Arise, dead old topic! Arise and RENEW!!!
Here's a trailer. I don't know if it's official or not, but it is accurate, so whatever.
View: https://youtu.be/V8TQwbsp9yU?si=6-EVRMQVfpM5a7jU
The Basics
It's a standard Space 4X game. You play in a galaxy of several hundred stars (up to 2000 if you've got 64GB of main memory). Most stars have planets of various types with various resources. A few planets can even be colonized by your people.
When the game starts out, you and some other factions from other worlds are all just learning out to fly in space. You'll explore your own solar system, then learn how warp drives work so you can fly fast enough to get to other stars and their worlds. You'll build exploration ships to scan those worlds to see how habitable they are and what resources they have. You'll build construction ships to make mining stations to get those resources, starbases to help colonies thrive, resort bases to make a little extra cash from tourism, and various others. You'll build expensive colony ships to establish new colonies. War ships of various sizes will eventually be needed to attack enemies.
There are a number of enemies, too. There are quite a few space monsters out there that will attack your ships and stations. There are, of course, the other factions. You might want to fight them, or you might want to be nice to them and hopefully become allies. There are also pirates. They won't like you much, but you should be able to convince most of them to "protect you" for a recurring fee. There are also other advanced ships, lying dormant in ionic nebula, ready to wake up and come eat your colonies.
You'll also be doing a lot of research. As you expand your empire with more people and find interesting space plantes/stars to study with research stations, you'll be able to research more and more complex technologies. That will let you make more advanced weapons, bigger ships, better scanners, improve your ability to colonize marginal planets, protect you from space plagues, make faster engines, and so on.
This particular 4X is real-time-with pause. You can crank the speed up to as much as 8 times normal or slow it down to a fraction. Push the space key and it all stops, letting you issue whatever orders you want.
Distant Worlds 2's Selling Points
Configuration is the biggest one. When you start a game, there are PAGES of configurations to choose from! How many other factions are going to be out there? What shape should the galaxy be? Do you want lots of nebula or just a few? Lots of monsters, just a few, none, or do you want to re-enact
The Swarm? Victory conditions can be tweaked, starting tech levels can be decided... it goes on for quite a ways. (It also remembers the last one you did, so you can start another game with the same settings easily.)
The automation is the other big thing. Everything can be automated! The big plus of this is that you can leave the parts of the game you enjoy on manual while leaving the tedium to the AI. You can often mix it up, too. You can leave the tax rates on all your colonies up to the AI, you can micro-manage every one of them, or you can manage a couple of them while leaving the AI to do the rest. Or perhaps you want to manage those tax rates when you've got 4 colonies, but at 8 you're too busy dealing with your fleets to mess with them, so you let the AI take over.
DW2 lets you design your own ships, but the hulls are pre-determined. So, the frigate you are designing might have two slots for defense, three for engines, two for scanners, three small weapons with 270 degree arcs, one large weapon with a 180 degree arc, and a dozen general use slots for things like crew quarters and damage control. There will be a max size but, as long as you stay under that, you can fill those slots with whatever you've researched. You can't change the number of slots, though, or change how the ship looks. (And, naturally, you can let the AI design your ships for you if you don't want to deal with it.)
The factions in the game are fairly different than each other. Not as much as in Sword of the Stars or Endless Space, but different enough to affect your play style. Each gets a few unique technologies and, as you would expect, tend to be better at certain aspects of the game. That might be war, colonization, economy, or what have you. They also tend to favor different types of planets. Humans like continental planets, but some others like deserts, others like ice planets, or even lava worlds!
The independent colonies are particularly interesting in DW2. Like lots of other 4X games, various small factions are spread over the map. These never learn how to go to space, but you can still trade with them. You can also conquer them or diplomatically encourage them (basically: bribe them) to join your empire. They'll add to your economy and, once they get a population of half a million, they can start colonizing other worlds. That means that the marshy world your human colonists wouldn't touch can now be colonized by those frog people you brought into your empire!
DW2 also comes with an in-game editor. When you hit ESC, you can switch the whole game into edit mode. This allows you to add stars, planets, nebula, even independent colonies to the game you're playing. Handy if the random number generator really makes life harsh in an otherwise good game, or just for poking around the local neighborhood at the start of the game to see if it's viable. Of course, you won't use it to delete that monster attacking the critical mining station that you forgot to defend - we're all gamers here, we don't do THAT sort of thing! (There are no achievements in the game, probably because of the editor.)
The developers are still actively developing the game, and I expect they will keep doing so for years to come. The DLC mostly consists of adding new factions to the game. There's one which adds an end game crises and some other new features that I haven't bought yet, so I won't comment on it. It has some bugginess here and there, but after three years, it's pretty solid now.
My Opinion
I'm loving this thing! I can use the flexibility to set up a galaxy with just a few other factions that already tend to be peaceful, then concentrate on the exploring, expanding, and exploiting aspects of the game. There are still plenty of monsters around, so the military aspect doesn't get completely ignored. I've always wanted this! Galactic Civilizations 2 gave it to me, but I haven't found another example since (including in GC3).
There was a pretty real learning curve and, because the game is always getting updated, some of the older videos can lead you astray. There's also some patience needed when starting out just to get through the whole list of options and possible automations. (The defaults are reasonable if you're in a rush.)
DW2 on Steam
Distant Worlds 2 is a vast, pausable real-time 4X space strategy game.
store.steampowered.com
DW2 on GOG (half off for the next 7 hours - there's still a little Spring sale left!)
Distant Worlds Returns! Distant Worlds, the critically acclaimed 4X space strategy game
www.gog.com
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