What do the dashed lines between systems represent?

[100thMonkey]

A very basic question: what are the dash lines between systems? What do they represent? Do they have any effect in-game?

There doesn’t seem to be any info on them anywhere. The tours, the galactopedia, the manual, the forums: nothing!

I’ve found a thread on Steam, where people also don’t really know what they are, and would like the devs to chime in on the subject:

https://steamcommunity.com/app/1531540/ ... 346764617/

I don’t think I ever quite knew what they were in DW:U either. I seem to remember thinking that they were connecting spaceports... So I did a test to verify if that’s the case or not in DW2.

The results shows that the presence or absence of a spaceport affect those lines. But it aslo shows that there can be dash lines connecting to a system that doesn’t have a spaceport (see screenshots below).

Before deleting the spaceport.png (257.19 KiB) Viewed 1679 times

After deleting the spaceport.png (331.23 KiB) Viewed 1679 times

So the mystery remains...

[Lunalis]

i think its mostly a visual tree like representation of your colonies. like newer ones get branched to older ones... or smaller ones to bigger... prefering to link them to closer colonies nearby and no spaceport colonies to spaceport colonies.
like how urd wylan is branched to lokazik or praxles to tuula.

i guess alpha kassieda was colonized before tuula... so it linked to nispes. and when the port there was destroyed it updated the connections. then alpha kassieda is a "no spaceport" colony and got "attached" to the nearest spaceport colony tuula. while tuula/nispes is the new "main route" from spaceport to spaceport.

maybe it has some effect on how trade/recources "flow" from colony to colony... but who knows, i think its mostly visual to see what belongs to what... it can be a mess if other empires have similar colors as other empires and have colonies behind the other faction... so they get "connected" with lines to make it more visible what belongs to who.

[MichaelJ007]

The lines do appear to be dynamic. They update in response to game events.

Also noticed that the lines conform to a unique pathing model. There is only ever one path between any two systems.

I like to think this is related to how resources are balanced between planets, with larger planets serving as local hubs. So freighter jobs are generated along these lines. No clear evidence for that though.

Wondering if this could be extended to show whether mining stations can be linked to planets, or if resource distribution is entirely random.

[solops]

In the original DW the lines were just traffic indicators that had no impact on play. They change over time as traffic patterns shift.

[Jorgen_CAB]

As others have said... they are visual cues for how your civilian traffic operates and they will dynamically update based on the traffic flow.

The reason you get this is obviously based on colonies, stations and the lengths of your civilian ships maximum jump distances between systems.