Tips for beginners from a beginner (updated 2014-10-14)

Distant Worlds is a vast, pausable real-time, 4X space strategy game which models a "living galaxy" with incredible options for replayability and customizability. Experience the full depth and detail of large turn-based strategy games, but with the simplicity and ease of real-time, and on the scale of a massively-multiplayer online game. Now greatly enhanced with the new Universe release, which includes all four previous releases as well as the new Universe expansion!

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Nikratio
Posts: 50
Joined: Mon Aug 04, 2014 6:16 am

Tips for beginners from a beginner (updated 2014-10-14)

Post by Nikratio »

I had a pretty difficult start with Distant Worlds. So to hopefully make your life easier (and the game more enjoyable from the very beginning), here are the things I wish someone had told me early on:
  • Start in age of shadows. Having just one solar system at the beginning makes things so much easier.
  • If you get confused by Das24680 tutorials, look at Larry Monte's "Extreme Survival LP" instead. He also explains everything, but he does so while playing the game. For me this was much better than Das24680, who goes through all the concepts and windows, but doesn't actually show you how to play the game.
  • You really, really want to install the "Das Chrome UI" mod. It doesn't change the gameplay at all, but replaces the resource icons so that they're much more helpful. Now you can actually see at a glance what kind of resource you are dealing with.
  • Enabling "Fleet formation" automation also automatically assigns fleet postures.
  • If a ship is part of a fleet, it generally stays with the fleet. If fleet is automated, manual commands to a ship are cancelled immediately. If fleet is not automated, you can generally give a manual order and the ship will return to its fleet when it has executed the order. But obviously, if you give an order to the fleet before that, this will take precedence right away.
  • An automated fleet generally returns to its home system on its own.
  • In order for the "Retrofit" and "Update" columns in the Design window to have any effect, you need to turn on design automation. The design window settings can then be used to turn automation off for selected designs.
  • Smaller space ports can be retrofitted to larger space ports. So as long as automation is turned off, there is no difference between having a small, a medium, and a large spaceport design, and having e.g. three small spaceport designs of different sizes.

    However, if you turn automation *on*, the AI chooses between small, medium and large spaceport designs based on the population of the planet.
  • Automatic retrofit needs to be enabled for the current design of a ship in order for an upgrade to happen (as opposed to it being enabled for the design that the ship is upgraded to).
  • In order for ships and bases to be automatically retrofitted, you *also* have to set Construction to "fully automate" or "suggest new ships and bases". In the latter case you will get occasional prompts recommending a retrofit. These prompts will claim to be specific to a component ("We have completed research on xyz"), but selecting "Retrofit" will update all ships and bases to the newest design (which may differ from the current one in many more aspects). Also, small and medium spaceports may get "retrofitted" to bigger spaceports (rather than just newer designs). Finally, all retrofits will be done at the same time, which may result in large fractions of your ships not being available for regular duties, and quite a dip in your finance.
  • The "Optimize" column in Design window is obsolete and can be ignored.
  • Hitting the "Automatically Upgrade" button in the Design window is not the same thing as having ship design automated. This button just replaces all components with their most advanced versions. Automating ship design, on the other hand, will also add new components or remove old ones entirely.
  • If automation is disabled, the ship types (Escort, Frigate, Capital Ship etc) don't have any intrinsic meaning. You can design a capital ship of size 130, or an Escort of size 1500. Only the carrier is special, because this ship type can exceed the construction size limits by some percentage to carry more fighter bays. However, the ship type
    determines how the computer will use the ship (if the ship is automated or fleet automation is turned on) or how to create designs for a ship type (if design automation is turned on).
  • A solid ring on map indicates at least one colonized world.
  • A fuzzy halo on the map indicates an explored system within an area of influence.
  • The sum of total research capacity should exceed empire research potential. Bonuses are applied after total potential has been distributed among capacity.
  • The Bonus income number in the upper right tells you how much bonus income you got so far in the current year. The cashflow, on the other hand, tells you the estimated earnings *per year*.
  • Bonus income is generated by the private sector ordering ships from your spaceports.
  • Colony value comes from population and culture
  • Colony revenue depends on colony value
  • For colonies, development == culture
  • Culture comes from population (up to 50%), luxury resources and other things
  • Resource percentages at resource locations indicate mining efficiency, so they can add up to more than 100%. Generally should not mean at locations with less than 120% total efficiency.
  • Shield recharge rate adds to energy consumption
  • There's no reason not to put the engagement settings for bases (in the design window) on "All Weapons" for both stronger and weaker opponents.
  • Building a massive shield generator protects your colonie not only from bombardment, but also prevents invasion forces from landing (second hand information, not tested myself).
  • If you try to go to the location of an event, but at that time the object the event refers to no longer exist, you will get to a random location on the map (rather than the place where the object used to be). In particular, this also happens if the event is the destruction of the object itself. This means that e.g. the message that a pirate base has been destroyed can never be used to go to the (former) location of the base. (second-hand information, not tested by me).
  • If you want to attack a pirate base on one your colonies, you can do so in the "Colonies" window under the "Facilities" tab.
  • If a construction ship is lacking resources to continue a construction project, it will by default just wait for a private freighter to deliver the missing resources. This can take a while though. Alternatively, you can give the construction ship a different order (e.g. to move somewhere), and then tell it to repair the unfinished construction. Now the ship will fetch the resources that it needs on its own before finishing the construction project.
  • If you want to build a fleet from a set of ships for which you have just given build orders, an easy way to do so is to open the "Ships and Bases" window and filter for "Military Ships". Now the newly ordered ships will be at the end of the list. Do *not* click on any column header, or the list will be sorted by that. In this case you need to close and reopen the construction window.

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