The ship design interface now distinguishes between automatically updating your blueprints following research milestones, and having the ships automatically refit to those designs on a per design basis, allowing you to switch any setting back and forth at will in a manner that would take a paragraph to demonstrate. Set this up right and you don't even need to manually send them - just have some fleets defined as invasion fleets, then click on the 'queue an attack here' button while examining the target, then zoom away across the universe to do something else, confident that your people will take care of it. Or perhaps you want your tougher ships to charge at a planet and drop their invading troops in the midst of a battle, while some supplementary ones will hang back and only drop reinforcements when the coast is clear. That lets you, for example, build a defensive fleet that will never retreat, but still create an exception for the very valuable battleship you patched up after finding it abandoned so it will retreat at soon as things look dicey. There's now a panel to explicitly choose whether a fleet's AI will take precedence over an individual ship's, or vice versa, on a per-fleet basis.

Construction ships, for example, can now be set to automatically build mining stations only, or to automatically salvage. You could always seize and return control of anything in Distant Worlds at any time, but in its sequel it's much less likely to cause havoc, and there's less friction thanks to different tiers of delegation. That latter point ties into a better and more nuanced degree of control over automation. There are ways to quickly replenish a shot up fleet, order multiple things built and forget about them, confident that your constructors will do what you asked without having to be babysat. Above all, it's dramatically less laborious to navigate, with menus and common order screens integrated far better, more keyboard shortcuts and accessible icons to quickly select key spaceports, settlements, and fleets. Much as I'd love to see a new subgenre come from the ideas Codeforce played with from day one, they needed to be refined first, and that's what Distant Worlds 2 is. And its sequel is not revolutionary, considering how much of it was already there. Distant Worlds 2 is, in the plainest terms, a strategy game about building a space empire that will dominate an entire galaxy.Īll this was true of the original Distant Worlds, of course. Whatever you want to call it, the point is you can hand the reins of any part of DW2 over to the AI. That leads into a third crucial thing: delegation. They pay to build ships of your design, they supply spaceports to your specifications, and they build stations where you allow it, but otherwise they do what they want. You run the state, but all the mining and shipping and trading is done by autonomous private freighters. Those traders are the second crucial thing. With it, you can, and anyone without their own supply will have to buy it from your traders.

Without it, you can't build anything that uses osalia stone. A mine isn't good because it makes your money go up, it's good because it's the only source of osalia stone anyone nearby knows about. This has several effects, but most crucially it makes economics about more than just cash, and turns the usual formlessness of space into a complex geopolitical concern. Crucially, every ship and station is built directly from components of your choosing, themselves made from specific resources you've mined or imported.

I often bemoan those as stagnant, putting me in a strange spot for this one because it is in many ways a classic 4X, but goes about things completely differently to most. Many of those in turn contain resources that you must detect, mine, and ship back to populated worlds, to trade or turn into components for the ships and space stations that impress your will upon everyone else. Those galaxies are comprised of thousands of stars, the dot of each often orbited by multiple planets, moons, and asteroid fields. But it's also because I really want to keep playing.ĭistant Worlds 2 is, in the plainest terms, a strategy game about building a space empire that will dominate an entire galaxy. But in the spirit of the ancient ones, I can share a review-in-progress of what I've seen so far.Īlright, alright. Even when familiar with the original, even after our preview last month, there's way too much going on to review it comprehensively within a mere few days. I'll have more to say soon, and I've a feeling it'll be mostly good.ĭistant Worlds 2 is enormous. Distant Worlds 2 is an enormous 4X strategy game about building space empires that refines the formula from Distant Worlds.

Second galaxy mmo