Distant Worlds 2

DW2 scratches that itch for more in depth mechanics that Stellaris leaves you with after playing. But be warned there is an absolute ♥♥♥♥ ton of jank to muddle through when it comes to learning the game systems and how to read, the frankly awful, UI/UX BUT after that its the most fun I've had in a space 4x. It just about perfectly combines the tactical layer of combat you get in Sins of a Solar Empire 1/2 with far better 4x empire building mechanics. You actually feel like the universe is alive instead of interacting with a really pretty and clever spreadsheet.

Keep telling you they are improving the AI, but the AI is so stupid in this game. The AI can't even defend 1 system against 2 enemy fleets having 15 defensive fleets. Because fleets will stop midflight whenever the station in the system they want to defend is destroyed, fly back, then notice another station attacked, stop, fly back to defend - rinse and repeat, never arriving until the system is cleared of your stations. . It doesn't matter that the enemy fleet is all the time visible and within the radar in that system... ^ one example of many how stupid the AI is in this game. The devs did not come up yet with the idea of "defending a system with 10 stations" AI mechanic, instead of a single station that gets blown up fast. Someone needs to tell them that they have made a game with "large galaxies"... Another: imagine they finally add a feature so that you can put different designs of the same ship hull (escort, frigate, etc) into a fleet and you find out, oh actually no. You can't have separate upgrade paths for two different designs of a hull, they will override each other all the time... I really try hard to understand what's happening there, I really. But I simply can't understand what this devs are doing. You can't do anything efficiently in this game. Detected enemy fleet and AI to dumb to defend the incoming fleets and you want to rally your fleets there ahead of time manually? Have fun making them go to the right station where enemy will arrive. You have to select your, let's say 30 fleets, one by one (you need that much and more to optimize the brain dead AI) and then zoom into the sector so you can tell them to go to the station. It zooms centered around your mouse. If you mouse is off by 2px away from the pixel station (zoom levels are immense) you end up 100,000,000km away from station. So you have to zoom in VERY SLOWLY and aprox the station. You missclicked or it selected something near station? Well bad luck, try find the fleet you just have sent to a wrong location, because chances are you have fleet filter enabled in order to be able to find anything and by sending the automated fleet to a wrong location it became manuall controlled and is now not shown in the list of "defend" or "attack" fleets anymore. Removing the filter though shows you all manuall fleets, also those maybe 25 others you have painfully sent to the station. And now imagine the enemy changes direction after you have set everything up... They have tried to solve this issue with a context menu when you click and HOLD the right mouse button that shows all possible things in the "pixel", but its so dumb, it will show you the right things only 1 out of 4 times and sometimes NEVER and the way how context menu works is, you have to hold the button and release over the action you want to execute. If the action is not there you want to execute, you need to n ot release your mouse button accidentally or your fleet will do the wrong things, but press escape, which will also close all the windows, including the fleet list... Devs either have no clue how broken their game is in this terms or they are incredible inefficient at solving any kind of issues that naturally derive from the game concepts they have envisioned. Have they not gathered any experience from the prequel? They work on this niche for prob 15 if not more years in total.

I really want to like this game, I have come back to it again and again trying to understand and to learn the OVERLY COMPLICATED ropes. But it is just ♥♥♥♥♥♥ insane, Even if you hand over the reigns to the ai fully they cant ♥♥♥♥♥♥ play their own game. I do not recommend picking up this game, it is disappointing

I just can't get into it. Having ships not stay together is just not something I can get used to. It totally ruins immersion for me. As a leader, if I tell a fleet to go somewhere, there is no way I would expect that half the fleet goes, part of it stays somewhere else, part of it runs out of fuel and just sits there, some of them take forever, etc. I tried to find a way that would cause my fleets to stick together no matter what, so that if they can't make it to a location together then they tell me and I can fix what's wrong. It really seems like there is a fantastic game here somewhere. I think I may be too much of a sim person and not as much of a strategy person? I like to min/max. I like to click something and it do whatever I clicked it to do. It seemed like this game just fought me every step of the way. I went into the game knowing how it seemed like there were two camps that split fans on this, and that was the fuel. So I tried as much as I could to be objective and understand the fuel thing was going to be a challenge. I just couldn't do it. For my playstyle, my opinion is that it isn't executed well. If they had options behind fleet behavior that allowed you more control, I'd probably be able to deal with it. But since there are no options like that and the game is less about the minutiae of the supply chain, it just turns me off a little. Also, and this bugs me more than I thought it ever could, the overlay showing the empires is way too transparent. I couldn't find a way to make it any better...in fact, when I did find a setting that controlled it it was already on max and I didn't think that could be right but it was. It's just too hard to see borders in this game. Again, seems like there is a great game somewhere but, as a 4x game, I think it plays too niche. But I am not surprised at all that so many people love it.

NO CHINESE, NO RECOMMEND AND ♥♥♥♥ YOU FOR GIVING NO OTHER LANGUAGES AND REFUSING TO FIX THE DAME BUG CREATED BY YOURSELF YOU ABANDON A VAST MARKET YOURSELF!!!!! 用好评求汉化是没希望的，消费者用脚投票！！！！

While game with steep learning curve (that requires third-party sources to boot) might not necessarily be a bad thing in itself, it also commits a cardinal sin of throwing player into the midst of things without much of an explanation only to show that player is not actually needed - the game can play itself just fine. Sure, you can learn how game actually works, and reap the benefits of getting your master's degree in computer game by enjoying the process... but then, by virtue of knowing what to expect, you are made aware of countless little bugs, that, while relatively harmless by themselves, all add up to the level of frustration: - started the game? well , those initial designs that are being built do not calculate upkeep properly, so you'll have to reload if you care about keeping a couple credits you're entitled to - want to capture enemy ships to reverse engineer or use against the enemy? be ready to periodically reload or manually intervene because fleets "forget" about having the ability to capture from time to time - got few admirals? have fun manually reassigning them, because game will pile them up onto a single ship - built few raiding fleets to sow some chaos behind the enemy lines? have fun manually directing them, because automation will make them all attack same target - want resources delivered to the new colony? too bad, automation just queued up all the idle freighters to bring 100 rotten space apples to your homeworld (which each of them will do, despite each being able to carry dozen times more) ...the list goes on, and while this stuff is being gradually fixed, the question remains: how much of it can you take?

I held off on trying DW2 for a long time. DW1 is one of my favourite games of all time, and I wasn't sure whether the depth of that game would fully translate to the sequel. DW2 is a thoughtful iteration on the mechanics of the first game, and while I think the first game does some things better (pirates are more fleshed out, for example), at this point of the development I think DW2 is the superior title. Give it a try if you want to try a space 4x with a compelling and dynamic model of galactic economy, lots of room for experimentation in combat, and the ability to fine tune what parts of the enormous empire simulation you are controlling at a given time. DW2 still has its rough edges, the most obvious being in the presentation of flavour text. You can tell it's developed by a tiny team, but that makes it even more of a triumph in my eyes.

Honestly, not that fun. One of the big advertised mechanics of this game was the automation, but they really rely on it like a crutch rather than using it as an interesting mechanic. When you do decide to actually take control and do things, they don't work intuitively: take trying to attack an enemy with a fleet of your own, you'd think it would be as simple as "click on fleet, then click on who you want them to attack", but nope, instead you have to place a target on what you want to attack, then your fleet will attack it, when the weather is good, the planets align, and they feel like it. Instead they will spend more often attacking random things you don't want them to attack regardless of your orders. But let's say you decide to just leave that and focus on your economy as what you manually control, well too bad there basically isn't much of one. Planets have little to no depth game play or mechanically. Everything is like this, they say its "deep, intricate, hard to understand", make it really annoying to gather information, give orders, and do things so that you automate it, then hope you don't actually spend the time to look into the systems because then you'd find that, if it wasn't layered behind the god awful UI it is simpler than 99% of 4X and grandstrategy games out there.

No clue why this game is getting negative reviews. It's one of the best 4x space games out there.