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[Serenitis]

http://www.matrixgames.com/products/515/details/Distant.Worlds.-.Universe

This thing eats your time.
As you sit there directing your little empire, building mining stations, chasing off pirates, just watching all the myriad civilian ships go about thier business. You look up and suddenly it is dark outside.
There is just something so engrossing about desgining all the various things you need to get things done, and then going and doing it.
And everything you use in this game can be designed, and tweaked, and customised by you. Everything.
You want dozens of beautiful shiny guns on your space hotels? No problem.
Fighter bays on all your ships to create an endless swarm of bees? Easy.
How about making some ships into huge mobile sensor platforms to spy on your neighbours? Sure, go nuts.

I totally adored Master of Orion, both 1 and 2. And DW hits all the same buttons - you can even pirate enemy ships and either use them yourself or strip them down and learn tech from them, just like MOO2.

tl;dr - Check this game out. It's pretty cool.

I also mashed some things together for my own amusement:

Spoiler

herpderp content butchery is magic

[close]

[SafariJohn]

Looks awesome!

[Modest]

This game is awesome. It is IN MY PERSONAL OPINON waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better than Master of Orion was. I played it so long, long time ago Maybe I should return to it? Hmm? I think I should!

But for everybody who will want to play it - it has VERY STEEP learning curve! It will smash You in head with tons of options and will not make it easier for You even for one second. It is complex game. It is HUGE also. Seriously - You can make galaxy that will have up to 1400 stars... Almost all of stars will have from 1 to... Umm... 12 planets? Something like that. Few planets per star system will have 1 - 3 moons. Extremly huge game if You want it to be like that. And there is very little limitations on what You can and what You can not do when it comes to creating Your ships as was described by Serenitis. Though limitations there are of course.

Anyway - if one likes 4X Games set in space that are NOT turn based (yep! I love that it is not turn based) and are very complex, this game is no brainer for You.

And best part in this game in my opinion - State and Private parts of Your empire I haven't seen that in any game so far What it does means is that Your empire is composed of two "parts". One is state - like military, stations, research done, colonization etc. And Second is private - fraighter, population transports, mining ships, mining stations. And while You can control what is owned by State, you can not directly control Private things. You can only influence them indirectly. Oh! And when you are building new, shiny destroyer in Your space station it needs certian types of resources to be delivered. In most games it is done behind curtains... Not here! Here You really see some fraighter going to planet with said resources. Picking them up and flying to space port in questions. Nothing is simulated - all things are happening. You want Your enemy planet to stop producing things but don't want start open war? BLOCADE IT! Sent fleet to cut it off from any and all supplies. Sooner or later it will run out of resources (unles being a source of those) and will stop producing things.

If only AI would be better...

[Chronosfear]

Yeah, i fully agree. I love this game.
Still MoO2 is great .. not that complex, but enough for me when i was young 

In Distant Worlds I loved the AI feature for "my empire" , to automate things i hated to do ( it does it pretty decent i´d say )
And those large amount of different resources needed ( including different types of fuel for engines/powerplant ) and that my empire was split into state and private was fit in well
Seeing 100 of traders roaming through my space, getting eaten by space monsers 

Stellaris (http://www.stellarisgame.com/) could be the successor of Distant Worlds . Not that much known yet.Time will tell.

[Serenitis]

The AI is actually pretty good. You can set everything on automatic and just watch it do a competent job of everything, not awesome but definitely good enough.
It's pretty cool just clicking around and watching all the freighters do thier thing.

The one thing that bugs me, is that there is no terraforming.
Planets have a definite value for how good they are, but that is it. You can't improve it no matter how godlike your technology is.
There is a terraforming facility but his only repairs damage upto to original level, which to be honest was not what I expected at all. And as a primarily building focused player this was a bit disappointing, as I greatly enjoyed cramming as many people as possible onto worlds creating wonderful and prosperous city planets in MoO2.

But yeah, there's a lot of fun stuff to play with.
Except Silvermist. Which are just if you run into them early on.

Also MoO2 is awesome. I still play it now. Sometimes simple is good.

[Modest]

WHAT?! Silver Mist is not fun?! On no! That is the MOST FUNNY THING YOU CAN ENCOUNGER! Sooner - better! Hahahaha

Once I had game in which which after like few hours of play (I played with technology costs set to 999k - so game was VERY SLOW when it comes to research) I encountered Silver Mist at end of galaxy... This didn't bothered me too much since... Well... Another end of galaxy! I thought that before it will get to me I will be prepared And later I forgot about that Silver Mist after some time. But few more hours later, when I looked at map I saw that one of empires was suddenly starting to "shrink". They were loosing planet after planet. At first I was sure that was just because of war they were fighting. But than suddenly another empire started to loose planets pretty fast. And such "sphere of no owned planets" were getting bigger and bigger... And than I got what happened! Silver Mist was slowly feeding on weak empires and was replicating! It was wonderfull "story", and while I and few other stronger empires managed to hold our ground against it, we never ever managed to reclaim that part of galaxy It remained dead for whole game We propably could have take it back, but You know... Wars, wars and wars Even such threat didn't stop them from happening

As for Terraforming... I had also this problem with game, but actually I am happy that there is no such thing. I mean - there is so many planets, I think it would be awful if I could just terraform any planet at my will with "god like" technology. I am glad that is not possible. What I would like to see as possible though is to raise planet qualities by some %. Like I can not raise it from 50% to 100%, but from 50% to 65%. You know. Some limited terraforming would be nice Not full! No, no!

[Serenitis]

Fine. You can keep all the Silvermists then.
Worst thing you can find starting out: An explore event which triggers these things. Potentially even worse if one of the AIs finds it, as it doesn't have the sense the keep ships away from them so they can get overrun by "well fed" mists.
(They multiply whenever they kill something.)

On the flip-side, finding an explore event which gives you a random ship five times bigger than anything you can build and filled with tech you won't see for probabaly decades or longer (and sometimes stuff you can't even research) is quite amusing.
I always want to keep them because they are so awesome, but the sensible and correct thing to do is drag them back to your nearest base and rip them apart to see how they work (and a hefty science bonus).
I also tend to spend quite a lot of time hunting for and salvaging wrecks. There are dozens of the things in the average galaxy, sometimes in huge fields. And they are like pieces of shiny, shiny foil to my primitive magpie brain. I must acquire them. I must.
One of these wreck 'fields' is quite special, and has a very large suprise in the middle of it. You have to work to get hold of it, but damn it's worth the effort....

Explore everything!
Yeah... I love exploring. So much in fact that I use a mod that makes the early hyperdrives slower to make that initial push out into the galaxy last longer.

[Modest]

Oh! You play so diffrently than I

I always dismantle those big ships! I never ever hold on them! I just hate them since I am extremly OCD when it comes to my fleets! I love my standarisation and every fleet must (just MUST) have set amount of ships... And than I find some super ships... No! They do not fit into my perfect OCD system! Dismantle! And maybe... Just maybe I will get closer to uncovering hi-tech stuff thanks to that? When playing with 999k  research cost, dismantling those things is even more important Even 20% bonus to research complition is massive jump foward in those situations

Also... About that special thing in one of junkyeards... You mean "Desolation Moon Project"? If so... I always destroy it when I find it! Just can not stand it! If there would be ways of creating planets out of gas gigants, asteroids etc - like in MoO2 - than I would propably used it But since every destroyed planet is one planet less to conquer... I just blow this up Nobody is fit holding such massive power

About hyperdrives... I love how they made 3 diffrent and very legit drives in middle tech It is funny because I always try to go in "Efficient" branch (I have tendency of waging prolonged campaings without refuel points - remember about research 999k) but ofthen events/spies and tech from dismantled ships manage to decide for me in which branch I will go

[Requal]

Have this game for a while now.
Its nice and its possible to let it take none of your time and automate EVERYTHING,

[Modest]

It has pretty steep learning curve! If You will need any help understanding it, or just want some good tips on some subject - feel free to ask me and I will make my best to provide help as long as I will be able to!

[Serenitis]

Guh....
You destroy the big shiny prize?
You do realise that you get an onging tech boost so long as you're repairing an "advanced" derelict right? It's something like a flat 10% boost or some such, which you'll be getting for quite a while as it takes some putting together. And once it's finished you can haul it off to a port and strip it down for yet more delcious technology if you absolutely feel need to remove it.

Diff'rent strokes I suppose....
But yeah, dismantling found/salvaged ships is always the "correct" choice. Always.

One of the things I've found I quite enjoy is solo Pirate hunting, with specially built flagships built around a supply ship chassis so it has infinite range.
Doesn't always work according to plan because sometimes Pirates can get some amazing luck behind them and end up with huge fleets, but damn is it fun trying.
It has defintely influenced my preference for hyperdrives as well.

As mentioned there are three choices you get to play with mid game which affects how your ships behave.

• "Efficient" Drives are fairly average but require less power to operate, so your ships will use less fuel to cover the same distance and you might be able to use less reactors in thier design.
• "Speed" Drives are really fast, but have terrible efficiency and take a long time to activate.
• "Fast" Drives are the slowest and have okay efficiency, but activate much faster.

Each has its uses, and everyone will develop a favourite for what they like doing.
I prefer the "fast" drives myself. Low initiation time is pretty important to survival under fire - It doesn't matter how fast or far your ships can travel if they get shot to bits while thier engines are still charging.
The really nice bit is that these choices are not exclusive you can swap them around as much as you like, the only limitation being each ship's design can only use a single drive. So you specialise your fleet until late in the game when you can "unify" all the drive types into something with the best of all worlds.
(Unless you play as the angry spider people in which case your unique tech is a "best of all worlds" drive.)

And lack of refuelling points is something you shouldn't really ever encounter, with supply ships you can create refuelling points virtually anywhere. Even right next to your enemy's homeworld if you feel like it. tl;dr - supply ships are amazing things once you learn how to use them.
(If you can stand the extra micromanagement you can even "kitbash" a military design into being a supply ship which has none of the limitations!)

I'm also rambling. Shutting up now.

[ciago92]

Anybody have any good (steam) coupons for this? It sounds great but I can't justify dropping $60 on it. Half off or more would be super appreciated!

[Aeson]

the only limitation being each ship design can only use a single drive.

This is not actually true. A ship equipped with multiple hyperdrives will have a virtual hyperdrive whose jump initiation time is equal to the shortest jump initiation time of any hyperdrive carried, a hyperspeed equal to the hyperspeed of the hyperdrive with the highest hyperspeed, and a power requirement equal to that of the hyperdrive with the highest power requirement. You get a warning that ships don't need to have more than one hyperdrive, but this does not prevent the design from being saved and used, nor does it prevent the resulting vessel from gaining some of the beneficial attributes of the various drives carried. Whether or not doing this is worthwhile is another question, and at least for smaller vessels the answer is that it probably isn't. Of course, since you mention that you like using resupply ships as battleships, and resupply ships kind of have a lot of room to mess around...

Efficient" Drives are fairly average but require less power to operate, so your ships will use less fuel to cover the same distance and you might be able to use less reactors in thier design.

Interestingly enough, the 'efficient' midgame hyperdrive option isn't really that much more efficient overall than the high-speed midgame hyperdrive option. The total energy requirement of a jump can be computed as [jump duration]*([hyperdrive power requirement] + [static power requirement]), and the fuel requirement differs only by a scale factor; the 'efficient' hyperdrive is slower than the high-speed hyperdrive (duh), which means that more energy (and thus more fuel) is required to cover static power requirements over the course of the jump. End result is that using the 'efficient' hyperdrive instead of the high-speed hyperdrive only buys you maybe 10% more design range at the low end of reasonable static power requirements for warships and can actually cost you design range once static power requirements exceed a certain level (about 50, though the exact value varies depending on exactly how upgraded the hyperdrives being compared are and exactly which hyperdrives are being compared; even very large end-game standard warships will not typically have static power requirements this high, with more likely static requirements being somewhere around 20-30, though anything with a long-range scanner will have a static requirement of at least 75).

[Serenitis]

I didn't know you could use multiple drives. Interesting....

But yeah, "Efficient" drives are kinda redundant to be honest, they don't really give enough of an incentive to use them in favour of the others. The only use I've found for them is putting them on freighters (and maybe escorts) so I can get away with only using a single reactor. Everything else can do better either by being faster to take off, or faster in transit.

The only thing that bugs me about this game is that the default ship designs are garbage, and are underpowered enough that they can't even acheive their maximum jump speeds.
Which means 15-20 mins is spent redesigning everything. Fortunately you can save designs for use any time you like so after the first you can just load them as needed.

Sadly DW seems to not get put forward for sales very often, and even then it's only for 24h at a time for whatever reason. Last one was in June and there are still people bummed that they missed the tiny tiny window.

[gruberscomplete]

LOL. I play on 0.00 K research, so I can do all research in one day. For whatever reason, the enemy AI's never research that fast, so I always have a boost.

Plus, I do not have to rebuild new ships every time I get a new upgrade, and I try to fit as many repair stations to my stations and repair ships as possible.

Honestly it was fun, but I stopped cuz of its slow speed and only 32 bit support, no 64bit, and slow saves.