Attempting a Video Game Review: Distant Worlds 2

So let’s see whether I can write an engaging video game review. This post is about the game Distant Worlds 2.

the game is an indie space 4X game, meaning you eXplore, eXpand, eXploit and eXterminate. My preferred kind of game. It is absolutely huge, more in its sheer scale than in the amount of game mechanics. The best description I can give it is from the old Master of Orion days: Your spreadsheet now has 3D graphics. 😁

Apropos graphics, the game runs perfectly fine under Proton on Linux, with my AMD Radeon RX580 and AMD Ryzen 9 3900X with 32 GB of RAM.

It lives off of its automations, and you can decide, in quite some detail, which things you’d like to do yourself, and which you’d like to have the automations take care of. And this is one of the things which kept me playing: Distant Worlds 2 was able to make me feel more like an interstellar ruler than any other game of its kind I’ve ever played. And it was done through a simple mechanic: In addition to a simple on/off switch for specific automations, you also have a “propose” option. If an automation is set to that option, the automation will propose actions for you, and you can decide yourself whether you want the automation to execute it or not. It makes you feel like a head of state sitting at their desk and one of your ministers walks in with an edict for your assent or veto. Instead of you basically playing the part of a hundred million different bureaucrats, doing everything yourself.

But I’m getting ahead of myself a bit. Let me start with an overview over the different aspects of the game, and I will give more of my opinion towards the end.

The game

As it so often does with 4X games, your first task isn’t to settle your first planet, but rather to configure the environment. Like most 4X games, Distant Worlds 2 doesn’t have a story campaign with missions, but rather a large sandbox with lots of knobs you can tune to your liking.

Setting up the sandbox

The first one, configuring your galaxy shape and size, already shows off the scale of the game, showing system requirements for different galaxy sizes. In the below screenshot, you can see that it recommends 10 cores and 32 GB of RAM for a 1500 star galaxy. I was able to comfortably play those on my machine. In a game where most of the galaxy was colonized, with 6 different empires and me, it was only using around 4.5 GB of RAM. The problem seems to rather be the galaxy generation phase, which uses considerably more RAM.

Although it warns that there might be problems with performance in 1500 star games on my machine, I didn’t see any, unless I cranked the game speed up to the very top. Which, this being a 4X game, you’re not going to be doing too often in the late game anyway.

In the next screens, you can chose settings for difficulty, starting tech level, starting expansion of yourself and other empires, as well the general thread level. This configures how aggressive pirates and the local space fauna are going to be.

Then comes the race selection screen. With all DLCs, there are currently 13 playable races. Sadly, in contrast to e.g. Stellaris, you can’t construct your own civilization, but instead get a number of predefined ones. And while their differences hold some significance, the resulting playstyles don’t reach the level of differentiation that Stellaris has.

All species have some base attributes, like migration tendency and reproduction rate, where the Ackdarian shown here are pretty middle of the road. Then each species prefers certain planet types. The Ackdarian, being an aquatic species, prefer Ocean and Deep Ocean worlds and don’t like desert planets. Each species also has specific bonuses to some basic stats, like mining rates, research rates, planet happiness or maintenance costs for ships and stations. Here again, the Ackdarian are middle of the road, with moderate bonuses in quite a few areas.

In addition, but not shown here, each species has a few special technologies replacing default tech in the tech tree. The Ackdarian, for example, have better engines. Then there’s also a difference in starting tech, e.g. some species start with beam weapons already researched, others with missiles.

Finally, most of the species have some special traits which make for slightly different gameplay. Here is an example from the Quameno, which shows how they are very research focused, but also isolationist.

Full text of the features from the screenshot

Alien Distractions

+1 Happiness and -20% All Research for 2 years after signing a treaty with another faction

Integration Studies

Reduced Happiness and Research output whenever you have unassimilated alien populations at your colonies. The reduction amount relates to the proportion of unassimilated population in your empire.

The Answer

+10% Happiness for 5 years and a random tech boost when you build the Transcendence Hub planetary facility.

A Puzzle Solved

When completing an advanced research project (tech level 5 or greater), have a small chance of the following benefits: +10% Happiness and +10% All Research for 2 years, plus a bonus positive trait on your Leader and a Scientist. Higher level projects have an increased chance for this event to occur.

Building the Future

+5 Happiness for 6 months whenever you build a new Research Station.

A Piece of the Puzzle

50% chance of both a 25% research boost in a related tech and a +10% empire-wide population growth bonus for one year whenever you discover a new research location.

While these special features do make for a bit of variety in the playstyle, I didn’t find them too interesting. Again, compared to e.g. Stellaris, there isn’t that much difference in playstyles between the different species.

After the species selection comes the government selection screen. Each species has one or two preferred government types, but others can also be chosen. These government types add a few bonuses and maluses to the general empire stats, like improved research speed or reduced happiness. There’s also special features in some of them, e.g. Democracies get random events providing small bonuses to empire stats for a short duration.

Game elements

Let’s start with the main screen, here with an example of one of my saves in the late game phase.

That was a pretty zoomed-out view, right after loading a save. It provides an okay overview of the overall situation. Here’s another view, zoomed in on a fleet action against a bunch of extradimensional invaders:

The graphics are nothing to write home about, but they’re also not bad at all. On the left side is an example of the advisor making proposals, in this case for updating my Planetary Admin complexes and my orbital defense batteries. These proposals have a timeout and will vanish after it, and you can choose for each one individually whether you’d like to enact it. If you don’t, they won’t be enacted. Normally, there aren’t this many of them. This is just because I just developed new technologies which allow those upgrades. And the game does batch them, so these are perhaps 20 or so messages, not all 178 colonies.

Economy

The economy in Distant Worlds 2 is a relatively complex simulation. It is split into two parts, the state and private economy.

The private economy is almost fully automated, and cannot be controlled by the player. It consists of the following:

1. Planetary economies
2. Transporting of natural resources
3. Tourism

Each planet in DW2 has a number of inhabitants which each generate money, depending on how happy they are. Their happiness depends on a number of factors, e.g. the quality of the planet they live on, the tax rate, facilities like medical and entertainment centers. The sum of this money represents the total economy of a planet. From that sum is subtracted a certain percentage of corruption, depending on the form of Government, the distance to the empire’s capital, the population count and a few other factors. From the resulting number, state taxes according to the planet’s tax rate are subtracted. The remainder goes into the “cash reserves” of the private economy.

That money is then used, again fully automatically, to buy transport, passenger and mining ships. In addition, this money is also used to build resort stations and mining stations around planets, black holes, moons and asteroids. So this is kind of an in-between. The money comes from the private cash reserve, a pool independent from the state budget, but the building of mining and resort stations is under the control of the player. The construction ships used to build space stations are also paid from the state budget.

The state budget, in turn, is fed mainly by the aforementioned taxes on planetary economies. From that budget, military space stations like defense stations and shipyards are paid, as well as state ships. These are civilian ships like explorers or constructors, as well as warships of all sizes. Additionally, research and population growth are also paid from the state budget, as well as buildings on planetary surfaces.

Here is an example of the private economy from a relatively late-stage game:

Notably, the “Private Ship Building” cost is paid to the state, as the player controls all of the shipyards.

Here is a screenshot of the state budget, from the same game:

The way the economy works in the game, you get most of your maintenance costs covered by the taxes, but large chunks of money for new buildings and projects, like new battle fleets, come from the private economy investing in e.g. new or upgraded ships, which represents a transfer from the private economy cash reserve to the state budget.

With the money side covered, let’s continue with the natural resources, of which there are many, many different ones. They’re divided into two categories, luxury goods and constructions materials. The luxury goods are consumed by planetary populations. The more different luxury goods are available on a planet, the happier people are and the larger the planetary economy will be - ultimately meaning more taxes. Construction materials, on the other hand, are for constructing both space stations and ships. Planetary buildings do not require construction materials. In addition to those two, there’s a third, special resource: Caslon. It is the only fuel resource in the game. It is required to power ship’s and station’s reactors.

All three resources are mined by mining stations around planets, moons, asteroids and suns. These mine all of the materials on the object they’re orbiting at a certain rate, determined by each resource’s abundance on the planet/moon/asteroid/sun. These stations can be build fully manually, by telling a construction ship to gather the necessary materials at the nearest planet or space port and then manually tell it to build a mining station at a certain location. But you can also automate them, and just say at which objects you’d like a mining station to be build, and the automation will find a suitable, unoccupied construction ship, send it to load materials, and then send it to build the station. You can do that via a list you can filter and order in many different ways:

This screenshot shows some planets with resources. Those which have the ship icon shown already have a construction ship building a mine there, while the ones with the struck-through crane hook are the ones which have already got a mine queued, but no ship assigned yet. This makes it a lot more comfortable than having to look through all the planets in your empire to find a free planet with a resource you’d like to mine.

But there’s another snag: The resources mined here are not magically transported to some central storage. They need to be transported to where they’re needed. This means a transport ship has to collect it from the mine and bring it to a spaceport. And then another transport ship might collect it from there and bring it to another spaceport, where it’s more needed. This also means that you have to keep an eye especially on your Caslon fuel reserves. Because if you run out, your transports, which have to transport additional Caslon, would also run out at some point. This is a part of the system you don’t really have control over. While you control the location of mining stations, the transportation aspect is entirely controlled by automation, and that’s not configurable. You cannot take manual control of the transport ships.

Ships

In spaceships, DW2 has the same separation as for the economy. Private ships, like transports and passenger liners, are designed, build and controlled by automation, and you can’t change that.

Military and some military-adjacent ships like tankers and exploration ships are another story though. These, you can design yourself, put into fleets and order around. Or you can leave that to the automation as well. Ships come in different sizes you enable via technologies. For warships, they range from small corvettes to battleships and carriers. You can configure the following components:

• Sublight engines, determine how fast the ships fly in-system
• Hyperdrives, determine how fast they fly over longer distances, how long they need to charge between jumps and how far they get with a single jump
• Reactors, determine how much energy a ship produces for all the other systems
• Fuel cells, determine how much reactor fuel a ship can carry
• Electronic systems, like sensors, targeting and ECM
• Support systems, like crew quarters, command decks
• Weapons systems, which come in a few basic types with slightly different characteristics:
  • Beam weapons
  • Kinetic weapons
  • Missile weapons
  • Ion weapons
  • Energy torpedoes
• Protection, both Armor and Shields
• Hangar bays for fighters

The different ship sizes have different numbers of slots for the different types of components. For most ship sizes, there are a few different types. E.g. for destroyers, there are the heavy destroyers, with lots of gun emplacements, but fewer electronics and engine bays. Then there is the fast destroyer, which has fewer guns, but more slots for engines. And then there’s the fleet destroyer, which sits in the middle. These different types might also have different bonuses, e.g. one might get a speed bonus and another a targeting bonus.

Here is the design screen for an escort, the first ship type/size you start with, from a relatively late game:

This screen deserves some explanation. All of the empty bays in the bottom left can be filled with components. But each component has a size and an energy consumption. Each ship size, and each type inside a size, have a certain amount of free space for components. Quite often, hulls have more free bays than their total available space can cover when used with the max-size component which would fit. So for example, you might have a destroyer with four weapon slots, each allowing size 39 weapons at maximum. But after fitting whatever engines and other components you’d like, you might not have enough space left to fit full size weapons into each of the bays. So you will have to decide whether you’d like to go with fewer, but heavier weapons, or more but lighter ones.

Ship hulls, and the number and arrangement of their bays are one of the main differences between species. And there is (intentionally) no real balancing. Keep the above screenshot in mind. This is a human escort size hull.

For contrast, here is a an Ikkuro escort:

This shows quite a few differences. First, there is only one engine bay, instead of three. But there are three protection bays instead of two. And the weapons bays are a lot larger, allowing for the largest weapons available to be fit onto the Ikkuro corvette, if you’ve got enough total space. But the arrangement of the gun emplacements is not optimal. They point to the sides, instead of the front. If the target is large enough, still both side’s weapons will be able to fire on it, but e.g. if there’s an enemy corvette right nearby, only one of the guns will be trained on it, with the other being entirely useless. On the human corvette, both weapons point to the front and thus can be used against the same target together.

One important point are the upgrade paths for the design, which can be configured here. But these are a source of frustration, so I will discuss them below in the section about frustrations and problems.

Once the designs are completed, you can put them into fleet templates. Those allow putting together a number of different ship types with their required counts, put them into certain stances and save them. Then you can just click the build button next to them, and the automation will start building the necessary ships in available shipyards in your empire, and the ships will assemble in the fleet around your capital world.

The different stances determine what the fleet does when it is automated. Defensive fleets attack all enemies within their defense radius which attack friendly bases or ships. Attack fleets will attack any enemy at all. Raiding fleets will raid enemy stations and worlds to steal resources, technology and money. Invasion fleets will attack enemy worlds and try to conquer them. I will describe these mechanisms a bit more below, as they’re sadly also a large source for frustration. So much frustration.

Diplomacy

When it comes to diplomacy, you deal with two different kinds of entities. The first one you will likely meet are independent colonies, single-planet polities which don’t expand or build stations or ships. They can either be conquered or induced to join you via bribes and good relations (but mostly bribes). I’ve found them to be critically important for expansion, because those independents might supply you with a new species for your empire, with different planet preferences than your main species.

The other type of entity are AI player empires.

In both cases, diplomacy works with a points system, very similar to other 4X games. What I like here is that the points are explicitly spelled out, instead of hidden:

So I can see why they like or don’t like me. In addition to these factors, there’s also some first contact randomness. Sometimes, the species immediately likes you, and sometimes they really don’t, meaning you start out with a -15 malus to relations which only decreases slowly over the years.

When it comes to treaties, there’s nothing special. You can share your galaxy or territory map, share ongoing operations information, make trade treaties, swap mining stations, form alliances and declare war.

Colonization

The last point I want to go into a bit is colonization. There are a number of planet types which allow colonization, ranging from continental worlds over desert worlds to ocean worlds. Each planet has a quality rating, and each species has bonuses for certain planet types, and maluses for others. This is where the previously mentioned independent colonies come in. They can add more species to your empire and thus allow you to use more planet types for colonization. Each planet has a colonization suitability value ranging from -50 to +50, depending on the species and the planet’s quality. Everything above +20 is fine, everything below will mean that there is more support cost, slower population growth and lower happiness.

Similar to mining station building, there’s no need to hunt around for colonizable planets via the map. There’s a menu which shows all colonizable planets and allows to instruct the automation to colonize the planet:

Once a colonization order is given here, the automation will build a colony ship, which will automatically load some citizens of the right species and head off to colonize the planet. In theory.

Which brings me to the subjective part of this review.

Frustrations

Let’s set the moot. If I only had one free wish, it wouldn’t be fixes for the below issues. I recognize that they’re probably not trivial. So my one wish: For every fleet of ships, add a button: “Line the entire senior officer corps up against a bulkhead and have them shot”. That button doesn’t even have to do much. Just give me a popup which says something along the lines of “The entire officer corps of Battle fleet 53 has been executed for gross incompetence”. Nobody actually needs to die. Just give me the button and the popup. It would make the game 50% less frustrating.

So, why am I saying this, you might ask. And the answer is: Pirates. And the utter incompetence of the current fleet AI to handle them. There are so many things.

Let’s start with aborting jumps. Let’s say a mining station at the outer edge of a fleets defense area is attacked. The fleet, as I would expect, immediately starts to go there. But the pirates might succeed before the fleet is halfway there, especially with the slow hyperdrives at the beginning of the game. And that’s fine - I made the decision to build a mining station far away from the nearest fleet presence. But why doesn’t the fleet then abort the jump and return to base, to not end up completely out of position on the other side of its defense area?

Next, planetary raids. The number of times when a single pirate corvette raided one of my planets, and the defense fleet jumped to the wrong side of the planet and then slowly tried to get around the planet is astonishing.

Then there’s tanker/fuel behavior. I’ve had fleets abort an engagement with a pirate squadron attacking a mining station because one of the fleet’s ships got a bit low on fuel! Similarly, I’ve seen a fleet with a single ship below 70% fuel sitting at a planet waiting for a fuel tanker while the next planet over was raided by pirates.

And it’s not just fleet commanders which should never have been promoted past ensign. It’s also the fleet’s high command which couldn’t find its own arse without a full tactical staff. To my frustration, I’ve seen four frigates protecting a mining station in my core system, with no less than five battle fleets with over 100 ships sitting one planet over, idle. While at the same time, mining stations were getting raided all over the outer systems.

There is also quite surprising behavior with ship upgrades and fleet template upgrades. Sometimes, and I was never able to figure out what leads to this, the automation removes ships of older designs from a fleet and builds entirely new ships, instead of just upgrading the ships already in the fleet. I was never able to figure out what exactly was going on, so I ended up doing the entire fleet handling myself.

And it’s sadly not just the fleet automation which sometimes does questionable things. It’s also the colonization automation. As I’ve mentioned above, everything above +20 for colonization suitability is okay, but it’s not necessarily optimal. In late game, after researching a number of colonization technologies, there might be more than one species which has +20 or more for a particular planet. But for one of them, the planet will be ideal, while for the other it will be okay-ish. And the colonization automation doesn’t do a great job here. When a colony ship is build and a choice for which species to load onto it needs to be made, the automation often ends up with too many ships with the wrong species loaded, and then starts sending them to colonies anyway, although another species would be better for that planet.

Well, after the above, I probably should point out: Even though I got rather frustrated after the first 20 hours or so, I still ended up playing for over 300 hours. Because at some point, I had figured out all of the quirks of the automation, and everything was doing what I wanted. And there’s a really good game in there at that point.

How I play

I thought an interesting section in a review about a 4X game would be how I played it.

Setup

When it comes to the setup, I ended up playing in 1500 star galaxies. I would have played in the largest, 2000 star galaxies, but at least as per the tooltip, my PC would not have been able to handle that. Out of curiosity, I just did a test and found that in a 2000 star galaxy, the initial memory consumption is about 6.1 GB. In a late-phase game with 1500 stars, the memory consumption is around 7.9 GB. So it looks like I might actually have been able to play with 2000 stars.

When it comes to galaxy shape, I ended up preferring either elliptical or spiral, which leads to the stars being distributed relatively equally in space. I also played a few games with the different clustered distributions, and they were also nice. Mainly, there it takes longer to meet other empires.

I always disable tech trading, set pirates to weak and few. I’m also always setting the config for my home system to excellent, and I always start with pre-warp.

When it comes to race selection, they’re all fun in their own way. I’d like to especially call out the Atuuk. They have pretty bad maluses on almost everything, worst of all -30% on all research. But: They get their “Great Direction”, which adds insane bonuses to certain areas, like research or making money. Those last for five years each, after which you can choose a new “Great Direction”.

One thing which annoyed me a little bit was the setup for the Gizurean. Their special abilities allow them to consume part of the population of a freshly conquered colony. Which was fine for me, and I decided to play a round with them, wanting to play more aggressively than I normally do, including conquering instead of bribing independent colonies. But that didn’t work out as I had hoped. I did expect other nations and independents to have a dim view of me for it. I could have lived with that. But galactic reputation also has an impact on colony happiness. So when I conquered an independent and ate part of their population, I was suddenly facing economic issues, because my population got unhappy due to the reputation hit after conquering and consuming an independent colony. Which didn’t make much sense to me at all, and finally brought me to abort the session.

At the start of a game, the first decision I made was how to handle pirates. At least one pirate faction will find you immediately - and try to raid you - right after you research the first inter-system hyperdrives. And they’re going to come at you hard, with multiple ships utterly beyond your starting tech level. In short, you need quite a fleet to have any chance to fight them off. I always took one of two approaches. When I decided to not pay them off, and fight them instead, I would wait a lot longer before researching inter-system hyperdrives. I would get the second level of my chosen weapons technology, as well as Frigate ship types. Then I would build two defense fleets (more on the setup later) as well as a few dozen automated patrol ships. And only then would I research hyperdrives and meet the pirates. This sometimes leads to problems, because the pirates also grow in that time. In other playthroughs, I decided to just pay off the pirates, and got the hyperdrives right after I got the basic military technologies like shields and armor researched.

On fleets, I made the experience that more smaller fleets, with smaller engagement radiuses, make more sense than fewer, larger fleets. I always have two generic kinds of fleets. The defense groups, and the battle groups. The defense group is made up of the following ships, as the hull types become available:

• 5x Escorts
• 3x Frigates
• 2x Destroyers
• 1x Cruiser
• 1x Tanker

Once you’re out of the very early game, that’s enough to defeat most pirate raids, or at least drive them back. They intentionally top out at cruiser hulls, as they’re mostly intended to defend an area, not to attack an enemy.

That would be the domain of the battle groups, which look like this:

• 12x Escorts
• 8x Frigates
• 5x Destroyers
• 3x Cruisers
• 1x Battleship
• 1x Carrier

These are the heavy hitters, which will go into enemy territory or clear out large numbers of space creatures.

I configure the defense groups with a 50 million engagement range, and then scatter them over my empire. My general rule was always that any colony needs to be covered by a defense group, which has its home base either on the planet itself, or a neighboring colonized world.

In a late-phase game, this is what that would look like:

I then only build mining stations within the defensive range of one of my fleets. I also experimented with increasing the defensive range when available hyperdrives got faster, but ended up canning the idea. The high density of relatively small fleets was just too useful.

As I’ve already noted above, the fleet management is suboptimal, and so I’m doing it all myself. I generally have more than one design per hull type, e.g. an escort destroyer with lots of point defense weapons, and a fleet destroyer concentrating more on anti-ship weapons. For cruisers, I generally have a “light carrier” type, a heavy-hitting mainline cruiser and a command cruiser specifically to lead the defense groups. In the fleet compositions I then mix and match those so it feels a bit like what a real military might do. Whenever I’ve got a number of new components researched, I then go through all of my ship designs to update them. Ending with something like “DD Escort MK V”, and updating all fleet templates, subsequently manually ordering all fleets to upgrade.

Conclusion

While it frustrated me in the beginning, I ended up having lots of fun with it, mainly once I figured out all the idiosyncrasies in the automations. Distant Worlds 2 is now the third most-played game in my Steam library, only beaten by Sins of a Solar Empire (mostly due to great Star Trek and Star Wars mods) and Stellaris of course. But those two of course have the advantage of having been in my library for a very long time.

So my best advice? It needs some time to age. Perhaps give it a bit longer than you normally would other games?

And that’s it for my first game review. I tried to mostly go for a description of the game and hope I’ve captured the essence.

Comments or thoughts?