Distant Worlds Community Ideas: Making a good game great

[republic]

I've been thinking lately about how almost awesome Distant Worlds is.  It is so very near to being the game of my dreams.  I have some ideas and I wanted to see if my ideas were shared or maybe I'm just an outlier.  Below are my first 2 thoughts...

Trade/Resources
Distant world has a plethora of resources and goods...but it is all hidden away out of sight of the player.  That is made worse by the fact that you often have such abundance that they never even matter.  I never really feel like I'm having to "invest" in any project.  I rarely feel like I need to seek out a specific resource, and NEVER have I had to fight a war to obtain a resource.  (Unless you count the ship graveyards as a resource.)  The bigger your empire gets the more resources it should take simply to maintain the empire.  A sprawling empire should be a ravenous resource craving machine.  Wars should be fought to control sources of materials...

Civilian Economy
The civilian portion of the game is great.  It was, to my knowledge, something entirely new.  It should be expanded.  You should have to seek bids for warships and have the civilian economy present you with prototypes...then you pick one.  You should be penalized heavily by designing your own ships.  This would solve multiple problems.  It would prevent player designed ships from always beating up the AI, it would lessen the late game micromanagement while adding some flavor to the game.  You may choose to say with Space Lockheed because if you take that new Ilyushin Galactic model you'll have to pay a 50% retooling fee.  You may stay with outdated engines in order to have fleet commonality so that maintenance costs don't skyrocket.

What do you think?  What would you do?

[Rayfer]

I play with exploration ships under AI control but the AI will never send a ship off to explore a location that was revealed through a discovery at a ruins or an abandoned derelict ship even though the AI recommends that you do so.  It would be helpful if I could right-click on the location and have a menu option for the AI to send a ship there to explore. As far as your suggestions, I really like the first but the second doesn't appeal to me.

[Martok]

I just want the AI to be better (the usual request/complaint).  ::) 

[RooksBailey]

I've been thinking lately about how almost awesome Distant Worlds is.  It is so very near to being the game of my dreams.  I have some ideas and I wanted to see if my ideas were shared or maybe I'm just an outlier.  Below are my first 2 thoughts...

Trade/Resources
Distant world has a plethora of resources and goods...but it is all hidden away out of sight of the player.  That is made worse by the fact that you often have such abundance that they never even matter.  I never really feel like I'm having to "invest" in any project.  I rarely feel like I need to seek out a specific resource, and NEVER have I had to fight a war to obtain a resource.  (Unless you count the ship graveyards as a resource.)  The bigger your empire gets the more resources it should take simply to maintain the empire.  A sprawling empire should be a ravenous resource craving machine.  Wars should be fought to control sources of materials...

Civilian Economy
The civilian portion of the game is great.  It was, to my knowledge, something entirely new.  It should be expanded.  You should have to seek bids for warships and have the civilian economy present you with prototypes...then you pick one.  You should be penalized heavily by designing your own ships.  This would solve multiple problems.  It would prevent player designed ships from always beating up the AI, it would lessen the late game micromanagement while adding some flavor to the game.  You may choose to say with Space Lockheed because if you take that new Ilyushin Galactic model you'll have to pay a 50% retooling fee.  You may stay with outdated engines in order to have fleet commonality so that maintenance costs don't skyrocket.

What do you think?  What would you do?

All great ideas!  One thing I always wanted from DW is for the civilian side to give you missions.  So, say pirates are harassing freighters in a particular sector, you should get a mission to clean them out or face a potential strike from the freighters working that region.  Stuff like that.

But the thing I want MOST from DW is for it to be on STEAM!  This game deserves a much bigger audience that only Steam can give it.  If DW was available there, I suspect the devs would be well on their way to releasing DW2 by now from all the extra revenue they would be raking in (see Chris Park's comments on how Steam helped make AI War a financial success).

[Rayfer]

RB...your comment about DW on Steam had me scratching my head at first, but the more I thought about it the more I see and agree with your point.  Good one!

[RooksBailey]

RB...your comment about DW on Steam had me scratching my head at first, but the more I thought about it the more I see and agree with your point.  Good one!

Thanks!   :)  It is rather amazing that even though DW has been out for a few years, you still get the "Distant What?" response when you mention the game.   >:(  Travesty. 

[Darkspire]

No to the first part and no to the second as well.
The game may not consume resources in the manner you are describing but it does need them to be widespread and well distributed to ensure relatively smooth construction at both ports and mines.
Manual ship designers have a bad enough time as it is with the way the ship designing works without those restrictions put on them as well.
There are ways of making the game 'have more flavor' without crippling the player, all of which can be achieved through creative and logical theme construction, I never play on anything above normal regards difficulty because of the way DW tends to take the option of reducing the players capabilities instead of bringing a smarter AI into play. The theme I use gives advantages to the AI but balances the races, only drawback is that most of the time they are to strong for the original DW races and have quite often got me in a corner, there are many options in the race and policy files to achieve this without any external influence.

Darkspire

[Sparhawk]

I would like a way to feel more engaged in what happens with the economy instead of just spamming colonies to ensure enough resources. One irritation I've always had is the feeling AI suggestions seem irrelevant (steal technology when yours is superior) or even counterproductive and designed to damage relations for no good reason (stop trading your supplies of loros fruit to the Securans).

[republic]

My biggest issue is the game is too easy, even on hard.  I don't have any hope for a better AI, so figure the game itself is going to need to provide limits to the player but in a way that adds to the theme of the game.  Making player designed ships major investments, would help the AI because it is so easy to out design.  If the AI is designing your ships too, your on level playing field...but giving you a choice, even though its trivial, would restore some of that control...at least to my mind.  Just an idea.

What theme do you use Darkspire?  I'd like to try it.

Don't get me wrong, I love the game.

[Darkspire]

The theme I use is mine, nearly got released a year plus ago but Shadows moved the goalposts with the designs mainly, I had to scrap about 1200+ designs and start again with the less controllable templates. I am still balancing the current races, regarding trade, troops, aggression, intelligence, research, research rates, size, growth etc, it is a fine juggling act so that things do not go out of sync, first 15 I have got to where I want them and am just tweaking and taking notes for during games, last 5 have the designs done and the initial data for the race and policy files but I am working on the images.

Here are the current 15 races (you might recognize one of them ...)

Darkspire

[Kushan]

I'm with Darksipire, no on both accounts. I'd rather see the put more development time into making the AI act more logically and opening the game up more to modders. The two things I would like to see them add are wormholes (and the ability to tax/toll freighters using them) and the ability to spawn every star with a hyper deny on it.

[republic]

My only worry is that we've been wanting a better AI since the original, but I haven't really seen it progress much.  I've never EVER seen the AI actually do whole scale war...it sends harassing parties.  Sometimes they are big if the empire is big, but they never really throw their entire armada at me as one would assume they would.

[Rayfer]

My only worry is that we've been wanting a better AI since the original, but I haven't really seen it progress much.  I've never EVER seen the AI actually do whole scale war...it sends harassing parties.  Sometimes they are big if the empire is big, but they never really throw their entire armada at me as one would assume they would.

But combat and conquest is only one of many ways an empire can win in this game.  I've had games where I didn't stay aware of other empires victory conditions only to be surprised when the end-game screen popped up and another empire won through one of the numerous other ways other than conquest.  There is a multitude of ways to win in this game, do you leave them all on or do you narrow down the victory conditions to just conquest?

[republic]

I usually always play sandbox.

There are races though who's victory condition is conquest or destruction and they only half-heartedly attack.  This has been an issue since the beginning.  I understand it on the lower difficulty levels, but at the higher levels the AI should throw its weight around.  Maybe have a war timer or scale.  I understand only harassing me if the war is a border skirmish, but once the war escalates to the point of invading planets, they should go all in.

I do wish resources were more important though.  I don't recall ever fighting a war out of necessity, other than perhaps to take one of the salvage fleets.