I've managed to put about 25 hours into DW2 so far, andwhile I'm thoroughly enjoying the game I thought it would be useful to stop, take stock of how it's going along and post some feedback for the team. So here we go!
The positive stuff!
- I absolutely love the new scaling of ships, planets, stars, stations etc compared to DW:U. The graphics and models are a huge improvement!
- The automated ship designer is vastly better compared to DW:U, I have only had to interrupt it once to add a medical bay to a station following a plague.
- The pirates seem much better balanced now, as opposed to the instant-death encounters they sometimes were previously.
- The UI is slick and mostly super-easy to find your way around, with some exceptions. Every screen shows the most pertinent information with the minimal effort, which must have taken a lot of work to get right.
- Automation is, for the most part vastly improved as well. The real grindy stuff can just be handed over with no worries or concerns, letting you focus on the bigger picture.
- It made me oddly happy to see tech that unlocks subsets of ships (e.g. patrol frigates, long-range cruisers) and fleet templates that allow me to design fleets with these in mind!
- From a technical standpoint, I've had no crashes in this version. There have been some hiccups / temporary freezes at some points, it's difficult to pin down why/how.
The constructive criticism
- First, message filtering. I occasionally come across new resources, or a debris field full of cargo pods where I will discover 20+ new resources and I'd love if there was a way to turn just those messages off. I can disable exploration messages, but there's a lot in that category that I don't want to miss!
- Some of the default automation settings are a little hard to find, and have questionable defaults. Fleet automation is a big one - I don't think it's a good idea to have most of the ships formed into fleets, as pirates are going to be a problem at various stages and having a number of escort/patrol/guard ships available is important for me. I skimmed over the fleet automation settings and missed the % assigned to fleets setting the first couple of times as it was right at the bottom, smaller than the larger buttons for the other settings. Minor detail, I know.
- The military automation settings are a bit weird, especially for Enlisting / disassembling. If I set enlist to "always" will it just ignore the other setting? Maybe the "Disassemble when..." setting should be greyed out when that's the case?
- Tax rates automation seemed to go a bit wonky at the start of the game with just one colony, setting it higher than I wanted. I struggled to bring it under control and just set it manually until I was ready to hand control back - it seems to work fine with > 1 colony. Could be related to highly variable supplies of goods, I'm not sure.
- On three occasions in my latest game, one pirate faction has broken non-aggression & protection treaties. One occasion seemed to be triggered by an event, where ships were spawned that attacked an exploration ship. Those ships just happened to belong to a pirate faction I had a non-agression pact with. On two other occasions, it took pirate attacks for me to notice that the treaties had been broken. Is this intentional?
My biggest concern is my ability to manage ships & fleets at the moment. It's such an important part of the game and I have to confess I'm struggling to get the fleets to do what I want them to. If I had fleet formation over to the AI, it will generate some 'approximately correct' ratios of ships in fleets, depending on my settings and what's available. I would like some more granularity over AI control when it comes to fleets, for example:
- Fleet formation on/off
- Per-ship tactics management for fleet ships on/off (although this would almost always be on)
- Home base assignment automation on/off
- Fleet tactics management on/off (so I can set the engagement range and have it stick)
- Fleet tactics automation e.g. Defence, Attack, By Template, Invasion etc
A special note on fleets
Let me illustrate by way of a story: I create a template of ships that I want to use to patrol my home system. I create a fleet based on that template. The engagement range is set to system-only. If I hand over control of that fleet to the AI it will change the engagement range. It may change the home base and send it elsewhere, if I let it. Perhaps a patrol system/within x range option would cover it?
In the mean time, what settings do I need to use to get the fleet to stick in the system I put it, engange threats (i.e. don't ignore them), and don't leave unless I tell it to? The answer isn't clear, and I've struggled against it for a while.
I have to admit, I'm concerned about how I'm going to manage fleets later in the game. I have noticed ships in fleets tend to be a little "all over the place" when I check on the parent fleets, which causes delays when amassing for defense & attack.
Finally
Overall, vastly improved and much better in almost every aspect than DW:U. I haven't even touched on a lot of areas that I could have because there's just so much to be positive about. I'm very glad that a lot of the mechancs have stayed compared to DW:U as well; I know it's tempting to reinvent the wheel for sequels and I'm glad that this hasn't happened to this gem of a game.
Thanks!
