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Man, I really want to play Distant Worlds 2 now. Only problem: Because of my bad eye sight I set the UI-size to the largest possible when launching the game. Result: Most of the UI is now invisible, and the rest seems to just cover loving everything Also, trying to go back doesn't work because the confirmation-button in the settings menu is now invisible, and there apparently is no keyboard shortcut for confirming the settings. In fact, you can't go back out of the menu either, you're just trapped until you tab out and kill the game from Steam. Welp. Deinstalled, re-installed, nothing changed. Searched for a place where the settings would normally be saved, but apparently DW2 doesn't put the in-game setting anywhere where you could get at them from outside. Changing the Windows UI just breaks the UI even worse. I've filed a bug report because of this mess, but if I don't hear back, I'll be forced to ask for a refund. 
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Mar 10, 2022 22:15
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Splicer posted:Close game Thanks! That helped. After some careful experimenting, the game accepted Win10 at 125% scaling and normal UI as an acceptable compromise without breaking anything. Now the game is actually playable! So far thinks are looking good, but of course now it's time to stop already, ha ha. All this trouble-shooting ate away all the playing time I had left for today. I guess I have to go deeper in my Teekan merchant guild run tomorrow after work 
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Mar 10, 2022 23:22
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Willfrey posted:ooof. really hate burning a save i have all this time into but man, i've explored like 8 surrounding systems and no silicon which is required for a LOT of valuable research. Just a side annoyance.. i mean.. planets are literally described 'rocky silicon planet' I think either you or the devs are confusing silicon with silicate. A planet made of silicon would be very unusual
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Mar 12, 2022 19:01
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Jarvisi posted:Jeez. Ackdarians start with a super stardock. Commerce station, research lab, hospital, recreation center and a ton of guns Are you sure you haven't accidentally taken one of the advanced start options? Because there are like 4 options, going from "single colony, nothing" up to a fully developed star empire. This sounds like you switched to option 2 or something before starting.
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Mar 12, 2022 19:04
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Jarvisi posted:I'm just going with the prewarp options. They start with a ruined Spacedock in orbit that you can recover. Ah, that's interesting. I've started with Teekan, but hadn't much time to play beyond noticing there's a bunch of ancient technology to research on our homeworld. I guess every race has a different line of events back to space if you start pre-warp?
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Mar 12, 2022 19:06
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RandomBlue posted:First start right after buying none of my ships would work, they were constantly stuck in construction. Sometimes they'd finish for a sec then go right back in. Thought it was some weird construction bug but it turns out the game started my colony in the middle of a huge ion storm and it was completely unplayable. The RNG it seems can be really cruel in DW2. Though I hope a later balance patch can tighten that poo poo up, like e.g. giving a starting empire a small nebula exclusion zone or something.Now that I had time to go back and play my Teekan-game a bit longer, I think I really like DW2. The "only one type of fuel"-thing already saved my rear end, because in DW1 I sometimes ran into the problem of all nearby gas giants at game start having the wrong type of fuel. (I think in my longest running DW1-game I was suffering a constant shortage until I eventually developed a reactor type with the other kind of fuel, allowing me to retrofit and switch over.) Also the RNG seems to be really nice to me so far: Tons of asteroids, planets and moons with tons of useful resources, and at least one another planet good enough (basically homeworld-quality) for colonization -and I haven't even explored more than 3 out of the 7 planets in my homesystem yet! In fact, I haven't yet managed to properly survey the huge ring of asteroids around my homeworld, because the explorer I assigned to the asteroid ring didn't manage to finish its work yet, ha ha The only thing I have yet to puzzle out is that one constructor that has been stuck on "picking up computer core" for years now. I'm assuming it's related to ancient tech stuff my people found by exploring their homeworld and the asteroid ring, but I have no idea what the constructor is even doing, as its task doesn't come with a time limit or a progress bar or anything. Since I'm fearing that I'm missing out on something cool, I kept that ship on whatever it is its doing, and just used the other constructors for work. What I'm slowly seeing is my private sector going nuts, as soon as the first mining stations and my first spaceport went online, the private sector started building tons of ships and now my growing empire is getting busy. I like to pretend this massive private expansion is due to our state being a Merchant Guild. All those trading guilds need their ships, after all.  Another improvement over DW1 I've noticed: The research automatically tries to select your next research project and so far every selection made sense or was something I wanted to research anyway. Kind of spooky, actually.
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Mar 13, 2022 20:58
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chglcu posted:A very minor thing that’s bugging me in DW2 is that all the galaxies are circular. I can’t really do the thing I did in DW1 and use one of the non circular galaxies and pretend I’m in a small chunk of a much bigger galaxy, which makes the small number of stars require less suspension of disbelief. I don't really understand this complaint, even irregular star clusters are roughly circular, I mean "spherical" OK fine, but close enough. For immersion purposes, an invisible barrier preventing you from leaving an arbitrary rectangular chunk or a circular cluster is exactly the same -in both cases you have to event some reason for why your ships can't leave the map to not break immersion (my preferred options are "irregular cluster slightly above the galactic disc and all around the cluster are huge stretches of impassable halo" and "there's some freaky dark matter zone or weird super-nebula preventing ships moving through hyperspace in that direction" Edit: Jarvisi posted:What determines when your territory expands in dw2? Can't see anything in the pedia. I've got lots of stations in blank territory but it won't expand There are still colony range options in game set-up, so I'm guessing it works the same as in DW1: You need a new colony around that blank territory for your territory to expand into Blankvania and cover it.
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Mar 13, 2022 21:17
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Squiggle posted:Another patch today with more crash fixes and display troubleshooting, but also this: Holy poo poo! But only after 90% of the debris ring around my homeworld has been explored, of course 
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Mar 14, 2022 17:45
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Splicer posted:I like how luxury fish scales has a three page treatise on who when where what and how of everything, but the research tree is just "It's called a Thuon Beam, whaddaya want from me here" A Thuon Beam is apparently a music and girl power based weapon. Very futuristic!
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Mar 14, 2022 19:37
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Something about the weapons in DW2 confuses me. My escorts came with some sort of wave motion gun and torpedos pre-installed and while torpedos are easy to understand, this weird "bomb"-weapon confounds me. So, this weapon does huge AOE-damage and is a direct fire weapon, which I am assuming means PD can't intercept this "bomb". But the normal weapons like beams seem to do only tiny amounts of DPS, have way less range and no AOE. Looking at the stats I can't see any obvious drawback, but this would make any other weapons useless. What am I not seeing?? 
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Mar 17, 2022 17:47
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Bloodly posted:Friendly fire. Area weapons don't discriminate. Yeah, that makes sense. I didn't want to blindly assume, since the game didn't tell me about AOE weapons hurting indiscriminately. (Or let me guess, that stuff is in the manual I didn't read?)
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Mar 17, 2022 19:28
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As someone who put *checks Steam* holy poo poo nearly 3000 hours???  ahem, who put a lot of hours into Stellaris, I think it's kind of funny that Stellaris-players often complain about a lot of the automatization not working, causing an overwhelming amount of micro, while people who don't like DW2 seem to be annoyed at automation working too well Anyway, the most fun Stellaris is if your space empires runs itself, and you only go in once a month at most and deal with an important issue. The worst Stellaris is if you have to babysit a thousand issues at the same time, eating up your time like candy. In comparison, Distant World's strength was always that you could just highly automate anything you personally think is boring and only concentrate on that other stuff. It's why I've stopped playing Stellaris for now and switched my free time over to DW2! Playing Stellaris is fun, but while playing it I also feel like I'm haunted by the feeling that I'm only having fun because I grew up with space 4x games from an era where "good automation" meant your order was properly processed without making the game crash, if that makes sense
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Mar 17, 2022 21:27
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Orange Devil posted:
This reminds me, I build some early game escorts, but they're standard designs with plasma torpedos and energy bombs. As the latter are AOE, I foresee a huge military disaster in the future if I don't refit them to something less prone to accidentally blow up the ships they're supposed to protect.
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Mar 20, 2022 13:05
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Neophyte posted:I don't play the game rn but looking at various DW2 LPs you also shouldn't spam colonies on every possible world, low quality ones especially, you'll be in the red on them nearly forever and they're a huge drag on the economy. Settle a few high-quality ones only, unless maybe you need a particular planet for a special resource or trait or something. This seems to be easy, at least in my case. After 7 hours playtime, so far the only other colony I got was through an event chain. There are multiple colonizable planets around, some even with high quality, but they're the wrong type and still need tons and tons of research, so for now I've been concentrating on industry, exploration and trading. Edit: Right now my first playthrough encountered some slow down because I spend ages moving around with skip drives, when I eventually realized that's not enough for my explorers to reach the nearest stars, I had spend tons of research on other stuff. Now I'm up to warp bubbles, but we still need better fuel cells and bigger explorers to even get to the nearby stars and back. My work-around for this terrible self-inflicted situation is sending around tank ships to refuel my explorers mid-flight. It takes ages
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Mar 20, 2022 18:38
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Bliss Authority posted:You want Colony Bases to grab other planets within your starting system, not Colony Ships. I haven't seen that research option so far, and I fear by the time I can build them, I'll have already colonized all the other planets in my starting system.
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Mar 21, 2022 17:53
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ate poo poo on live tv posted:You start with that option. Even on pre-warp. There is no research required to do it. None of my station options are a "colony" base and there is no such compartment to make one myself, as far as I can tell.
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Mar 21, 2022 18:32
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Splicer posted:They're talking about MOO2 Oops, kind of missed that there was an entire MO-discussion mixed in with the DW2-discussion, my bad
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Mar 21, 2022 18:47
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LLSix posted:DW2, ships are slow enough that I feel like I need at least 1 fleet for every "side" or "sector" of my territory. Annoyingly, whenever I set a fleet to automate as a "defense" fleet, the AI changes it's homebase to my homeworld, and moves it halfway across my territory, instead of defending the sector and Caslon mining station I have set as its home base. I really wish there was a way to get it to stop doing that. You can use the "Guard"-command to keep your fleets on site. I've noticed the "defend" problem with my second ever fleet, but after I ordered it to guard my 2nd colony, it stayed put.
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Mar 22, 2022 09:22
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Darkrenown posted:And yet, I noticed I have a couple of mining ships sitting in a much more distant system and these ships have a smaller range and skip drives. They may have been built in the pirate base in the system, but they claim to be offloading their cargo on my home planet's spaceport. I decided to sit and watch them to see how they did this, but whenever they cargo bays get full they just instantly empty and they continue mining The explorer should have two rings, if you zoom further in. The outer ring is the total range, I think. The inner ring shows how far you can get on half fuel. Without any refuel capability, your explorer will only go as far as the inner ring before returning. With some exceptions. One of my explorers bravely tried to reach a star it couldn't, and ran out of fuel halfway there. But at that point I had tankers running around, and there maybe was a draining nebula involved? I have to look closer at this mess the next time I'm playing. Maybe the ship tried because it new it would be re-fueled eventually, or it could have reached that far, but got drained by a nebula.
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Mar 22, 2022 21:50
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Darkrenown posted:I do see an inner ring, but it is MUCH less than half the distance, barely reaching beyond the star system. Maybe in system travel is much less fuel efficient? There's something odd with the large ring too - I tried making a Long Range design where I stripped out the weapons and added an extra fuel cell. It shows Fuel range: 40M on the design screen vs my normal design's 27M, but when I select the LR version it has a smaller ring than the normal designs... To be fair, I've only noticed the range markings after I've had researched warp bubbles, and my ships have ranges around 200-230M. If you still use a skip drive, the range may simply be not there. No idea what is going on in your case. Maybe you zoomed in too far and the larger ring is now hidden? Or maybe I'm wrong and the rings have some arcane, inscrutable meaning I've missed? Too bad I only have time to play on the weekend, when I'm back from hospital (long story), or I would take a look now myself.
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Mar 22, 2022 23:54
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Jinnigan posted:DW2: Holy poo poo the Teekan start is godawful, you get a 10k cr upkeep terraforming device dumped on you in the first system, well before you can do anything approaching the level of sustainment required Protip: Take the colonists instead to get a free colony. You'll get the terraformer a bit later anyway. Just scrap the thing as soon as the quality ticked over your homeworld quality. Getting a second colony this early turned out to be quite the boost!
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Mar 29, 2022 17:41
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Wipfmetz posted:Any advice on colonizing? I accept that a new colony will be a money drain due to being uh, new and on life support from the empire. 100M is still loving tiny, you're not doing anything wrong. Besides maybe colonizing new worlds before the old colonies reached at least 1b? Anyway, if it annoys you too much, you can always switch off finance automatic and just set a higher tax rate. Be warned it will slow down development of the new colonies though.
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Mar 31, 2022 12:59
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Space Empires V had a PBEM-function, I think. And it's on GOG currently.
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Apr 18, 2022 10:07
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KOGAHAZAN!! posted:Does SE PBEM not take like real life decades to finish In SEV, every game takes real life decades to finish, so every player should be well accustomed to this. Seriously, there's something wrong with how SEV was programmed, having 100+ ships and bases should not mean that you can go and make tea in the time it takes the fleet window to open. There must be a lot of players who mistakenly believe SEV keeps crashing* because of how excruciatingly long some windows take to open in longer, bigger games. But no, SEV does not freeze, it just really takes entire minutes to process your input somehow. *Crashes still happen of course, just not more or less than in any other space 4x
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Apr 18, 2022 12:29
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Lawman 0 posted:I think I have my SE V disk somewhere so if we could find a working mirror for the devnull mod I would consider playing that. I got tired of regularly re-installing SEV and trying to find my manual with the key printed on it, so I just bought it for like 2 bucks on Steam. (Later I bought the entire loving series on GOG again, this time for 5 bucks.) Now I have to never deal with this copy protection poo poo again! Also, if you can't find your disc anymore, paying a couple bucks to GOG or Steam probably saves you a lot of future headaches.
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Apr 18, 2022 16:58
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Ironically, I still love SEV. Mostly because I really liked a lot of the ideas the game introduced, the 3D-RTS-style combat maps and the art style. If I look at SEIV, it just makes my eyes sad. There's more, but the other poo poo I liked was also in SEIV, so gushing over it in SEV would be deeply unfair. Also, besides their uneven output, the devs of this mad series definitely deserve mad props for having the balls to make their first game unable to be played without human players (SEI has no AI).
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Apr 18, 2022 18:07
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Agean90 posted:Gal civ 2 ai was good, it was capable of doing things like realizing that your going for culture wins then declaring forever war or managing to actually compete with the player will still having personality quirks for each race From what I remember about 4x-programming, sadly it's not as easy as taking a "good" AI and putting into another game. A GalCiv2 would be fundamentally incapable of controlling e.g. Stellaris, as the decision trees are too different. Making the GalCiv2-AI work in Stellaris (or really, any other 4x), would mean rewriting it from the ground up. And to stay at this example, if the work is done by the same devs, they could just delete the GalCiv2-AI and copy over their own work and claim they'd done the rewrite. The end result would probably be better than actually attempting to make the other AI fit. It also doesn't help that over time, 4x games became ever more convoluted and complex, making it harder to create an AI that works for your game. An additional problem is that a 4x game is a product like any others, with a finite life cycle. There's therefore an only finite amount of time and resources a developer can put into a game's AI before that game is dead and gone from the market. And the next generation of games is filled up with even more gizmos and greebles, or too much of the old AI was tuned to an engine that's now obsolete and gets thrown out, etc. Woops, suddenly the devs start from square 1 again. Ironically, if we ever manage to make a genuine, general-purpose AI, the very first thing 4x-developers will do is trying to copy them into their games to have less work to do. But that's not how 4x-AI works at all right now, so we're basically hosed. Edit: Essentially, I agree with Kanos
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Apr 30, 2022 18:15
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Google Butt posted:Missed this thread when I asked a bit ago, what are some 4x games that are fun with a gamepad? With a gamepad Uh... I guess Civ II? I played the horrible PSX-port, but the many problems of that version were not in the control-department, it played perfectly fine with gamepad. Sim City on the SNES (though you could cheat by using the Nintendo-mouse instead) was good. If we want to stay closer to the 4x-genre, Utopia: The Creation of a Nation was also fun to play. Though again I switched to my Nintendo-mouse to play most of it. Any modern 4x-games though, ha ha hell no 
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Oct 15, 2022 16:48
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The Human Crouton posted:Compare that to Civilization where the AI proposes a treaty and you're locked in a data-barren screen until you make a decision. Oh, you don't have the entire map and each deal between each other faction memorized? Too bad, gently caress you. Maybe check and memorize the diplomacy screen between each and every turn next game. Oh, I remember this. I always "solved" this issue by only accepting deals that were obviously bad for the AI and good for me, or by refusing, then later looking at all my poo poo in peace and quiet, then sending my own proposal.
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Oct 16, 2022 09:22
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Orange Devil posted:The Lufia strategy guide was excellent. Yeah, the SNES had some good ones, but all in German. Guides for Lufia II, Secret of Mana, Secret of Evermore, even one for Terranigma, I think? Too bad those were never really sold separately, so they're kind of hard to get nowadays. I threw mine away decades ago, for example. For some reason Nintendo thought German kids would get easily confused by RPGs, ha ha. Apparently no-one told them about the German love for simulation games, RPGs are easy mode compared to that poo poo.
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Oct 29, 2022 13:48
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Yeah, MO3 suffered a lot because the game tried to give you lots of tools to macro-manage your empire, but then the devs also gave the AI ideas of how to do things and forgot to inform the player. Like, nowhere in-game is explained that the AI when contemplating what military stuff to select is hard-coded to always take the cheaper option, resulting in late-game AI cheerfully filling up your reserves with hundreds of tiny recon ships you don't want. The game is also full of odd oversights, like did you know its impossible to scrap ground units after they've entered your reserves? Or that troops can't be moved after they end up on a planet? The only way to get veteran troops back is either hoping for survivors of lost battles to limp back home or to just manually scrap armies stuck on the ground and put them into completely new ships. Because of course their old transport task forces demobilize themselves immediately after a landing attempt. And in MO3 it can take some time for demobilized ships to finally reach your reserves so you can use them again. Another thing that was always a real head scratcher is that the devs implemented a full system to store ammunition on a ship -but only for missiles. Fighters instead just auto-respawn. Every so often, your now empty carriers will magically refuel empty space and then eventually their hangars will spit out another wave. And another one. And so on, every couple minutes, until the battle ends. Since I sincerely believe the devs weren't stupid or lunatics, I can only assume all this weird poo poo is the result of time crunch, because I can easily see the devs finishing up the missile system, realizing they don't have the time to properly balance a similar system for fighters, and then just make them respawn a lot 'cause otherwise fighters would have been too weak to compete with missiles. (Instead it's the other way around, as soon as the tech tree gifts you some good fighter techs, the other ship classes can just go home and weep.) Libluini fucked around with this message at 12:22 on Oct 31, 2022 |
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Oct 31, 2022 12:20
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Deptfordx posted:MoO 2016 is fine MO16 has sexy cat ladies, if you're into that. Otherwise, not really. "It looks nicer to modern audiences" is the only thing it has going for it.
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Oct 31, 2022 15:52
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Mr. Fortitude posted:It's better than MoO 3 at least. But not nearly as ambitious as that game. So... yeah. yeah, but a solid block of wood is better than MO3
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Oct 31, 2022 16:01
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chaosapiant posted:I mean does MoO2 need a clone? Every space 4x since then has essentially copied its model. Not all of them, Space Empires was originally made the same year MO (the original) came out and by the year MO2 came out, Space Empires II was also already there. (MO2 released in 1996, SEII in 1995) And Ascendancy also released in 1995, one year before MO2 and did its own thing too.
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Nov 2, 2022 22:50
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Tuna-Fish posted:Stars! has a system where each planet (star, really) gets rolled 3 different habitability values, radiation, temperature and gravity, and in race design you can pick the midpoint and width of the habitability band for each of those. The most point-efficient way to get a wide habitability is to be near the middle with roughly equivalently sized bands, but there can be really serious diplomatic benefits of having at least one of the bands narrow and pushed far from the middle (because if you meet someone who did the same but in the different direction, you are the bestest of friends and can happily expand into each other's space without hurting each other). Stars! always interested me, but I never managed to get it to work on my modern PC. Is there a GOG-version or something available?
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Nov 4, 2022 17:55
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Tuna-Fish posted:It runs great under wine. If you have no linux machine to run it on, install WSL2 or a linux virtual machine, and then run wine under that. Thanks, last time I checked, I simply assumed it's one of those weird old games that need Win 3.1 or Win 95 to run and are now forever lost. Didn't know Stars! was a Linux-game, my next inept install attempt would have gone done the wrong road, Edit: OK, now looking at the other post, that's the same website I stumbled across earlier and it claims Stars! is a Windows-game? So what is it now, Linux or Windows?  By the way, any idea how to get the 2005 Matrix Games version of Reach for the Stars? Annoyingly they still have the last patch available for download, but stopped selling the game. I'm imagining because they hate money.
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Nov 4, 2022 20:32
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Ah, now I remember! Yeah, for some reason I totally forgot what WINE was. Too bad about rudimentary AI, but I'm playing space 4x games mostly as some sort of space civilization simulator, so human opponents are neither desired nor needed.
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Nov 4, 2022 21:14
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I will always love Civ II, both for this guy and for having a massive special edition with tons of mods added in, because one of those mods was a Master of Orion mod, which allowed me to recognize Master of Orion III when I found it in the cheap trash bin at our local video rental.
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Nov 6, 2022 12:42
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Yooper posted:Distant Worlds 2 question. I've just met the local pirates and are paying them protection money. It should only be 375 total, any idea why it's costing me 4,500 / month? From the numbers it looks like 375 per month instead of "total". I guess the pirates hoodwinked you with math?
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Nov 6, 2022 16:41
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Also, considering you're doing a lot of shipbuilding, do you even need to pay those pirates? Is their homebase right next to important poo poo of yours or something? Because if not, your military should be strong enough to gently caress up their raids.
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Nov 6, 2022 16:54
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