Distant Worlds 2

This is not a game for everyone, not even for every 4X enthusiast. The biggest issue to overcome is not any supposed difficulty, or complexity of features, but its unwieldy and cumbersome UX. The game suffers greatly in this regard, making player struggle against its controls. The second greatest issue is its lack of in-depth tutorials, which actually explain to you how to engage with the game, and one of its best features: the automation. I had to look up an external !! 70 !! page guide which walked me through the systems, and recommended automation settings. I don't think I would be able to grasp the game If i didn't have countless hours of previous experience in other similar 4X games, such as Stellaris. However, once I overcame the initial issues, the game really captured me with its fun gameplay and deep simulation. As your empire grows, it fills up with hundreds of automated ships which simulate organic trade and transportation of goods within and without your territory. Another thing which hooked me is the (arguably, really hard to use as I wanted to) ship designer, and all of the various technologies and ship components that can be researched. The depth and width of choices it offers really allows players to experiment. Seemingly every technology alternative has its benefits and drawbacks and can be used depending on the situation. Overall, I recommend this game to every 4X fan that is willing to fight the UI for a bit, and read a bit of text before, and during the game. The guide I mentioned: https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=380441

I am a player coming from the original Distant Worlds 1. My expectations of this game is a improvement over the first in the terms of UI and some gameplay elements. Here is my thought process so far as I play the game as a complete beginner. I might update my review as time goes on, but I wanted to imprint my initial feelings and impressions here. Initial Impressions of the UI. Its certainly bigger and clearer than the first, since its compatible with modern systems, but it does not feel intuitive. The only thing that really was like a "ah hah!" moment was when you zoomed out from your home world and they had all the planets at the bottom of the list for easy viewing. Other than that, it still feels cluttered, janky, and I'm often going through a list of menu's to find what i'm looking for. Let me give you an example. Take the Research menu. This list is super long (not left to right) but rather top to bottom. They have tabs on the right side to allow you to switch between each section, but that doesn't mean it makes it any better looking at this giant excel spreadsheet. In the old DS1, they cut this up with tab categories. Why they decided not to do this here is confusing because it just makes it a pain to scroll through the whole thing. When you click on a ship, you can now see the cargo they have and you can see it transferring from and to stations or whatever that ship might be doing. This is a Godsend personally and this is what DW1 was lacking. You would always have to manually go and find out. Now its just there, which I love. Ship Models: I just need to get this one off my chest. The models look absolutely stupid and made by a 6th grader. If you have ever played Supreme Commander, a game that came out 15+ years ago, have better models. I am not kidding. In DW1 the ships were 2D, but atleast you had one hell of a image to look at, and you can scale it upwards to represent a "bigger threat" when it had more components added on it. This just feels like lego starwars or something. I mean they are just so dam static. I'm playing Zenox and I was expecting there to be some kind of flash or blinking with the ship designs to represent life or a presence, but its just not there. Take Eve Online, when you go to a space station, you see flashing lights, so you know someone is home. Perhaps the bigger orbital stations have some flashing lights, but I can say for now, the smaller ones do not. Limited Ship Design: In DW1, you could load a ship up with 100's of generators if you wanted to. Why? Just because. Of course, you had to be able to afford it in terms of ship yard that could allow you to build a huge ship, but the flexibility of putting anything and everything unto a ship, even multiple of the same type, was there. I can't say for sure as I haven't played much but after designing and putting on my new ship drives for FTL on a exploration ship, I realized that, that feature seems to have gone away. Now you have preset bays and components. To me this is not in the spirit of DW1. This was what I loved most about that game and its charm and that seems to have been taken away for very limited building templates. If that's the case, I will likely not continue to play in the future. Why? Because it means I can't spam 30 resource mining extractors on a mining station if I wanted to. The game will just tell me nope, build what WE say you can build. The Home World: I might have gotten a bad first world, because its like Saturn. The concept of having a Saturn like planet is cool! But the rings are on top of all my ships, so they are hard to find under the rings and actually block me seeing my own ships! Its like putting a filter around your base and asking you to enjoy it. I mean its my HOME planet, so I'll always have to deal with that. Maybe a reset with a new planet will fix it, but that is annoying. Crashes: The game had crashed on me once so far before I even got a year into it. I have a 5900x so I do not lack in the CPU department. Thats a bad sign for early game, because it makes me wonder about later late game stages. Will I have more common crashes? Either way, when something didn't move, I had to think about was the game gonna crash on me again. No gamer should have that feeling. Auto Saves: So far i'm 8 autosaves in and they just seem to be stacking up rather than overwriting one another, at 25 MB each. That's a lot of storage in the long run. I'll have to check the settings later to see if I can do anything on my end, but talk about eating up space just to eat up space. So far, I can only say why is this the default setting, rather than an overwriting save every 2-3 saves or 5? I don't need 8 autosaves! Music: Kill me. On the design screen, the music lasts for like 2 minutes, then repeats, over and over and over and over again. It was driving me insane, and I was just designing ONE ship! I think i'm going to have to mute the music in this game. It is no Stellaris by a long shot. That has been my experience so far. Overall some changes are good and I like those changes, but i'm not feeling good or optimistic in the direction so far. If this was all the changes they have made, they could of just improved the UI to the first one and left it at that. I will continue to play more because I really do like DW, so hopefully further gameplay will change my mind and its a bad first experience. I will update my review as I continue to play if things become more favorable. -------------------------- Further Updates After playing the game longer, 1 fear has come true, in that the ship design is preset. When I unlocked Frigates, for example.. They have "types". Heavy, Fast, Fleet, ect. Each one has a different component configuration. This means the FREEDOM to build the ship how you want rather than a TEMPLATE is gone. How does this make the game BETTER? Its a STEP BACK. Fire Fights Okay I am sorry but seriously. Go play command and conquer 3. Look at those beautiful laser fires from 15+ YEARS AGO. Then look at this garbage of a "laser fire" or a "bomb blast aoe wave" is here. It looks like it was scribbled and made by a 2 year old. This just isn't fun or enjoyable anymore. Its not the first game because it has down grades. Things are templated out, so there is no freedom. Pirates They just get better stuff and better gear. And no i'm not talking a little bit of here and there, i'm talking superior in every way. As Zenox, my race has superior shielding recharge, but when I took damage on my ship and looked at the damage their ship was taking, they had superior shield recharge. Meaning they are running with the latest and greatest. You can still kill them but your going to have to out-gun them 3-1 to stand a decent chance. Also, perhaps its likely a special weapon they get, but they are doing damage not only through my shields but also through my armor and hitting directly on my hull! What weapon by-passes both defenses and just says F it, I will go straight for the kill. Oooookay. Overall my impressions is I enjoyed the new UI changes and what not, but this is NOT the same game. You don't have the freedom to express yourself like you did in the first one. You do NOT have great fire-fights or visuals. Infact, it looks like a 2 year old throwing paint on the wall. ITS THAT BAD. Don't believe me, go watch a YT video. It will bore you to tears. I don't know why they decided to go this "3d route" when no one requested it. We just wanted better 2D. Oh well. That is my review. If you want a slightly better UI experience but turned down visuals and turned down gameplay, this is "part 2". I will however, being go back to part 1.

I really wanted to like this game. I really did. But it is so complicated that you have to leave at least some things to the Automate Idiot (AI), especially as a new player. And I am constantly getting my economy wrecked because the Automate Idiot is spamming a bunch of useless ships in one of my starbases and I can't figure out how to stop it. Then the AI factions come rolling in, WTFPWN my fleets and I'm left with yet another loss. If you're a hardcore 4X player that loves pain and anguish, ready to micromanage every little detail and laughs when others would cry, be my guest. Me, I'm going to go find something better to spend my time on.

Game looks really interesting and has some pretty unique aspects. Has a lot of automation features that seem pretty solid. HOWEVER I wanted to explore a few dozen asteroid. Automation ignored them. Upon turning off automation for the ship, I realised that there was NO WAY TO QUEUE ORDERS! I am honestly glad that I discovered it just one hour into the game as I will attempt to get a refund due to the lack of the one the most essential mechanics that has been standard in the genre since it was invented.

I like this game as someone who also plays X4: Foundations and Dyson Sphere Program. It looks a bit like Stellaris, but that has more focus on story telling and role playing. Distant Worlds 2 (DW2) does that a bit, but leans more towards RTS and simulation and it is very large scale (you quickly go to 50+ solar systems, but automation will help you). A game also takes a long time at least 30h and i believe typically 40-70h. DW2 is easy to dislike because of the learning curve and you fighting with the automation. You have to learn what automation does and how you want to use it. [b]Automation[/b] By default nearly everything is automated and you are asked to accept or decline suggestions that the automator makes. At the start this made me wonder what my purpose as the player was. At the start of the game you can have a bigger impact by manually microing some ships to explore certain places or built mining stations at certain spots. However after a while your empire becomes too big to order indivual ships around. Thats where automation is nice. You can decide to automate things you currently do not want to focus on and also control the exact amount of automation. In my current game i have building of mining stations fully automated and my 8 defense fleets and 3 attack fleets that automatically defend and attack threats. But i also have some manualy fleets that i order around myself because im at war with another factions and have certain areas i want to focus on. But you could also fully automate the fleets and just give global orders to mark certain spots for invasion or attack and wait for a capable fleet to pick up that order. Fleet management itself is also done by using fleet templates which defines what ships are in a attack fleet for example. Thats cool because building ships is now abstracted into a fleet which you just 'top up' and the required ships are built/upgraded automatically. [b]Simulation[/b] What is also interesting compared to Stellaris is that everything is simulated. So if you want to built a spaceport somewhere, the mined steel first has to be picked up by a construction ship which then brings and uses that to built the station. Theres also fuel which is mined and distributed. Your spaceships need this to effectively use the hyperdrive. It plays a big role in engagement range and mobility around your empire. Theres also a civilian economy with its own ships. You will have to provide a budget to get them built, so they haul cargo and resources around. However you do not control them. [b]Research[/b] The game has a huge research tree to focus on everything you'd expect from diplomacy, weapons, jump drive tech, trading etc. Personally i think it's has clear sections and tiers, but it's not always clear what research exactly does. What could be improved is that it only tells you the absolute numbers of upgrades.But i'm more interested in the percentual improvement compared to the current situation. So the game now makes you hover back and forth between the previous and new research popup to spot the differences. I do like the clear icons from the research tree, compared to the AI generated ones in Sins of a Solar Empire 2. [b]Notification spam[/b] You'll get so. many. notifications. It drained me at first, but you will just have to learn to disable ones that are not too interesting. Quickly the 'new resource discovered' message can just be blocked for example. Even your civilian ships getting attacked is not super interesting, they will get rebuild. [b]Diplomacy[/b] Won't comment too much on the diplomacy. You can make friends, form alliances and make enemies. There also spies that you can give missions to steal technology or sabotage things which are chance based. [b]Races[/b] I've only played quite a bit with the Atuuk (they're like Star Wars Ewoks). I found them pretty funny. They're naive cute bears that can work together but aren't too smart. They have their own mechanics and quirks. For example you can tax them 71% and they're so happy about it :D. Try that with humans and they get really mad. You can't make your own race. I've read many comments about people finding this a big downside. Personally i like predefined more. There's at least 12 races (dlc included) and multiple govermental types, so loads of variation there. [b]Music[/b] I didn't like the music at all. There are mods out there that just replace the entire soundtrack with that of Stellaris and other games which i use. Theres even a community member Nico Guerrero that remade the entire soundtrack, very cool! [b]Closing[/b] Theres much more i could talk about like ship design, planet invasions (mostly a numbers game). But i want to end with that it's very customizable in terms of difficulty, enemy factions, universe generation, automation levels. So you can really tailor it to your play style. All in all, a great game for people that don't mind to read a bit and tinker a lot.

没有官方中文我可以理解，但修复了中文玩家可以使用第三方来进行官方中文的bug，并且已经这么长时间了，这就不得不给个差评

Keep telling you they are improving the AI, but the AI is so stupid in this game. The AI can't even defend 1 system against 2 enemy fleets having 15 defensive fleets. Because fleets will stop midflight whenever the station in the system they want to defend is destroyed, fly back, then notice another station attacked, stop, fly back to defend - rinse and repeat, never arriving until the system is cleared of your stations. . It doesn't matter that the enemy fleet is all the time visible and within the radar in that system... ^ one example of many how stupid the AI is in this game. The devs did not come up yet with the idea of "defending a system with 10 stations" AI mechanic, instead of a single station that gets blown up fast. Someone needs to tell them that they have made a game with "large galaxies"... Another: imagine they finally add a feature so that you can put different designs of the same ship hull (escort, frigate, etc) into a fleet and you find out, oh actually no. You can't have separate upgrade paths for two different designs of a hull, they will override each other all the time... I really try hard to understand what's happening there, I really. But I simply can't understand what this devs are doing. You can't do anything efficiently in this game. Detected enemy fleet and AI to dumb to defend the incoming fleets and you want to rally your fleets there ahead of time manually? Have fun making them go to the right station where enemy will arrive. You have to select your, let's say 30 fleets, one by one (you need that much and more to optimize the brain dead AI) and then zoom into the sector so you can tell them to go to the station. It zooms centered around your mouse. If you mouse is off by 2px away from the pixel station (zoom levels are immense) you end up 100,000,000km away from station. So you have to zoom in VERY SLOWLY and aprox the station. You missclicked or it selected something near station? Well bad luck, try find the fleet you just have sent to a wrong location, because chances are you have fleet filter enabled in order to be able to find anything and by sending the automated fleet to a wrong location it became manuall controlled and is now not shown in the list of "defend" or "attack" fleets anymore. Removing the filter though shows you all manuall fleets, also those maybe 25 others you have painfully sent to the station. And now imagine the enemy changes direction after you have set everything up... They have tried to solve this issue with a context menu when you click and HOLD the right mouse button that shows all possible things in the "pixel", but its so dumb, it will show you the right things only 1 out of 4 times and sometimes NEVER and the way how context menu works is, you have to hold the button and release over the action you want to execute. If the action is not there you want to execute, you need to n ot release your mouse button accidentally or your fleet will do the wrong things, but press escape, which will also close all the windows, including the fleet list... Devs either have no clue how broken their game is in this terms or they are incredible inefficient at solving any kind of issues that naturally derive from the game concepts they have envisioned. Have they not gathered any experience from the prequel? They work on this niche for prob 15 if not more years in total.

A disappointing convoluted mess that doesnt play as well as the first. Ive waited for "updates" but its time to display my review.

DW2 scratches that itch for more in depth mechanics that Stellaris leaves you with after playing. But be warned there is an absolute ♥♥♥♥ ton of jank to muddle through when it comes to learning the game systems and how to read, the frankly awful, UI/UX BUT after that its the most fun I've had in a space 4x. It just about perfectly combines the tactical layer of combat you get in Sins of a Solar Empire 1/2 with far better 4x empire building mechanics. You actually feel like the universe is alive instead of interacting with a really pretty and clever spreadsheet.