Distant Worlds 1.0.4 Public Beta 4 Now Available!

[Kushan04]

Playing a 1500 star galaxy, 10 empires total (including me). No major issues so far. Its running ALOT smoother then in previous versions. Economy seems to be a little better balanced. My economy didn't tank 5 seconds into the game, but I'm not swimming in cash either. Only about an hour or so into the game though.

I have noticed that the system patrol feature doesn't seem to work. I keep trying to get my destroyers to patrol my home system but they seem intent on patrolling the same planet and its not even my capital.

Keep up the good work

Kushan

[Vedric]

Can you patrol a system with a fleet? I haven't figured it out if you can. If this was never intended then I think this would be a logical if not excellent feature.

Another UI annoyance is the inability to "zoom to" or "backspace" to a fleet when the whole fleet is selected. If you click a single ship from the fleet in the selection panel then the "zoom to" feature works. Code it to zoom to the fleet leader.

Being able to turn off civilian icons when zoomed out is great. I was going to suggest this when I was playing the last version. It really cleans up the GUI. I have a ton to write on this subject but will make a separate post when I have more time.

There is a Great game under there! Keep it up!

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: Jarhead0331
I'm experiencing some disappointing ship/fleet behavior with the beta 4.  Individual ships tasked to a fleet do not always engage the same target that has been selected.  For instance, I sent a 12 vessel fleet into a gas cloud to attack a pirate base.  The base was protected by one ship.  I wanted to take the ship out first.  No matter how many times I right clicked on it, some of my ships in the fleet kept going after the base as opposed to the ship.  I experienced the same behavior in a defensive battle...2 pirate ships jumped into my home system.  I wanted to coordinate my defense and direct all my firepower on one ship at a time.  Despite orders to attack a one of the pirates, some of my ships kept attacking the other.  I've never had this problem before under any of the other patches.

Thanks for the report, any chance of upload a save showing one of these instances? Were the ships that disobeyed your orders under attack by the ships they started firing at?

Regards,

- Erik

[Erik Rutins]

ORIGINAL: Vedric
Another UI annoyance is the inability to "zoom to" or "backspace" to a fleet when the whole fleet is selected. If you click a single ship from the fleet in the selection panel then the "zoom to" feature works. Code it to zoom to the fleet leader.

If you click on the fleet name or the general display area once the fleet is selected, does it not center on the fleet for you? Or do you mean something else?

Being able to turn off civilian icons when zoomed out is great. I was going to suggest this when I was playing the last version. It really cleans up the GUI. I have a ton to write on this subject but will make a separate post when I have more time.

Did you see the other options in the Advanced Settings too?

Regards,

- Erik

[Kushan04]

ORIGINAL: Vedric

Can you patrol a system with a fleet? I haven't figured it out if you can. If this was never intended then I think this would be a logical if not excellent feature.

According to the first page:

9. Fleet system patrolling: select a fleet and right-click a system or star to patrol all of your colonies and bases in the system

Kushan

[Gerth]

I just tried the "patrol system" command. Fleet jumped to system edge near a mine. A pirate attacked a mine near the star and one of the patrol ships zoomed over and blasted him to space pebbles, then zoomed back to the fleet.

[shinobu]

Much thanks to the Code Force and Matrix team for all their hard work. Got my best game to date going on now and really enjoying it. Keep up the great work and know that it IS appreciated...

[Vedric]

ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

If you click on the fleet name or the general display area once the fleet is selected, does it not center on the fleet for you? Or do you mean something else?

No it doesn't. This is exactly what is going on. I have a small fleet hotkeyed to "1". I click "1" to select my fleet. Clicking the display area in the lower left does nothing. Clicking backspace does nothing. Clicking the "zoom to selected item" button does nothing. If I select a single ship from the fleet in the lower left corner, then the zoom to selected functionality works fine.

I think this might have something to do with setting up a hotkey with ctrl+#. As I mentioned above I can't patrol a system with a fleet. When I hover over the star with my cursor I get no patrol icon, when I right click I get a menu with no patrol option. I'll go play with this some more.

Update edit: I closed the client and restarted, no change. Fleet or no fleet it doesn't matter. When I select multiple ships I can't patrol anything. With a single ship selected, I can hover my cursor over a base or star and get the patrol icon. Right clicking sends it on patrol. For planets, hovering my cursor does not give the patrol icon but a right click will give the menu with the patrol option. None of this happens when I have multiple ships selected. Everything is fine with a single ship both for patrol functionality and for "zoom to selected" functionality.

[Druthlen]

Getting some very annoying crashes. They happen when i attack something with a fleet and then retarget something else. I am gonna uninstall game and reinstall. It is happening every 30 mins or so and is atm unplayable. Im not sure but I think the game may be corrupted and needs to be uninstalled becuase It wasnt happening at first.

[DarkWraith]

Been playing around with the new beta. I haven't encountered any significant bugs. I think the economy is too easy again, though.

In Beta 2, the beginning of the game usually had an extremely tight budget. I always expand as fast as I possibly can, and it was normal for me to dip into the red for a bit in the beginning. The economy had a *slight* limiting effect on my expansion then, and if a war broke out the cost to get my military in shape could easily halt my expansion plans. Somewhere around mid game though, my economy would reach escape velocity, and I could throw money around like crazy because it was always coming in so fast. Half a million a year within 20 years was easy to reach.

For Beta 4, the economy seems a lot easier at the start. Still using my usual rapid expansion play style, I was never threatened with running short on money. I was even able to start buying techs almost right out of the gate (I've been playing with other races having and advanced start). My economy never seemed to really reach the ridiculous heights I saw in beta 2 (corruption, I assume?), but money was never a concern throughout the game.

I think this beta moved the mid and late game economies in the right direction, but the early game economy is too easy right now.

[Dadekster]

I've put in a solid ten hours of game play today, (I was off today and wife was at work :p) and so far I am liking what I see a lot. Overall the game is much tighter in regards to the economy. Making sure you get all the strategic resources and luxuries you can seem to make quite a bit of difference between having an economy/colonies that are happy and productive and ones that just sputter along medicore like. What still bugs me is having 3 or 4 mining/gas stations in a system and then the AI planting a colony in there native to them 20 years later and then screaming bloody murder about infringment on his propery. I'm like wtf...I was here like way before you clown. Usually leads to a war since you can't remove your private stations so there's no solution other than selling them maybe? Interstingly enough that's exactly what the AI did several years later after the war ended and I had taking his colony. He had a gas station left and offered to sell it to me.

[RViener]

Erik, I wonder if some of the bugs now noted may be corrected by a clean install and adding the new beta update. Also removing mods that may have been added. There have been a lot of changes.
Bob Viener

[lancer]

Goodaye,

I've played two games for 25 years each from a scratch start with Humans (different government types), fully manual woe to go. Also played half a dozen games with automation for a 5 year period to get a feel for the early game balance. Different races, all scratch starts.

Couple of observations.

1.The slowing down of the research speed is a big plus. Map filters likewise.

2.The economy ticks over but I'd have to agree with the gentleman above who thinks it is too easy in the early game. In none of the early game tests did I feel any form of economic squeeze. Cruised through with the greatest of ease.

Mid game (20 year mark) appears about right from my limited sample size, probably due to corruption kicking in, although still verging on 'buckets of cash'.

What a good balance is for the majority of players is probably a tricky decision but for me the early game appears firmly in the 'Too Easy' catergory which takes away from the game as that's the part (as in early - mid - late) that you tend to experience the most. Certainly a lot easier than 1.04 Beta 2 which I found was just about right for an interesting challenge in the early game.

With Beta 2 I was having to prioritise build & colony decisions due to limited cashflow whereas with Beta 4 I can pretty much do what I want, when I want (within the parameters of reasonable strategy).

As a typical early game example I can have my homeworld and up to a dozen fledgling colonies which produce zero income, between 130 and 200 ship, bases and ports (including private sector) and still maintain a healthy double digit cashflow. Couldn't do that with Beta 2 which was more a case of staging your expansion as funds allowed.

I wasn't experiencing any form of meaningful resource crunch either. Resources abound. My rapid expansions generated much private sector construction which provided enough funds to keep me nicely in the black (along with the revenue from my home colony). 'Cause I didn't run into either a resource or financial crunch (a-la-Beta 2) I could happily (not really) keep expanding at will in a kind of virtuous feeback loop.

Once I hit hostiles then it was a different story necessitating a strategy change but I generally had a big enough fleet to deal with them or at least hold them at bay.

Lots of variables involved though and perhaps if I play more games (eight so far) my view might change.

3.All other improvements seem beneficial.

4.Corruption - I'm O.K with this as it echoes what's happened in empires in our own history but I can't seem to find any in game information on the amounts of corruption occuring. It's possible that it's there and I'm not seeing it. As my wife keeps telling me, I'm a man, what do you expect?

I realise that corruption has always been in the game but it appears that it is now a bigger factor.

So if on the other hand it isn't there then I'll offer the comment that you will probably be taking a lot of flak for keeping it a hidden element. Something that has a significant effect on your economy should be shown along with some indication of what's causing it. Apologies if it is there already.

I appreciate all the hard work you are doing to improve the game.

Cheers,
Lancer

[jscott991]

ORIGINAL: DarkWraith

Been playing around with the new beta. I haven't encountered any significant bugs. I think the economy is too easy again, though.

In Beta 2, the beginning of the game usually had an extremely tight budget. I always expand as fast as I possibly can, and it was normal for me to dip into the red for a bit in the beginning. The economy had a *slight* limiting effect on my expansion then, and if a war broke out the cost to get my military in shape could easily halt my expansion plans. Somewhere around mid game though, my economy would reach escape velocity, and I could throw money around like crazy because it was always coming in so fast. Half a million a year within 20 years was easy to reach.

For Beta 4, the economy seems a lot easier at the start. Still using my usual rapid expansion play style, I was never threatened with running short on money. I was even able to start buying techs almost right out of the gate (I've been playing with other races having and advanced start). My economy never seemed to really reach the ridiculous heights I saw in beta 2 (corruption, I assume?), but money was never a concern throughout the game.

I think this beta moved the mid and late game economies in the right direction, but the early game economy is too easy right now.

I vehemently disagree.

If anything, the economy in the late game in beta 4 is too contracted. The start-up economy is just about right.

I maintain that using corruption as a means to balance the late game is too rigid and limiting. It is simply a black hole that sucks cash, with the player being unable to do anything about it. It's a cheap, hidden trick that imposes "balance" (whatever the bleep that means) and limits gameplay.

If we absolutely must have reduced economic performance, I think the developers should look at ways to create this within the game's system itself; force players to make trade-offs to make more or less money, rather than simply draining money out of the economy with a shadow global value.

Also, in case people did not notice, corruption rises the further out from the capital you are. This produces a situation where empires located in the deep core are able to keep their homeworlds as their capital, whereas races on the galactic edge will probably have to move it (perhaps several times). Doesn't it seem ridiculous that a race would abandon its homeworld as its political center, especially considering that a homeworld will still have many times the population of other large colonies even deep in to the game?

Using corruption smacks of laziness, which is in complete contrast to all the other work Matrix is doing on this game.

[Bartje]

Yes but in order to change it there needs to be an alternative.

Can you offer one?

Perhaps corruption can be countered by investments into a Bureaucracy research tree ?

This would allow larger empires to gradually regain their monetary advantage while delaying it long enough for them to have problems early on.


It makes sense for larger entities to be wealthier, especially with sound economic management.

I too feel that corruption is too heavy handed right now.

[Spacecadet]

I pretty much agree with jscott991 on the Economy. I think it's just about right now.

On the corruption issue, I think it may be a bit too high or there's some kind of disconnect between the Colonies screen and the Empire screen.
I'm pulling these numbers from memory, but I recall seeing my Colony reporting a revenue of ~147k, but my income was only running around 20k.

Someone else might want to check this as it's going to be a while before I get to look at this again.
If this is due to corruption then it's way way off, and pretty much will just breaks the whole game.

[jscott991]

ORIGINAL: Bartje

Yes but in order to change it there needs to be an alternative.

Can you offer one?

I can offer too many to list here.

The easiest thing to do is simply increase the maintenance and other costs of later technological components (which is exactly what happened in the real world if you compare WWII military equipment with items that became increasingly available during the Cold War). This would allow the player to choose between lots of cheap ships and components or fewer, more technologically advanced vessels. Because almost all players would choose the latter, this would act as a drag on the economy, but it would be a visible and easily diagnosed one.

But I think it's a false dichotomy. I don't think the corruption sink has to be replaced with anything. I think it's poor design to elevate hidden, out-of-reach values to prominent roles within the game. It becomes even worse when those values start to create "gamey" type decisions such as moving your capital around to increase revenue / decrease corruption (because, of course, the solution to America's current financial woes is to move its capital to St. Louis, so all of the nation is equidistant from the federal capital).

[Bartje]

That seems like something that can be introduced as well. Quality vs Quantity. Like the Millions of communists vs the UN in the Korean wars.

Allong with some ways to reduce the impact of corruption it would go along way towards increasing immersion and gameplay.

[Erik Rutins]

Wow, you _really_ hate corruption, Jscott.

Corruption is not going to remain a hidden value and the corruption due to distance from Capitol is actually an extremely small part of overall corruption, so getting worked up about that is fairly pointless. The advantage "core" races get from this is minimal. Corruption is also not going away, though it may go through more tweaking. While there are other things that can be done, corruption is a realistic solution to the difficulties that a government which evolved from one planet would find when trying to manage a galaxy. It might more accurately be called "Corruption and Inefficiency" as it does not strictly represent the taking of bribes or such.

I appreciate constructive criticism, so please a bit less of the "lazy" or "poor designers" talk and a bit more of the actual suggestions that you have "too many to list". We really do read and listen and if you come up with a good suggestion we will certainly use it.

[Bartje]

Exactly!
 
Corruption is a logical part of the galaxy. Handeling it requires the evolving / adaptation of interstellar governments to their new situations.
 
Perhaps investment into the governments bureaucracy or the ability to use space ports as anti - corruption government centers.
 
Or how about the ability to build a patrol - station, which acts as the hub of law enforcement in a given area (area defined by the amount of stations compared to systems) or even the neccesity to build a Fleet Command - station which would serve as the center point of all communications with one or perhaps several of the Empire's fleets.
 
Such stations would be prime tactical targets, thus introducing many new strategies.
 
Want to reduce an Empire's income? Pick of their escorts, bomb their mining bases, take out space ports or remove their patrol efficiency by destroying patrol stations. (perhaps even in several incarnations, small, medium, large?)
 
Want to throw their fleets into dissaray? Destroy their fleet command centers and severly limit your opponents to coordinate strike fleets.