Distant Worlds 2

I have no idea what the problems in my empire are (let alone fix them), so there’s nothing to do. I’m kinda winning a war, but there’s no way to tell what could improve it, so I just sit and watch. Kind of a ♥♥♥♥ game

05 Apr 2026 I came back to see whether the automation systems, my biggest frustration last time, had finally improved. Early game is fine, as you’re doing most things manually anyway. But once you rely on automation, it’s still a no. My main concerns: (1) Troop automation. Still horrible. If you automate troop recruitment, the AI takes ages to assemble a force big enough for a proper war, so you end up doing it manually. And no, there’s still no mass recruitment interface like the one for ships. You must click a planet, click the troop panel, click once per unit, click the next planet, repeat. That’s a lot of clicks. But no, that’s not the end. There is no rally point, so you cannot hire a bunch of troop carriers to gather troops from your planets and deliver them to a rally point for your invasion fleet to pick up. Instead, the invasion fleet will gather troops itself, a few at a time. No wonder I spent 30 hours. (2) Fleet roles. On paper, you have attack, defence, raid, and invasion. In practice, there is very little distinction between the first three. My 300k attack fleet, set to “attack”, proudly targets an enemy mining station, while my 6k raiding fleet suicides into an enemy attack fleet because my defence fleet is relaxing on the far side of the map, even though I have enemy bases within my own territory. And yes, all attack and defence points were set automatically, because the whole point was to test automation. I wish there were clear options like: target large/small enemy fleets at home/everywhere, target enemy mining stations at home/everywhere. (3) The invasion fleet. This is somewhat better, at least it tries to do what it’s intended to do, albeit foolishly. But after the first invasion, more often than not, instead of picking up the assault troops from the captured planet, it goes to the next one with only a fraction of its force, which gets decimated, of course. So you need to manually instruct it to load troops, then restore the so called automation. Add to this the severe freezing in the end game, even if the game is paused, even if I don’t change the zoom (which is very weird) and you’ll see that it’s still undercooked. Incidentally, I didn’t experience any technical issues during my first try in July 2025, so basically it has got worse. 6/10 Will try again in a few patches. ----------------------------- 27 Jul, 2025 The good thing about this game is that it offers lots of automation; the bad thing is that much of it doesn’t work properly. I’ll give it another try later, but for now, it feels undercooked. It was a lot of fun at the start, but by the end, despite having a huge fleet, a huge army, and a huge budget, I eventually had to quit after almost 70 hours without finishing a single match, because the game had become a buggy mess. It was painful to watch all the stupid things the AI “assistant” did with my assets, but I couldn’t be bothered to deal the manual micromanagement hell in a game that’s supposedly all about automation.