowen posted:The base will have some defenders, but not as many as it would when completed. I don't suppose there is a way to just bombard a facility from space is there?
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Jun 3, 2014 21:16
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Also, victory conditions are configurable and some are based on your race. Difficulty level is also highly adjustable, and apparently you can set it to automatically make the game harder if you are well ahead of the AI.
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Jun 3, 2014 21:53
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victrix posted:It's not the learning curve, it's that you can seemingly automate the game and win? You can automate whatever bits and pieces you want. If you automate everything fully, you're basically just an AI player that you're observing. You might win or you might not, but you're basically not playing the game yourself anymore at that point. Essentially it's a semi-sandboxy kind of 4x, so you can set the difficulty and challenges and automation as high or low as you want. And as mentioned, you can adjust the victory conditions or turn them off entirely. Also the automation doesn't seem as smart or efficient as a human player would be much of the time. I imagine you will probably get away less and less with automating everything the harder the difficulty?
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Jun 3, 2014 22:32
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Benagain posted:Okay still coming to grips with this game. All of my ships were retrofitting, then I decided to take out some annoying pirates with my main fleet, but 3/4 of the ships in it were retrofitting. Only three ships jump so I hit stop, now no ship is doing anything. Go to the fleet screen, select the fleet. There's a big 'Retrofit' button in the middle.
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Jun 4, 2014 15:40
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Quick question about Resort Bases, I don't need to build one at a planet if I've already colonized it right? And you only ever need one per planet right?
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Jun 6, 2014 05:49
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It should always add the best jumpdrive you have to your ship designs as soon as you research them. So just make sure to retrofit your military ships as soon as those get researched. If you mean, can you have them ONLY update the hyperdrives and nothing else? I think you'd have to do that manually unfortunately. On that note, does retrofitting just cost the price of building the new components or is there an extra fee on top or anything?
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Jun 6, 2014 23:38
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Another stupid UI question. If I queued up a mining station or something to be built, is there any way I can see what priority it is? Or any way I can tell a ship to immediately go there and build it?
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Jun 8, 2014 23:21
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PittTheElder posted:Does any custom game work for this, or is there an Age of Shadows thing I have to uncheck somewhere that I don't see? It's on the last page of the custom game settings, you can enable/disable story events independently.
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Jun 12, 2014 04:26
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So what's the trick with your research being capped? The help seems to suggest it's based on your strategic value, but is there any way I can directly work to improve my research speed since building more stations seems to have extremely diminished returns? Any non-obvious ways to improve my strategic value?
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Jun 12, 2014 07:57
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Speaking of fleets, if I set a fleet to patrol a system, they don't seem to be smart enough to go and refuel periodically if they need to. Will they do that if I turn on Automation maybe? I think I'm leaning towards what ProfessorGroove suggested though, just making sure every ship has at least one passive collector to minimize having to micro my defense fleets.
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Jun 12, 2014 21:30
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1.9.5.3 is out today:quote:Distant Worlds: Universe is now updated to 1.9.5.3. This patch fixes some high priority issues, as well as a number of minor issues to help create a more stable Distant Worlds experience. Distant worlds is improved even further with some new interface tweaks, making the game better than ever!
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Jun 14, 2014 00:51
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Does increased size directly effect maximum speed? I would expect the benefit of smaller ships to be that they are more maneuverable and faster, but I can't really tell if that's the case.
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Jun 16, 2014 21:22
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I'm having some issues getting my fleets to behave how I want to. Basically what I want is for a fleet to defend an area against hostiles, repair and refuel when needed. So I THINK what I need to do for this is: 1) Set the fleet to Defensive Posture 2) Set the fleet's home base to the center of where I want to defend But it seems like I also have to manually move the fleet there in the first place if they weren't already there? I'm also not really clear if they will actually repair as I want them to. I shouldn't have to set them to automated either right? It seems like sometimes I have the fleets set up correctly but they still just sit there and don't attack pirates who fly in and start shooting poo poo up. I'm not really clear on if I'm missing something or what, it just seems somewhat inconsistent. Also, any tips on how to handle ships that get damaged when you fly out to attack a planet/base, since they tend to get their engine's damage and can't fly back quickly? Just bring construction ships with me whenever I fly out, or something easier? Gwyrgyn Blood fucked around with this message at 05:05 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Jun 19, 2014 05:02
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Esroc posted:Usually if I just manually set the fleet to defend a planet/system/station, then re-tick automate after the initial assignment, they'll stick to patrolling that area and repair/refuel as needed but always return to their assignment afterwards. Hrmm, I tried setting a fleet to defend sector -> automate once, and they started busying themselves with transporting troops around for no reason. I really don't get how to automate defense at all, they seem to just go off doing whatever they feel like, or they don't do anything at all. Also is there a way to make that blue bubble showing the defensive range disappear? Edit: Found a decent guide to fleet posturing and such, looks like I am supposed to set them to automated to get them to do what I want. I wonder why they were messing with troops? Maybe they had assault pods and wanted to fill them? Gwyrgyn Blood fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Jun 19, 2014 |
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Jun 19, 2014 17:32
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Fleet control went much better today, but I've got another weird issue. I set my offensive fleet to non-automated, attack stance, attack only target. But they still fly around their current sector attacking everything. Is there a way I can tell them to not do that, or tell them at least to ignore certain targets? For example if there is a research base, I want to capture it, not destroy it.
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Jun 20, 2014 06:37
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Factions will also still love/hate you based on those government types, so there's always that to consider. Question about when to build bases. Someone mentioned earlier that building spaceports causes freighters to shuffle goods around more, so you're better off having less of them. But is there another way to provide the bonuses from trade/entertainment/medical modules without building a spaceport? Will it count if I slap those onto a Monitoring station or Defensive station?
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Jun 20, 2014 17:41
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Lot of good stuff in that post. Seems like there's a lot of balancing acts to worry about in this game.MagnumOpus posted:The point here is that unlike in most games where the replacement of destroyed military units is an objective economic loss, in Distant Worlds it is also a mechanism by which the private economy is stimulated. Long story short: get blown up early and often. That's funny, and also great. The private sector also handles foreign trade and tourism right? So helping them expand should also improve my bonus income over time as well then? BTW on the Diplomacy screen, what's the number next to each race, says 0K or some other value. Is that the current trade income from that race? Over the last year I guess?
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Jun 20, 2014 21:14
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Nostrum posted:1.) Made it seem like your saved games were gone, since they changed the file structure and the game wasn't smart enough to figure out where you old saves were. This happens almost every patch. Settings get reset, save file location gets moved. However, this time they moved the save game folder to a common one, so that shouldn't be a problem again in the future. As far as autopatching breaking saves and such, I wonder if you can just copy this game's install folder somewhere else so Steam will stop trying to autoupdate? That trick works with CK2, which is another game where they frequently break little things with patches.
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Jun 21, 2014 16:48
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Make sure to either set pirates off, or set them to few/weak. They're a neat mechanic but if you don't turn them down they get super obnoxious, especially if you're just learning the game.
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Jun 22, 2014 05:10
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As much as I like this game, I think the fleet automation stuff is going to drive me to shelve it for a while. Maybe someone has some tips for this stuff but it's just driving me nuts... - Automated fleets prioritize refueling and repairing over everything else. Set a fleet to defend a sector, oh but a couple of ships are low on fuel? Guess they'll just ignore a pirate ship raiding a planet nearby until everyone is fully fueled up. - Compounded with the above, fleets only ever seem to act as a single unit. Meaning, they won't split up even if it would be radically more efficient to do so. In the above case, I would expect the fleet that needs refueling to remain refueling while the rest of the fleet continues mopping up pirates. Another example, a large fleet may choose an odd place to refuel, I assume, because it will only choose to refuel at a location which has enough Casion/Hydrogen to refuel the entire fleet. All together I suppose, means that the most efficient way to handle automation is to keep your fleets in somewhat small numbers. Which is not good. - Automated fleets are crazy unresponsive. Like, they take forever to actually respond to something happening nearby. Additionally, if an enemy fleet is on a vector to attack another system, the defending fleet doesn't try to get there ahead of time to intercept them. Or at least not that I've ever noticed. - Attack Stance is a whole different animal, it just doesn't work right at all from what I can tell. You set say, a target planet, set to attack stance, set range to sector or such, turn on automation. Maybe that fleet will pick up some number of troops, then fly to that planet and attempt to conquer it, fail, and then just cancel the target. The range setting doesn't seem to do anything at all? I was under the impression this was suppose to be a way to order a fleet to attack an entire area (the red circle), and refuel/repair at their home base when needed. But it doesn't seem to do this at all. - Ships in a system will just attack all enemies there, regardless of stance or automation or anything. I believe this is tied to the ship behaviors, which you can adjust in the design menu or as a global option, but there doesn't seem to be any way to tag a single fleet to 'not attack this thing because I want to board it' or 'stop loving warping around the system and stay in place where I tell you to'. - The fleet GUI straight up breaks once you get enough ships in it since there's no scroll bar and the ships just flow off the bottom. Another reason to use small fleets I guess. - Sometimes, despite all your best efforts, a fleet will just straight up decide to ignore certain orders. Turned automation off, right click to attack a planet. Ship cancels the order after a few seconds and goes to refuel, and they're already like 75% full. I'm assuming this is something to do with the fact that that fleet didn't have any troops so couldn't assault the planet. But ... why completely change the order and do something totally unrelated? It's nonsense. All in all, it's extremely frustrating trying to wage any sort of offense or defense because of the combination of horrible GUI, unresponsiveness of automation, and your fleet sometimes doing erratic things you never told them to with no explanation. I feel like I could probably work around some of this with enough experience trying to figure out the game's logic, but a lot of it probably not.
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Jun 28, 2014 02:28
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Thanks, I'll give a few of those things a spin and see how it works out. I was trying to take care of things like defense over a large region using automation but it doesn't seem practical to do that, or at least not with a single larger fleet. The problem is it's extremely micro heavy to worry about keeping defensive fleets out protecting mining stations where you don't have planets/bases and such. Maybe the right combination of non-automated fleets guarding systems and a small automated fleet for picking off small groups of pirates/fleets over a large region would work best. I think if you set a fleet to simply 'patrol this planet' it should guard the whole system and also refuel as needed right? I've also found that it really helps to name your fleets something like, 0a-1st and 0d-2nd to indicate 'offensive' and 'defensive' fleets you care to manage. That way they float to the top of the list and other fleets float to the bottom. Another dumb question, I want to design my own ships but have them automatically update with new tech. So I set Ship Design to Fully Automated, and make sure it says Automatic/Automatic in the design menu. But for some reason they still don't auto upgrade? The default ones auto upgrade just fine, I'm just not sure why my custom ones don't.
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Jun 28, 2014 19:03
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No I'm pretty sure an Out Of Memory Exception is the game making GBS threads itself because it's really badly coded, not a problem with his hardware. Sorry, not trying to be a jerk, just saying that trying to pass the problem on to his hardware configuration error is pretty ludicrous given that this game is both notoriously badly coded and notorious about throwing OutOfMemoryExceptions. Not to mention I don't think it's even possible for that type of exception to get thrown due to hardware issues like bad RAM, it's definitely a software problem either with the game or something else running. Gwyrgyn Blood fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Jun 30, 2014 |
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Jun 30, 2014 18:52
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If you go into the Empire Summary screen you can see the exact bonuses of changing to Way of Darkness. You'll also lose some colony development level but it's not real significant from what I recall. And yeah, you'll be the natural enemy to anyone with Way of the Ancients, Democracy, Republic, or Utopian Paradise, you'll specifically go from +12 -> -16 with your Utopian Paradise friends, which is fairly significant. The biases are all listed in governmentBiases.txt (use Notepad++ to read it correctly). On the other hand, Way of Darkness has no penalties at all and is super good if you're planning on just constantly being at war, low maintinance, basically no war weariness, fast recruitment, fast research, fast growth. As long as you aren't too worried about making a few enemies, it's basically a no-brainer to switch to it. For Neutral colonies, just send a Colony ship there to colonize it. 1.9.5.5 patch is out: http://steamcommunity.com/games/261470/announcements/detail/1859174592036304889
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Jul 1, 2014 16:46
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I think the in-game help also says changing governments can cause civil war in some cases, but I haven't seen it myself. Maybe it's based on happiness rating?
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Jul 2, 2014 00:25
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Leif. posted:Just picked up this game. Is there a good newbie guide out there? Anything I should specifically be aware of in the beginning? I typically like to play 4x's defensively, and expand slowly but make my empire as diplomatically, espionage, and research oriented as possible, until I really get the feel of the game and can take a more aggressive playstyle. Is that viable in this game? A good place to start is to make a custom game with these settings: Custom Game as Standard Empire -> Galaxy Screen: Expansion = Prewarp, Pirates = Very Few, Pirate Strength = Very Weak, Pirates do not Respawn = yes Your Empire Screen: Tech Level = Prewarp Victory Conditions Screen: Disable 'Shadow Story Events' You'll have a ton of time at the beginning to get a feel on how it works with a pre-warp start. I'd recommend for starters, go into the Empire Policy screen, set Research, Ship Design, and Taxes to 'Fully Automated', and everything else either to 'Suggest' where possible, or 'Manual' where not. Don't worry about the Research being automated, you can manually override it as you see fit. The first thing you need to build is a Space Port, then a couple of Exploration Ships to go out and explore the system. You'll want to build at least an Energy Research Base too, once you get a chance. Your first goal as a Pre-warp empire is to discover Warp technology (it will be in a site in your starting system), then research it ASAP. Meanwhile, build a Construction ship or two, and start setting up mining stations on sources of key materials. Key materials to be on the look out for are: Steel, Lead, Iron, Gold, Chromium, Polymer, Carbon Fibre, Silicon, and Hydrogen. These are needed to build basic components for everything, so having a good supply is important. Casion you will need too, for fuel. If you don't have it, I highly recommend at least using the Das Chrome mod, as it will color Resources by their necessity. Light Grey = Critical Resources, the ones mentioned above Dark Grey = Less important Resources, but needed for weapons and higher end engines/shields. Orange = Luxury Resources, stuff to make your people happy. Yellow = Bonus Resources, these give your colonies huge bonuses if you have them. Very rare. As far as playing a defensive + research oriented game, yeah you can do this, just make sure you pick a race and government that's well suited for it! You can't just turtle in your home system of course, but you can definitely do well by avoiding war and expanding and researching. Just be ready in case some of your neighbors decide they don't like you!
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Jul 3, 2014 01:44
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Stevefin posted:I would pick that mode if it was not for those two factors, I looked at the mod example between colours and I could not tell the difference in the two greys Not sure what example screenshot you looked at but they are very different shades of grey in the game. It's very easy to tell the difference between the two.  The ones on the right side are the different colors for resources.
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Jul 3, 2014 03:58
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Kilroy posted:Just to add, if you're going to do this, to also change the default tax policy as well. I go with <200k=none, 200K-2M=none, >2M=low to start. The default seems to be high, for the highest tier. Yeah I forgot to mention this, even after the patch change the happiness rating really effects population growth significantly. For example with a starter Human planet: 2466M population starting 0% Taxes = +20 Happiness = 14% Growth = 2802M Population after 1 year 25% Taxes = +3 Happiness = 3% Growth = 2553M Population after 1 year You can take a guess as to the effect of this over a long period of time. It's not exactly a linear effect though, one planet I have, for example: 0% Taxes = +51 Happiness = 15% Growth 5% Taxes = +47 Happiness = 13% Growth 10% Taxes = +43 Happiness = 11% Growth 15% Taxes = +39 Happiness = 10% Growth 20% Taxes = +35 Happiness = 6% Growth 25% Taxes = +30 Happiness = 4% Growth 50% Taxes = +7 Happiness = 3% Growth 60% Taxes = -2 Happiness = 3% Growth So there's a very obvious sharp bump there once you get to 15% or below. I'm not clear if that's entirely based around the Tax Rate or if the Happiness factors in as well, amplifying the effect of low taxes. Either way, low taxes = big population growth. If a planet is full, tax those bastards.
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Jul 3, 2014 04:29
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Stevefin posted:when its ingame on the info screen its hard to tell, as the screen its self is a shade of black and grey Go into the images/ui/resources folder for the mod, open up each of the light grey resources and paintbucket the background green or your favorite color. Should take you about 3 minutes total at worst. That's another nice thing about the game, modding it is super straight forward and easy.
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Jul 4, 2014 01:04
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First thing is to figure out if you are actually mining enough of the stuff or not. See how much total you have sitting around, including on the mining stations. If you aren't mining enough, you might need to look at your mining station designs, see this link: http://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=3649225 Or you might just need even more sources than you already have. If you're mining the stuff fast enough, you might need to simply increase the cargo space at your stations. Or, you might need to increase the cargo space of your mining stations. You have to watch the cargo holds and try and figure out where the bottleneck is. If the problem boils down to simply not having enough freighters moving stuff ... well, I'm not really clear on what the best approach to solving that is, hopefully someone else can chime in.
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Jul 8, 2014 19:58
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You can also pay for pirates to smuggle things for you of course, but I've had very little luck in general getting much out of them. I guess it just depends on if they have access to excess of that resource or not. Another interesting thing from that link was the idea of putting gas miners onto warships to refuel instead of using stations. Gonna have to mess around with that later and see how it works out.
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Jul 8, 2014 20:25
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If there's Gas and regular resources on a single planet/asteroid, will they automatically build both types of mining stations? Annoyingly I've noticed the button on the lower left doesn't give you both options, just one or the other.
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Jul 9, 2014 01:50
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Arghy posted:I dont want to have to bother with creating a fleet for every loving world--is there a way to ensure that your retarded automated defense ships actually protect important poo poo rather then waste their time orbiting my strongest station while the border worlds get ravaged? I've taken to creating a defense fleet for every world then stationing them there. Nope that's basically how you have to do it. The fleet automation is exceptionally bad, and because fleets operate like a singular unit it means the only way to do things efficiently is to split your military into tons of small fleets. That guide for fleet posturing makes it sound great on paper, but as you know the automation on ships is hilariously slow to respond and automated fleets will, again, act as a single unit. So if a single ship is out of fuel or damaged, the whole fleet will give up trying to fend off enemies until that one ship is ready to go. So you really just can't have 1 big automated fleet cover defense for a large area. You can try setting up lots of small overlapping automated defensive fleets too, this way they'll help cover each other when one fleet needs to get repairs. Another useful tip I mentioned earlier, name the fleets you are personally controlling (like large attack or defense fleets, or troop transport, etc) things like, '0a1', '0d1', '0t1' and so on. This way, the fleets you care about controlling float to the top of the fleet list, and the dozens and dozens of system defense fleets you create will automatically float to the bottom. I wish every space 4x game had mine laying mechanics like Stars! did. I don't think I've ever seen another one that had anything like that.
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Jul 14, 2014 18:04
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They won't auto-update no. But all you have to do is go into the designs screen, select them all, hit Auto Upgrade. You might have to tweak them in the rare case they go over the weight limit though. Also note this only upgrades components (ie it will replace Basic Armor with Advanced Armor and similar), but it won't add totally new components, like if you didn't already have Shields on a ship for example, it won't add them. Not sure about the prompts to retrofit, it's pretty painless to do that yourself though. Jump into the Fleets window and hit Retrofit. Things can get difficult if you try to branch one particular category of ship, which is why I just use each one for a specific role. IE Escorts for Capture, Frigates for Scanners, Destroyers for destroying, Capitals for Bombard, stuff like that.
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Jul 14, 2014 22:52
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Arghy posted:At this rate i'll have to tell each system defense fleet to STAY INSIDE THEIR loving SYSTEM and the roving defense fleets will just forever be loving idiots. Yeah that's what I usually end up doing, just have defensive fleets restricted to their own system, and then a couple of large defensive fleets that I manually control when the system fleets can't cover stuff. I'm still messing with different methods of getting automated regional fleets to help cover stuff, but the distance at which they can actually respond efficiently is very short. You can help protect your mining stations and other remote things by slapping enough armor/shields/missiles/etc on them to keep them safe from stray pirates. You may have to watch your private sector numbers though since they pay the upkeep on Mining Stations. Anyone have any experience on getting a balance of Armor and Shields and such for offensive fleets and bases and such? Like say for example if I have a 400 size ship, how much space do you allocate to armor, shields, and so forth? I'm assuming that Damage Control modules are always a must? Point Defenses too maybe? Any other things that help survivability a lot?
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Jul 15, 2014 20:17
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Less Fat Luke posted:I'm not sure what a good way is to put newly constructed ships into fleets. Say I build 25 new destroyers - right now I have to go into the ship list, choose Military Ships, sort by type and find destroyer. Then I highlight the non-fleeted ones and choose their fleet. Surely there has to be an easier way? Just go into the ship list, Military Ships, and all your newest ships will be at the bottom. Yes, you should really be able to assign them to a fleet on creation.
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Jul 16, 2014 02:19
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