Distant Worlds Catch All

CptDomano wrote:
master0 wrote:

That's werid, although I can recommend a couple things to fix it. 23% is kind of low if it is the only objective, think if it this way it would be possible for four different races at the same time to full fill it. Second, if you have the win objectives start right away, a race that is lucky and say colonize a few planets very fast, especially pre-populated ones could win real easy though control. I usually have all three set to around 30-33 percent, although that can make the game take a while. Also if you have the last expansion the race objectives are a lot of fun as well, although some race have it easy compared to others (those damn tribble creatures for instance)

Ahh yeah, that makes sense. The strange thing about it is that I didn't set anything up--it was just a Quick Start -> Random, so that's just how the game played out initially I guess. And it wasn't just control the galaxy, it had the produce 23% galatic income and 23% of of population or something like that too.

This second game is going better--the automation is nice for just watching everything play out. I've already encountered some AI race that warned me about some bad juju coming my way and ran into another race that seems content on just leaving me alone for the time being.

As for the last expansion, I purchased it for a discount along with the Shakturi expansion but haven't installed it yet.

Ah the AI race, they can totally break the game if you manage to capture their planet. I became friendly with them and launched a massive surprise troop transport attack on their home world. I wound up with a net income of over million. At that point I quadrupled the total number of ships I had, which barely put a dent into my income. It did slow down the game til it was nearly unplayable. Fun stuff.

Oh you should definitely install the third expansion. The addition of territory alone makes it worth it, and not to mention you can have an actual person flying you ship giving you stat boosts.

master0 wrote:

not to mention you can have an actual person flying you ship giving you stat boosts.

Oooo, like leaders/ship captains in MOO2? Or is it that EVERY ship gets an actual person?

CptDomano wrote:
master0 wrote:

not to mention you can have an actual person flying you ship giving you stat boosts.

Oooo, like leaders/ship captains in MOO2? Or is it that EVERY ship gets an actual person?

The third expansion adds hero units of sorts: Leaders, Governors, Scientists, Captains, Diplomats and Spies. You always have a leader but they can change depending on the style of government (having a good leader voted out sucks). While the others can emerge due to actions. ie have a big fleet battle and win well and a captain might emerge, research a lot and you'll get a scientist. So more like MOO2 then.

I also love the inclusion of the VERY detailed victory conditions screen in Legends. Makes things muuuuuch easier to understand.

Veloxi wrote:

I also love the inclusion of the VERY detailed victory conditions screen in Legends. Makes things muuuuuch easier to understand.

It also adds a whole lot to the meta game. Now they're are dozens of ways to make someone lose or get weaker without declaring war or expanding your empire. Although certain races have such easy goals that they can get a large head start sometimes.

Well then...Suppose that settles it. After I finish up this game I'll go ahead and install Legends

I think you can do it now and not wait, I believe.

Oh another neat thing I made a tv trope page for it: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/DistantWorlds
Never did that sort of thing before so definitely needs a lot of work. Kind drove the point to me on how niche the game was, that it didn't have a page already.

Oh and to better enable you on legends, they is a whole lot more stuff in it that we didn't mention, like carriers, lasers, and rail guns. Honestly it's why I love the game so much, each expansion and even each patch sometimes adds a whole bunch of stuff.

Oh yeah, I forgot how awesome carriers are. Sigh, I wish I had more time to actually play it. It's just sooo good.

Sigh, sometimes I wish I had more free time, but I'm sooo behind on covering games for my blog that I have to put DW aside until more time is freed up. Sigh.

Though I can't complain, really.

Veloxi wrote:

Oh yeah, I forgot how awesome carriers are. Sigh, I wish I had more time to actually play it. It's just sooo good.

It so hard, I'm home but I'm working (with the occional post), and I really wanna play now. As soon as the day is over the cat people are going to conquer the world again. Need to think of a few settings of challenges to make it interesting.

Veloxi wrote:

Sigh, sometimes I wish I had more free time, but I'm sooo behind on covering games for my blog that I have to put DW aside until more time is freed up. Sigh.

Though I can't complain, really. ;)

Super Star Trek

tboon wrote:
Veloxi wrote:

Sigh, sometimes I wish I had more free time, but I'm sooo behind on covering games for my blog that I have to put DW aside until more time is freed up. Sigh.

Though I can't complain, really. ;)

Super Star Trek :)

I'll get there eventually! Tell people to stop releasing new games for a while.

CptDomano wrote:

Well then...Suppose that settles it. After I finish up this game I'll go ahead and install Legends :D

Well...huh. Another strange thing. Apparently Matrix never gave me a serial number for Legends--only Shakturi. And, doubly strange, looking up the order via their Digital River customer service shows that there is no record of the order at all, even though Shakturi is linked to my Matrix account. I bought them both in the same order.

Looks like I'm still going to be playing just Shakturi for the time being until this all gets worked out

EDIT: Nevermind--found it using the Plimus customer service thing. Back in business, boys!

Alright after all this talking I decided to start another game. I decided to change it up a bit by making it a large map with every single race in the game. This sounded like a fun idea til I realized how many races there are. Even with a large map with over a 1000 stars or something it still was quite cramped. Worse of all I started right next to those annoying ewok aliens. I despise them cause they're so nice and they can win quite handily while being nice. I was going to blow them up but by the time I got a second planet they had five. One with a native population of my own race. So I played nice instead.

My starting point was right in the middle so I was surrounded by half a dozen people, my only real lucky break was a rare resource in my borders, and the fact that I built 20 exploration ships right in the beginning. This lead to me find a lot of stuff which accelerated my technology a lot. I was seventh territory wise but 2nd military wise due to raw firepower and crazy shields.

So after a while the ant bugs declare war on mean, and I'm like okay you are going down. Turns out I have no idea where they are on the map. Had to pay them off twice. Worse I went into a defensive alliance with the Ewoks which stopped the bugs from declaring war again.

I then crushed the spider people for fun and profit because they were weak and icky. I tried taking their homeworld but that was pretty suicidal for all 200k troops involved. Home world planets are way too powerful when it comes to ground troops. I believe its mostly to cover up the ai who would get clobbered otherwise. Quick win with a few planets gained, peace declared for 300 credits.

So everything is going well when the Ewoks drag me into a war due too our alliance, against more bugs (different ones, but all the damn bugs are violent and speciest). My tech advantage is still large enough that I can capture three of there planets. At which point they bombard the planets I captured annihilating their own people. So damn, now what? I'm taking a break before deciding whether to continue the war or pay for peace. Might just start a new game instead, the sheer number of ships and stuff is slowing the game down a bit, cause well large maps are large.

(Posted over at the Space Games Catch All As Well)

Hey, just as a heads up, I got an e-mail from Matrix talking about an update to Distant Worlds, but in addition, they're knocking 33% off on all Distant Worlds products. If your math isn't up to par (luckily I have the e-mail to tell me the answer!), that makes the main game $26.99 and each expansion $16.99. It still puts the buy-in for the whole series just over $60, but with the frequency that Matrix puts their stuff on sale, this is probably the best price you're going to see for awhile.

Yup, jump on this now if you have any interest in the game. I am imploring y'all, seriously, as I hope great sales at this lower price might convince Matrix, maybe, to lower the price permanently.

From the update notes:

Increased font size for project descriptions in Research screen.


Increased reputation hit from bombarding colonies.

These two things are the big thing for me in this update. It's a damn nightmare to go to war with the bug races if you don't have shielding for your planets. Not so interested in the ship design update as I never did that. Still I love how they keep adding to it. Now tell me more about the next expansion already...

Nice, a lot of folks complain about the font.

Veloxi kindly pointed out that the latest patch is actually for the Shakturi expansion and includes a lot of what was in the latet Legends patch. Very cool.

Bump.

So I accidentally bought a second copy of Legends (because I'm an idiot). If anyone wants it, I'll sell my extra key for $10 and throw the EXE up on Dropbox. PM me.

So here's what happened in my first game of Shadows:

Everything started out peachy, researching away, exploring the home system, building mining stations, defense stations and so on. Then my scientists researched hyperdrive, and 3 kaltors appeared and ate my science station. Suddenly every ship in my system ran away from the kaltors until they ran out of gas somewhere out in the oort cloud. My small fleet attacked and took care of the kaltors, but all those civilian ships were stuck outside the system (I was eventually able to order the military ships back to refuel).

Since my system lacked Hydrogen, I couldn't build warp drives, but the game upgraded all my ship designs to require warp drive. When I went to rebuild the losses from the kaltor attacks, I couldn't build any ships. Also, I couldn't ask the one pirate faction I had encountered to smuggle any Hydrogen.

So I'm pretty much screwed and that game is over. I'm not sure I want to try again.

I suspect you could have send a construction ship to help those civilian ones, but I have not tried that. I think the lack of Hydrogen screwed up the game's AI, frankly. (And how does a system lack the most common substance in the universe, anyway? Did you have no place to put a gas mining station?)

Weird, but I'd give it another go.

As for the warp drives, did you have the AI set to ask you before upgrading? That's generally a good idea, to use the AI as adviser rather than put it in complete control. At least in areas that you feel are important. I'm not sure how you could have dealt with this, except by sending out more exploration ships and waiting until someone turned up Hydrogen. Resources do pop up unexpectedly over time.

That sucks BadKen. I might be done as well after that, at least for a little bit.

The AI does some weird things in this game. I've gotten to where I don't trust it, which is not a good thing for this sort of game. Maybe this last expansion increased the complexity beyond the AI's ability to deal.

Robear wrote:

As for the warp drives, did you have the AI set to ask you before upgrading?

Well, my problem is that ship designs are either automated or not, there's no suggestion option. I'm not a huge fan of doing ship design, so I leave it automated. The ship designer didn't leave any pre-warp mliitary designs, and I couldn't build warp ships due to missing resources, so I couldn't retrofit anything and I couldn't build new ships.

I'm pretty sure there's a way to show old/obsolete designs.

tboon wrote:

I'm pretty sure there's a way to show old/obsolete designs.

Good luck finding it.

tboon wrote:

That sucks BadKen. I might be done as well after that, at least for a little bit.

The AI does some weird things in this game. I've gotten to where I don't trust it, which is not a good thing for this sort of game. Maybe this last expansion increased the complexity beyond the AI's ability to deal.

Yeah it seems like the ai doesn't handle the new stuff as well as the old stuff. Also it doesn't work well if you start running a negative balance. Not having any hydrogen is weird and perhaps just bad luck. Usually there is at least one gas giant nearby or something. At the point probable starting a pirate missions to bring you more supplies would have been your best bet.

garion333 wrote:
tboon wrote:

I'm pretty sure there's a way to show old/obsolete designs.

Good luck finding it. ;)

Just go to design menu and there's a drop down filter menu for all the old/new designs.

master0 wrote:

At the point probable starting a pirate missions to bring you more supplies would have been your best bet.

As far as I could tell, I couldn't offer any pirate missions. I tried diplomacy - maybe there's some new interface for offering smuggling missions. The galactopedia was unhelpful. All the pirate info was about how to play pirates.

It's probably a good thing that I put that game out of its misery. No hydrogen in the home system? Not a good sign.