The future of Distant Worlds - Is DW2 necessary?

[Unforeseen]

ORIGINAL: Cauldyth

Wrong. But I come to these boards to further my enjoyment of DW, not to saddle myself with teaching basic science to random strangers.

I will just conclude by saying posts like the above are not harmless, they are potentially seriously damaging. I hate to think how many impressionable minds read things like that and believe it. That's how these false, long disproven arguments keep persisting for decades.

Please, for the good of those around you, educate yourself about the subject before you go posting publicly about it. You're causing more damage than you probably realize.

This. !!!

Can we please stop this conversation? Every time eyegore posts a comment, someone out there viewing this thread gets dumber.
..............................................
I'd like to throw out my idea of a perfect 4x space strategy game. One which i doubt will exist within my life span

It's pretty complex and would require a processor beyond what we can even comprehend imo. Basically, you start out kinda the way you do in spore. You have a single cell organism that you evolve, but instead of needing to control it you 'research' your way through evolution using a sort of evolutionary tech tree. As your cell becomes more complex and reproduces it eventually emerges and goes through the phases like in spore, developing, becoming more intelligent etc etc. The game turns into strategy game such as what you'd see in empire total war or something like that, but what occurs is dependent on how you evolved your race and what other cells were able to evolve to this point and how. It would be extremely complex. Anyways your race is smart enough to start researching actual technology. Eventually, should it become intelligent enough, and survive it would make it to space.

This would of course be occurring all over the galaxy which is why i noted that it would need a helk of a processor and alot of memory. The galaxy would be billions of stars, not just thousands or hundreds as most 4x games get away with. By the time you become advanced enough to explore the galaxy there could be hundreds, thousands, millions or even billions of other races doing the same thing. All dependent on how each individual cell's story played out.

Maybe in a few thousand years i can expect to see something as complex as this

[Icemania]

Well said Cauldyth.

[Icemania]

ORIGINAL: Kayoz

I'm so ashamed.

A flame war I wasn't involved in.

The shame. The shame.

LOL! Great post Kayoz!

[Cauldyth]

It's not too late! You can still join!

[Haree78]

I hate to see the lies of the anti Evolutionists put on a forum like this, can we stop please?
Whether it's trolling or you genuinely believe these things please take it to a creationist or scientific web site where you will be suitably reaffirmed in your world view or laughed at.

Some Distant Worlds 2 hopes off the top of my head:

The budget is bigger! Seriously though I'd really like to see more spent on the visuals. I know, I know, not at the expense of gameplay, but I really would like to see Aliens have an idle animation in the diplomacy screen, troops that look like a game from 2014+, ships that have weapon systems attached and fire from them. Even if the game stays 2D, 2D can look absolutely gorgeous with the right artists. 3D rendered ships from a professional artist would be great. Real special effects for weapons. Even if it is in 2D there are toolkits out there that can do some really nice lighting/shading effects in 2D games.
Endless Space was a huge disappointment in many ways, but I have to hand it to them, the visuals and atmosphere in that game really did a lot for me.

I'd like to see tech trees specific to races, not 1 tech tree with a few uniques. They don't have to be radically different, but there is some glaring limitations of the current system.

Colony ships should be 'terraforming' ships that are pretty much incapable of producing or doing anything for a few years with a small population. You might even need to do this for each race. You can then do some mutually exclusive races, perhaps one race requires something in the atmosphere poisonous to another.

I'd like to see social and political decisions I have to make that have effects on the game other than tax rate per colony. Basically I'd like to feel my race and empire has a story I am partaking in. Maybe little things like I am playing as the Shandar and they are finding other races that have been assimilated in to their empire way more unruly, and find them unpleasant, I need to decide how to deal with it, perhaps invest in tolerance campaigns that will increase happiness of my unhappy Shandar. Or I could segregate my peoples on the planets lowering the bonuses I get from having other species in my empire, or maybe I will treat other races as second class citizens who are more likely to migrate to other empires planets and less likely to pay taxes if they aren't Shandar.
In games like this, I don't really go for scripted stories like the Shakturi stuff so much, I prefer sandbox, but I do like random little story elements appearing in my games.

Multiplayer would be really nice. I understand that a game with the magnitude of DW might not even be feasible to be a multiplayer game, it would be quite a feat, but there are other ways I can feel there is competition or interactivity with other players and how they play their game and give the game even more replayability.
Perhaps we have the ability to have a friends list and random empires generated in our game will use the research path, ship designs and special names my friend used. Maybe I can save how I did things in my game to a file and share that on the forums as some special Empire and say "here, try defeat these guys".
Perhaps the game can be played cooperatively, with each of us taking manual control of different parts of the empire. Perhaps I will control the expansion, diplomacy and ship building while my friend takes control of the ships, fleets and combat.

I'd like to see more elements to make stuff in the Galaxy have even more variety.
What do I mean by that? Imagine you come across a planet and the indigenous life are like gigantic fricking dinosaurs! I might need to send in armies to deal with them before I can colonise the planet, or perhaps I bombard them in to the dust! Perhaps I come across a system where the star is forever spewing out something that is bombarding the orbiting planets (has a reducing shield aura in system) and I need to use a construction ship to install a planetary shield before I can colonise.

[Lucian]

ORIGINAL: Unforeseen
I'd like to throw out my idea of a perfect 4x space strategy game. One which i doubt will exist within my life span

It's pretty complex and would require a processor beyond what we can even comprehend imo.

So essentially you're proposing a version of Spore, created the way fans actually thought it was going to be before it was released as a digital insult to people's intelligence.

Yes that would indeed be an awesome game although I'd think that the chances that 2 (or more) nearby life-forms would evolve to spacefaring stage - even within a few million years of each other - would be vanishingly small. I guess probabilities in the code could always be tweaked to ensure that it happens though.

ORIGINAL: eyegore

The first big problem with evolution is that the fossil record increasingly does not, honestly viewed, support it, a fact that famous Prof. Steven Jay Gould of Harvard has described as "the trade secret of paleontology.

I thought you were simply ignorant Eyegore but now it seems that you are just blatantly lying. For those who are curious, Gould dwells on gaps in the fossil record in order to argue that evolution works fitfully in bursts (called "punctuated equilibrium").

Creationists then love to mis-quote him to argue that it doesn't work at all. (They love the conspiratorial aura of Gould's description of these gaps as the "trade secret of paleontology.") In reality of course fossilization is an extremely rare event and big gaps are to be expected, in fact its a credit to the work and persistence of our paleontologists that the gaps are as small as they are.

[Gregorovitch55]

ORIGINAL: Haree78

I'd like to see tech trees specific to races, not 1 tech tree with a few uniques. They don't have to be radically different, but there is some glaring limitations of the current system.

This is a great idea but I would be cautious about it because of the effect it might have on the quality of the AI.

To give an example of what I mean, SotS2 does a lot of this and throws randomized denial of certain techs in for good measure. One race has no FTL technology as such but has a special portable jump gate system so that although it takes ages to get to a new system in the first place, once there it can instantly deploy as many fleets as it wants through these gates. This can be very powerful, if played properly.

The SotS2 AI does a reasonable job of using this system to get the race to expand in unsettled space but once it runs up against opposition it is almost trivial (for a human player anyway) to counter since it doesn't reaslise the strategic importance of these border gates and protect them accordingly and it doesn't realise it's initial strike fleets are too easy to pick off en route to the next target unless they travel in packs sufficiently large for at least one to get through and establish a new gate on the target system. Even if it it does succeed it usually fails to have gate defense forces lined up ready to jump through immediately to secure the new system and especially the gate.

To make this work you would have to program very specific tactical moves into individual race AIs, you cannot rely on generic algorithms. This would increase both the cost and difficulty of developing a satisfactory AI opponent and the approach also suffers from a lack of adaptability: if you script specific moves into a race AI then when human players find a flaw in it the AI is unable to respond.

There are a lot of other examples of this sort of thing in the game. SotS2 presents something of a challenge in overcoming the logistical problems necessary to set up a winning position but I have found that once engaged with an enemy it becomes almost trivial to defeat them so for me anyway I felt I was was fighting the game rules and logistics system rather than the enemy itself and ultimately I found this unsatisfying.

I'm not arguing against the idea in principle, the SotS2 variety is very appealing, but given the choice between this sort of variety and a better AI, I would go for the better AI every time.

[feygan]

ORIGINAL: Haree78

I'd like to see tech trees specific to races, not 1 tech tree with a few uniques. They don't have to be radically different, but there is some glaring limitations of the current system.

I don't really think this can work within the confines of a game system either today or in 5-10 years. Space Empires 4 & 5 did something similar to this, you had whole lines of weapon techs and other techs that were specialised to different race types. For example organic, crystalline, temporal etc. The problem with method is that in the confines of a 4x game I can come up with numerous plausible ways for other races to have the same tech. Holding technology from the player because they did not happen to pick the perfect racial stuff at the beginning is a gamey way of trying to make a race different from it's neighbour. It only serves to turn the player into G'kar begging a human for her dna as their species got left out of the telepathy game but not having the right kit down below.

Player made mods did work a way around that mechanic of course and at this time the best way I have seen it implemented is as follows.

1.A race is classed as organic and has instant access to the organic tree. (I don't see this as meaning the race is a group of space carrots, but just that in their history organic technological breakthroughs came early for some reason and they then pursued that line of technology further rather than silicon based as our own.)

2.Other races are required to research a set of technologies first before they gain access to the organic tree, this could be for example level 4 in biology and level 3 in medical. This then allows them to begin an organic theory tech which leads to the standard organic tech tree. This means a non organic race still has access to the same tech but will most likely always be quite far behind if both races only ever gain technological advances through standard research.

3.Once a non organic race has gained access to the organic tech tree, they are then able to start reverse engineering organic tech found on ships, or stealing it through espionage. Before this time that tech would be locked from the race due to how advanced beyond their own comprehension it was.

Now yow can probably still pick lots of holes in this method too and provide sci-fi arguments against it. But so far for me it has been the least gamey way of implementing racial techs. Any system that tells me I cannot have something just because I didn't pick the correct combinations at the start I find daft and either end up cheating my way around it or simply giving up on that game to frustration.

[Haree78]

Well imagine it was as simple as the Colonisation tree ordered differently based on starting planet type?
I said they don't need to be radically different, but with individual trees you can make things make more sense.

Changing the order in other areas, and adding in specific racial tech and different prices to things and getting the AI to handle it isn't beyond the realm of possibilities.

[Spidey]

How about splitting up the techs and having different colonization trees for different surface types? Different races could then start with different levels in each tree, or with different research modifiers, depending on what's more native to them.

[Tormodino]

The best example of very different tech trees in a single game is Gal Civ 2. It's not as shiny as other examples, but the way you played each race completely changed depending on the tech tree.
It was extremely flexible.

For my money, that is a great working model for a flexible tech system.

Colonization is more problematic, but at least having the colonization techs be arranged differently depending on a races preferred environment would be a step in the right direction.

[Gregorovitch55]

That's true but the big thing about GalCiv2 is that in the end everything is crunched down to the same seven numbers, the three weapon types strengths, their corresponding defense type strengths and max fleet size. Fleet against fleet, nothing else matters apart from these numbers so the AI can use relatively straight forward generic algorithms to assess strengths and weaknesses and plan moves, change ships designs and prioritise research, there are no ifs, buts or whats associated with race specifics. I think this simplicity of the GalCiv system is one reason why it's AI is so good, it makes calculating reasonable or even good AI moves tractable (in the same way chess is tractable but Go is not).

Interestingly it does have certain scripted moves it likes to do once its decided to have a go at you and sometimes these are its downfall. For example it like to stack up a load of troop ships ready to invade a little way outside what it figures your scanner range is ready for a surprise attack. However scanners in GalCic2 stack, so you can make a scout ship with 8, 10 scanners on it that can see 20, 30 parsecs and I don't think the AI was programmed to take this into consideration. So you get maybe a 10, 15 turn warning by observing this preparation and can execute a preemptive strike against these troop ships easily with devastating effect.

[Tormodino]

GalCiv uses a simpler model, for sure, but I was more talking about emulating the flexibility of the GalCiv tech tree. It succeeds at creating very diverse races and playstyles, even with a limited model.

As for breaking the DW AI, it is as simple as taking direct control of your empire. That is more than can be said for GalCiv, scripting, complexity and scanner stacking aside.

[rxnnxs]

ORIGINAL: DeadlyShoe

MOO3 was unpolished and unfinished and that's what killed it, didn't have anything to do with its racial selection

It's actually pretty fun today if you slap a bunch of bugfix patches and mods on it.

Could you please please (or others, i.e. please, Unforeseen)tell me what is needed to have a good setting?
There is the vanilla mod and some flavors, you can change so much with a patcher and there is this nice screen resolution that makes it look even better and good for today, but ...
is there now a way to quit a battle? or do we have to watch it until the fight is over?
then there was a bug that stacked the fleets/ships when the troops where landed and flew back to base was in the wrong order. was that somehow adressed?
i try the game every now and then but i forgot the good settings and have patched it to death i think.
so just please tell me what have you done to the game to get it playable?
i really want to like this game but i always end up saying to myself: "you remembered correct, it is crap"
just as this guy at GOG said it:

Mafu13:

I love Master of Orion 1 and 2 - easily in my best all time games top ten. However, MOO3 is a completely different beast, and the biggest disapointment I have ever had in computer gaming. There is nothing that links this game with the other two, it is over complicated and under fun. If you love MOO 1 and 2, then don't get this game, it will leave a sour taste in your mouth.
I brought it when it first came out in 2003, and since then I have kept trying to play it, just one more time, to see if it was in fact better than I thought, perhaps I had missed something? Each time I have turned it off after a few hours of frustration and confusion.
This game does not deserve to be on GOG.

[Tormodino]

I would also love to hear what is going on with Moo3 atm, and where to get the best mods. It's been absolute ages since I last played it.
If anyone knows what best mods are now, please tell

[rxnnxs]

to say something on topic:

i also would like to see that work is put into DW ONE, or say: Universe.
I do not like putting money into this and after some month the patching und bug hunting is over and the next game (DW 2) is promoted.

now i could start talking about how humans behave and think and never settle..

lets try to put it in words (i have made this up years ago but its in german so i write down my "wisdom " down in both languages:
"Man gewöhnt sich an alles, aber man ist nie wunschlos glücklich" (oder wenn nur für kurze Zeit)
"You adapt to anything but you are never wishless happy" (and if, just for a short time).


SO, what i want to say is, we all are made out of this thinking:

1) we want to have something

2) when we have it, we adapt fast to it, generating wishes, because the thing we wanted and now have is not as flawless as we expected. by now (we all are kind of grown up now..) we should know that there is never something perfect. AND THEREFORE WE SHOULDNT BUY ALL SEQUELS BLINDLY!!!

3) we want something new.

Now we all should try to expand the time we are glad about having (and playing) some thing to the max.
Many are eager and find right from the start some things they havo to change. therefore they "mod".
ok, small flaws are taken care of (everybody has "fixed" it in his own direction)

4) the publisher or whoever comes up with the game blabla TWO.

5) Whoaaa! We want it! We buy it! We find out it is buggy and not as good as the first one.

6) the patches come and go, the game evolves, time goes by.

7) the game seems to run nice and smooth

8) either the company needs more money or times have changed or ..well.. they need money...

i could go on and on and the circle will close and repeat over and over. maybe there com etings like new Operating Systems that "demand" a new game.
But one thing is for sure. Or not??

Times are over where games were developed to a stage where they were (almost) bug free.
now i payed big bucks to own all of the sequels from DW up to the universe...


and also i expect that the game is patched in a way that:

even those that "only" have Shadows or less come into the beauty of the resizable explorer at the left and at the left bottom.
now do they have this? i dunno.

i wanted to support the company to bring more patches out.

i wanted to have all the newest and best patched game thats available here.

i wanted to let others do the ranting when something is not going as it should.


but it seems that noone adresses those things that i dislike:

- please support also the old versions of the game where there really are bugs and resolution issues (font).
- please keep universe up to date and make it better
- please make it easier to mod

and there is the problem with the GEM mod (or others) that did an overhaul to the planet graphics but the shadow overlay is broken (the eclipse is sized faulty).
SO, i bought universe and had trouble installing and playing it. but i guess in some month it will be better than now.

but i hate it when just after the game came out (happens now with most games) the talking about the NEW NEXT GAME has already started.

i HATE IT!

i want to lean back and play this game.
i can NOT play relaxed a game (i need months to do it) when i know, very soon is every development finished and ther is no support and work done to this game because the company needs money and therefore the sequel comes out.
because the sequel is mostly not getting better, but only has better graphics, less deepness and less thought put into..

i want DW to be polished that is shines!

I want:
that the sliding message windows from the right stay longer when i have the time rate at 0,25 and go away faster when at a higher speed.

right now those windows(messages disappear after a given time and even on pause the disappear. HEY, that can be easily fixed, i do not want to wait for DW2 where it then magically will be fixed (or lets say NOT).
There will be an overhaul that
a) does everything like before but with more comic or shinier style and still the fading is unfixed or
B)it is done totally different and many people hate it where at the other hand fanboys will love it no matter what just because they are natural born slimers. i.e. SOTS2

anyway, i want movable and resizable windows!
uhh, nobody even talks about that...

i want resizable columns.

i want a filter that can be configured by myself.

there are so many things that can be done with DW without a new engine without new 3D models... that take time and take away the cinema that goes on in our head.

i want a game closer to dwarf fortress or ascii privateer and far away from X reunion or halo 10.
i really would play a game that has ascii code as graphics but with planet landings and fights and ships that can be designed.

am i alone with that?!

as a side note to bugs that are not able to fly in space:
on earth, a dog, i think Laika, was the first known lifeform in space or was it a monkey?
and in the future, i bet some crazy scientists come up with insects that steer spaceships. thats not science fiction but a reality.

now there might as well be in future a cockroach or moth that flies into the sun or to another star, steering a probe... maybe some genetic fixing or whatever, a crashlanding on a planet somewhere in outer space. voila.
given a bit time and the life will find a way..

and what is said about this chaos theory blabla.. works for an explosion engine, but lifeforms behave in the opposite direction. that the animals stopped in the evolution at a point is because they were happy as they were.. we seek and so evolve further and further. that does not mean we are smarter
anyway, it is always better to use the own imagination and mind as citing or thinking the same as some unproven brainpuke.

not so long ago scientist stated that moving faster than a horse can ride will leave the soul behind.
and if your only tool is a hammer the whole worlds looks to you like a nail...

so, i hope DW is patched and polished at least into the direction that we as the community CAN MOD THE CRAP OUT OF IT!!!!

[Tormodino]

Nothing kills a thread like a passionate rant

There are a ton of stuff to add, tweak and work with in the current model. It seems people are split on whether the game as it is should be improved, or if a new version should be made to have a fresh start with more powerful tools available.

I am following quite a few threads on the forum pointing out various issues, so here is hoping we can get some general developer feedback on what the road ahead looks like, as well as what we can hope to see added to the game in the short term.

[Lucian]

ORIGINAL: Tormodino

I would also love to hear what is going on with Moo3 atm, and where to get the best mods. It's been absolute ages since I last played it.
If anyone knows what best mods are now, please tell

There was no game called Moo3. It was never made. At least that's what I've succeeded in telling myself. Some tragedies are best forgotten.

[BlueTemplar]

A clear maybe

[arvcran2]

LOL 7 years later ... 3D will make modding new races/empires a larger task. Would be awesome to see the major studios add factions and story for Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Star Wars, The Expanse, or any others I can't think of at the moment.