World Types

[Abraxis]

Hey! I just bought Distant Worlds and the expansion after helping myself to Distant Worlds on my friend's laptop for a couple hours, I'm really impressed! It's like Aurora, but comprehensible.

Anyways, I'm about to start a game. I'm not sure what race I want. I see that races are separated into what world types they can colonize right off the bat, and it looks like planet quality is more inherent to some types above others.

So I guess what I'm wondering is, in so far as world quality right from the start, who's best off? And when can you start colonizing other types? Do you have to invade a foreign planet type to learn how to inhabit it? Or integrate a species who knows how? or is it a tech somewhere?

Thanks!

[Data]

Or integrate a species who knows how? or is it a tech somewhere?

both actually but in the first case you'd need a certain amount of pop from that particular race and even then only they can build the colony ships for that particular world type

another option is to stumble upon a colony ship of a race that can colonize a particular world, sometimes you enounter refugees who join you with a couple of military ships and a colony ship

[Setekh]

All of the different colony techs are researchable.

Welcome to the game.

[Abraxis]

Okay, yeah it's a lot more intuitive now with the Expansion's tech trees.

I'm still wondering though, are the world types fairly balanced in so far as frequency/quality are concerned?  For example, I noticed there are a tonn of sand planets in my first game, but most of them are around 60% quality.  Which leads me to believe any desert race will generally be growing out a lot, but not growing up much (large empire, but less dense empire).

So I guess I'm wondering what the trend is for other planet types

[Data]

the same question was put in the below thread also

tm.asp?m=2700846

some pertinent details to this in there, have not seen something similar somewhere else

[unclean]

The order of the colonization techs in the tech tree is pretty much the planet pecking order, but specifically it's:
Continental > Marsh > Ocean > Desert > Ice > Volcano

Like you noticed they definitely get more numerous as you go down the line, but ice and volcano worlds are so crap that it doesn't really matter. If you start with them you'll want to either get some colony tech or get to conquering the nearest planet full of squishy-looking ewok things ASAP

If you want a starter race the Haakinosh will do you no wrong, they have marsh planets, good spies, fat fuel tanks and a fat economy, they're quite the pain in the ass really [:)] Can't go wrong with humans either if you want to go a techier route.

[Abraxis]

Actually the Haakinosh are what I settled on!  I had to stop playing my game with them though, it was also the first game I started at the center of the galaxy, but there were squid creatures that seemed to keep spawning in my home system.  They kept frightening my colony ships as soon as they were built which would cancel their mission.  For some reason, I don't know if it's a bug with the Haakinosh fuel tank, the colony ships seemed to empty their fuel completely and start running away from this squid which was nowhere near the capital.

I thought maybe ships just fill up on fuel as soon as their built, rather then while they're building, and the colony ships were deciding to flee before that could happen.  Then I zoomed into my new fleet of destroyers and they were out of fuel too.  It just seemed like ships were randomly losing all their fuel everywhere.

Edit: after further investigation it's possible the wookies had been sabotaging that colony [:@]