Matrix Games Forums

I have some suggestions for DW2 based on jotting things down while playing DW1 recently.

1. when colonising an indy, I suggest a negotiation with weighted cost and not a weighted RND. The negotiation would constitute a treaty between player empire and the indy and the payment required to swing colonisation assent depends on the affinity. If you can afford assent then you can definitely colonise, if you cant afford it you definitely can't (but can invade).

The current mechanic encourages save reload to get your colony with all but the most hostile indys but I think the game mechanics would play better if they cannot be hacked by save reloading. Conditions for assent could include cash or tech targets instead of cash e.g. "we will let you colonise if you have XYZ tech to share with us", kind of thing. Also conditions for assent could be micro missions, "go repair and rescue our long lost colony ship and we will join your empire for free and you can have the colony ship".

2. would really like to be able to inspect and edit an order queue for a fleet or a ship, by removing specific orders or moving them up or down the queue.

3. In addition I hope the new engine will allow the queued orders to have the same level of specificity available as the current order. Its a problem in DW1 that I continually encounter, that I want to queue an order for a ship to refuel at a specific location, usually a fuel refinery built for fuel supply. Often a ship given a generic refuel order will otherwise choose to try to refuel from a partial supply in the cargo bay of a newly refueled mine base instead which does noone any good as the ship does not get filled and the mine base sooner needs a new delivery.

Point is, at a certain level of zoom I can select a refinery to refuel at when giving the order when mousing over a system with a refinery but I can never add that order to a queue unless I zoom right in, the order simply is not offered as an option for the queued orders when it is offered as an order with immediate effect. All I ask is that the specificity available for immediate orders be available in queued orders as well.

[Another example is move to mine base orders, which are sometimes available for immediate orders when mousing over a system but not present in queued orders for the same level of zoom and mouse location.]

4. might help if you could designate buildings as refuelling points in the [s]design[/s] deployment phase.

5. last but not least I would like to ask you to reconsider the save conventions. Save game currently overwrites the last save. This is a real nuisance and I frequently misclick and accidentally overwrite and erase the save I wanted to load. It is so awkward that I decided to make a dummy save every time I save (or load) the game to prevent that kind of accident. I like the idea of a single button save but I dont think it should overwrite the last save and instead I would like to suggest quicksave operates like autosave with a rotating pool of 5 slots marked quicksave and always overwriting the oldest quicksave and never overwriting a named manual save.

Hope that makes sense and is helpful. Best of luck with developing DW2, I will be trying it out for sure, though I missed the call for beta unfortunately, I will definitely try it on release and maybe will have more relevant suggestions then.

6. would like to be able to deactivate the "smart" right click cursor because in DW1 I am sorry to say after all the work it must have taken to add it to the game, it gets in the way most of the time and it deserves work on the logic to get it right for gameplay.

e.g. most of the early game orders are given for exploration, monster combat, building and refuelling. Refuelling is a really important aspect of gameplay and is underserved.

I put a couple of torps on explorers to deal with monsters and the game treats them like escorts and offers a patrol cursor when I mouse over something which is obviously a fuel depot, which the game can recognise as such as it causes the fuel sign to appear beside the system when zoomed out. But this is not treated consistently in ship orders, if the game knows it is a fuel depot then it should smart-offer refuel not patrol for an explorer or constructor and for any ship which is low enough on fuel to have decided it needs to refuel, but it does not and instead offers patrol for everything with a weapon. In the last 5 games I have found this got in the way a hundred times for every time it was appropriate. Obviously you can use ctrl to override it but the point is, it is not helpful when with a little more logic it could be.

Plus the game seems to recognise a gas mining station for Hydrogen as a fuel depot but not Caslon, which is again inconsistent and incomplete logic. Caslon only refineries are not given the fuel icon when the early game is exclusively Caslon and only a few found ships use hydrogen. Also when zoomed out from a system and trying to order refuel over a refuel depot even when recognised as such by the game, it is often blocked by the presence of civilian ships over the target, when these should be ignored at zoom and the refuel function in the system should be prioritised for the right click context menu, allowing me to order a particular refuel depot rather than drain a random station or new planet of its fuel supply which it needs for development.

In addition when using an explorer for monster combat, which is a logical result of the game mechanics, I find the standing orders and AI are not smart enough to deal with the situation and they need constant supervision (in fact the move logic of Kaltors is set up to catch ship AI out). In such battles precise preemptive movement orders are essential and frequently hampered by the "move to" right click cursor popping up when moving near asteroid belts or planets and moons.

Plus the move cursor often pops up when you dont want it then when you do want it, amazingly it doesnt, as it appears around the periphery of an asteroid but not when the cursor is directly over the asteroid and I frequently find right clicks completely ignored and I have to pause the game and use ctrl RMB to get a positive response.

So I think the right click interface could be good but needs more attention than it was given in DW1, where it is quite difficult to use. FYI

Totally agree with your statement, nothing to add.

Actually I would discard giving tech to independent because that would become the default choice. Why? When you colonize an indy they become part of your empire and have access to all of your tech any way. Why pay when you can just give them a tech knowing that the planet will have access to all techs anyway. I can agree with paying because it can be considered to be a bribe to the leaders of the planet. The current indy leaders get rich and you get a planet.