Matrix Games Forums

Releases:
https://gitlab.com/coyote-wolf/DW2-XL/-/releases

Latest Changes:
https://gitlab.com/coyote-wolf/DW2-XL#latest-changes

Overview:
https://gitlab.com/coyote-wolf/DW2-XL/- ... verview.md

Steam Instructions

1. Steam: go to the steam workshop for DW2 and subscribe to XL
2. Launch DW2
3. Within the game, In the Modifications menu, enable XL
4. Exit & relaunch DW2
5. Play a new game (this will not retroactively affect your previous games)

GoG Instuctions

1. Go to https://gitlab.com/coyote-wolf/DW2-XL/-/releases
2. download the latest Package
3. extract the XL folder from that zip and copy it into your mods folder (most GUIs will let you just drag and drop that folder from the zip into the mods folder directly)
4. e.g. ...\Steam\steamapps\common\Distant Worlds 2\mods\XL
5. BE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN YOU DO NOT END UP WITH XL\XL\ (double embedded, that won't work)
6. Launch DW2
7. Within the game, In the Modifications menu, enable XL
8. Exit & relaunch DW2
9. Play a new game

Launch the game and do a quick check:

• start a game with revealed tech tree and make sure it looks changed from vanilla.
• if all is correct, return to the main menu and start a game with the settings you really want.

There are tons of changes to the tech tree - so hopefully it should be immediately obvious (e.g. most weapons are pushed back to the 3rd column, fighters/bombers were reorganized, the entire construction section was revamped, and much, much more...

You can see quite a bit about the choices I've made in my project's readme, here:
https://gitlab.com/coyote-wolf/DW2-XL#readme

If you want to see how the sausage is made, this is an MIT copy-left open source project:
https://gitlab.com/coyote-wolf/DW2-XL

Have fun

Looks like a nice compilation of modded things - thanks for sharing it.

However, I think you could/should also offer some classifications regarding the different categories/themes in your mod - not only because some would maybe not need/want all of your moddings in their game, but also because it would be much easier to discuss individual topics and/or to keep track of possible issues or fixes for each part.

Sounds great!

The mod description seems really great but the game does not launch for me after replacing with your files. I did a clean install and tried again and still couldn't launch the game. I'm sure I am just doing something wrong but not sure what it could be

EDIT: Third reinstall and now i can start the game. not sure what happened but i just assume user error lol

Glad you got it working.

I need a much better installer - but that's such a PITA. I might draw a picture of steps for how-to at some point - if that seems useful (or do a wiki on Steam with pics).

I just pushed a major update last night for this mod. The README in my repo has been updated - if you follow the link you can read a bit about it, albeit I change far more than I remember to document.

Mostly I updated / fixed the fighter/bomber-craft and armor trees, and rebalanced direct fire weapons to be 12/25/50 size, making the choice between direct fire and tracking weapons a bit more competitive and not so obvious "DF win!"

Hopefully one can create competitive ships going all one or all the other, or some hybrid, without there being an absolute "only this choice wins".

I'm not 100% that tracking weapons should take up more space than direct fire - but it's core to vanilla, and it has some sensibility to it (LR weapons keep you out of the fray, and they can retarget, so there's a certain inherent bonus to them that DF don't get... still, only playing through more games will show whether that isn't already proved in the weapon stats themselves and makes the size differences gratuitous?)

For now I won't be breaking up this mod - nor using the mod-loader. That thing requires that I rewrite all of this in another language effectively - one that would create glacial startup times (it effectively applies all of my changes on the fly, at startup, every time -- and my changes affect a !@#$!@ metric ton of stuff, so it's unrealistic to both rewrite all I've done, or to expect it to be practical in terms of loading times).

If anything - I've kept the IDs of vanilla and so on so that this could likely be compatible as a base game replacement that you then also load other mods on top of -- mods that do things like alter or extend the races, or add shipsets, or even add weapons or systems to the tech tree (albeit those may be wonky in terms of their costs since they may reflect vanilla tech level costs and placement, so that last one is less likely to work w/o additional effort by one of us to make it compatible).

Still - being compatible with UI enhancements, new shipsets, governments, races, etc. still leaves a lot of fruitful dynamic modding potential for this mod to be extended and compatible with other mods.

I pushed up a major update last night.

I still need to refine the standard torpedos tree -- it has a weird gap w/o any fighter sized updates in the mid-game now.

And I want to extend / make additional weapons techs:

• Another level for Zennox star beams
• Another level for probably all of the torpedos (ultra end game stuff)
• Another series of standard rail guns for everyone who isn't human in that tree (it ends abruptly much early than all other weapons lines)

there's always more... but that's on my short list.

Maybe really redo the reactors line as well. I've made it better, but it still has a diamond pattern (which I hate), but I've not been inspired for a better way (I might want to mod in the old different fuel types -- have a tyderos driven reactor or somesuch...)

In this update there is a substantial update to hyperdrives - where the lineages all diverge significantly over time - and they all have distinct lineages that are viable to end game (no re-researching to get on the one and only end-game viable path).

Ultimately, however, all of this is doomed if Slitherine doesn't add OR logic to the tech tree. As it is I've had to go to great lengths to make alternative approaches which... all suck in various ways but are "doable". However, the final techs that let you incrementally improve a system will always be a problem w/o a real way to enable them off of MULTIPLE end-game techs -- which is simply IMPOSSIBLE in their current approach (which was the approach in DW:U - and so made for some very ugly tech trees trying to work around that). We'll see...

Just started with your mod and one question on something I noted on the weapons... why are usually all medium mounts like four times better at intercepting enemy missiles and fighters than the small mounts. The medium mount for many weapons have half the fire rate and fires two shots over the small mounts?

A medium concussion missile mount have almost the same intercept rate as that of the defensive missile mount, sure it is only half the size and intercept at slightly less range but still seem a bit too powerful in my opinion. The point defence missile seem quite poor in comparison with all the rest of the PD weapons too.

All railguns have a slower rate of fire for intercept purposes... but that might be intentional. In any way there probably is a bug in the Railgun for fighters still having some damage fall off.

I also wonder if having four shots in a volley for PD is good as all the shots hit one target anyway, but that is probably just a minor thing.

I also think you need to take a look at the jump drive and differences of the Quick, Fast and long haul drives. The long haul drives are actually more energy required per distance than fast drives... the only benefit is really longer jumps. In general you want these drives to also be more energy efficient per distance travelled as you never want reduced speed if you don't get better fuel economy and better range from these drives. The energy is directly related to speed... so more efficient drives need better more efficient energy per distance travelled. A High speed engine have an energy draw of 12.8 per 100 distance travelled while the long haul drives consumes 15.62 per 100 distance travelled... when you then put this on a ship that have say another 50 static energy used the difference become even more pronounced with 21.9 versus 28.6 per 100 distance travelled. This makes the long haul drive categorically worse drive to use despite the longer jump ranges.
One of the main benefits of the energy efficient drive in vanilla is that you need fewer powerplants, very useful for smaller ships and most civilian ships.

That is all feedback I found so far, keep up the good work... ...I really like the overall feel of this mod.

Jorgen_CAB wrote: Wed Jun 22, 2022 11:29 pm Just started with your mod and one question on something I noted on the weapons... why are usually all medium mounts like four times better at intercepting enemy missiles and fighters than the small mounts. The medium mount for many weapons have half the fire rate and fires two shots over the small mounts?

Other than removing the damage fall-off for rail guns (and normalizing all weapon hull sizes) - I did no other changes to their stats.
I haven't done a detailed analysis of all the ins & outs - just didn't like that a physical slug launched in a vacuum should drop in energy with nothing to offer resistance, so I changed that.

Jorgen_CAB wrote: Wed Jun 22, 2022 11:29 pm A medium concussion missile mount have almost the same intercept rate as that of the defensive missile mount, sure it is only half the size and intercept at slightly less range but still seem a bit too powerful in my opinion. The point defence missile seem quite poor in comparison with all the rest of the PD weapons too.

Same. I imagine there is a lot of room for improvements - and hopefully someone will make a mod that does just that. And hopefully, that mod is either compatible, or can be merged to resolve differences, should it prove a good improvement on the weapons in DW2.

Jorgen_CAB wrote: Wed Jun 22, 2022 11:29 pm All railguns have a slower rate of fire for intercept purposes... but that might be intentional. In any way there probably is a bug in the Railgun for fighters still having some damage fall off.

Nice catch on the ftr rail guns. I'll fix that.

Jorgen_CAB wrote: Wed Jun 22, 2022 11:29 pm I also wonder if having four shots in a volley for PD is good as all the shots hit one target anyway, but that is probably just a minor thing.

I assume that this is good against armored & shielded targets. But again, this is how vanilla is setup - nothing special in my mod.

Jorgen_CAB wrote: Wed Jun 22, 2022 11:29 pm I also think you need to take a look at the jump drive and differences of the Quick, Fast and long haul drives. The long haul drives are actually more energy required per distance than fast drives... the only benefit is really longer jumps. In general you want these drives to also be more energy efficient per distance travelled as you never want reduced speed if you don't get better fuel economy and better range from these drives. The energy is directly related to speed... so more efficient drives need better more efficient energy per distance travelled. A High speed engine have an energy draw of 12.8 per 100 distance travelled while the long haul drives consumes 15.62 per 100 distance travelled... when you then put this on a ship that have say another 50 static energy used the difference become even more pronounced with 21.9 versus 28.6 per 100 distance travelled. This makes the long haul drive categorically worse drive to use despite the longer jump ranges.
One of the main benefits of the energy efficient drive in vanilla is that you need fewer powerplants, very useful for smaller ships and most civilian ships.

Yes - the new "quick jump" and "long haul" variants aren't well balanced - and you make great points about the energy use / distance travelled. Clearly quick drives need to consume a ton more energy if they're going to be that fast, and long-haul need to be more efficient.

I was trying to come up with real choices and more unique / interesting options to play around with. Having a "blink" type drive for late game seemed really fun to me - rather than "all drives just converge on torrent drives" which seems lame / uninteresting to me.

Open to more ideas or variants if anyone has something they'd love to see (and it suites my sensibilities).

Jorgen_CAB wrote: Wed Jun 22, 2022 11:29 pm That is all feedback I found so far, keep up the good work... ...I really like the overall feel of this mod.

Thanks for the feedback!!!

FWIW - only the base ftr rail guns had that bug - all other levels were correct.

I updated the mod with the engines all normalized to have appropriate energy envelopes. I'm not sure the quick-jump ones are realistically useable anymore - but maybe... need to play through - but they're very expensive due to their very high speeds - in terms of energy / sec.

I did not realise that the vanilla had those values on some of the guns, had not really studied it as well as I looked at the values in the mod as I just assumed you changed some of it. I do think it might be worth looking at it at some point though.

It did surprise me that medium weapons are so much more effective at interception than smaller weapons. Many larger weapons can't intercept at all. Medium missile mounts in general seem like pretty effective for dual purpose, almost to the point that the defender line seem a bit wasted unless you have a small mount.

mordachai wrote: Thu Jun 23, 2022 2:10 am FWIW - only the base ftr rail guns had that bug - all other levels were correct.

I updated the mod with the engines all normalized to have appropriate energy envelopes. I'm not sure the quick-jump ones are realistically useable anymore - but maybe... need to play through - but they're very expensive due to their very high speeds - in terms of energy / sec.

The "Long Haul" engines are still not really useful for its intended purpose and still are much less energy efficient. Even on its own it is more or less the same energy efficiency as the "Quick Jump" engine.

Long Haul energy efficiency 13.02 (50 / 3.84)
Quick Jump energy efficiency 13.6 (82 / 6)

If you then put it on a ship with a static draw of say 30

Long Haul energy efficiency 20.83 (80 / 3.84)
Quick Jump energy efficiency 18.66 (112 / 6)

The more energy in total that a ship require the more efficient the speed of the ship is for the amount of fuel you use. The fuel is burned per second of travel with no regard to the anything but the total energy draw of the ship. In order for the Long Haul engine to be worth it the differences in the engines need to be much more pronounced. In the Vanilla the energy draw if the efficient engine is I think 38 and the high speed ones around 75 or so. The longer jump range will never be able to really make up for the longer jumps given the speed difference are so high. The Long Hauls drive probably should have a much shorter recharge time of the drive to make time between two jumps less, but still a worse Initiation time than the other drive as this is more important in combat. The Quick Jump drive should be reverse and good values overall in this regard.

If this makes any sense to you?

The quick jump line has 4x the static energy draw of the long haul - I think you missed that in your analysis.

So even when not moving, the quck-jumps are going to suck down 8 static, while the long-hauls will draw only 2. I am assuming that this translates into fuel used in a lot, but not al cases. it definitely will be drawn while travelling (between stars), so it should be:

90/600 = .15
vs.
52/384 = .1354

And with long-haul, you go point-point, not zig-zag all over the place, never having to drop out of hyperdrive and spend that cool-down + spin-up time but once; vs. quick-drive you have to do multiple shorter jumps, each with that penalty.

Overall the quick-jumps are great for short range action (and I may reduce their max range a bit more to amplify this aspect), but in the long runs they suffer from accumulated cycling stops.

I made sure that the long hauls now are overall the most efficient, and their range is easily the best, so they suffer their initial lag times at most only once by mid-game.

I could further amplify the static cost of the quick-jumps, or even reduce their initial efficiency. But after the first layer of them - they get crazy-energy-expensive to run due to the ramped up speed at which they run. 8 static + 146/s at level 2, and 8 + 228/s operating energy needs by their 3rd tier, 8 + 270/s at final stage.

This still represents an increasing efficiency for them, but it pales against the increasing speed.

Long-hauls by comparison never grow in their energy needs. So as your reactor tech grows, they just get more efficient - longer jumps and faster travel and lower overhead, presumably reducing your overall reactor count required and guaranteeing that 1-jump-anywhere mode of operation.

I mostly envisioned the long-haul's as a great choice for one's civilian ships. OTOH, the way the game works makes it super unlikely you'll have those as a second set of hyper drives! But... I don't see "energy efficiency" ever really being worthwhile enough to trade responsiveness or raw speed for in your military ships...

Thoughts?

----

To see if I understand your point about the static draw of other components:

Your ship has a base 28 static draw for all the components in common.
It has then the following efficiencies:

(28 + 8 + 82)/600 = .19666...
vs.
(28 + 2 + 50)/384 = .2083...

Yeah, I can see your point to some degree. It's close, but in sheer travel-cost, the long-haul is a bit worse.

How about the next tier?

(28 + 8 + 146)/1200 = .151666...
v.
(28 + 2 + 50)/460 = 0.1739

Yep, I can see your point.

There are other factors to consider, for sure - such as the point-point nature vs. multiple stops, but looking at this you're right that the Kaldos are going to have a greater range for a given fuel level than the long-haul, and that doesn't seem right

Hmmm...

Seems like the easiest solution would be to bump up the speed of long hauls a bit. e.g. that 2nd tier long-haul could be speed 500, which drives its efficiency to .16 given the above scenario, which is still below that of the Kaldos, but with the other arguments still in play.

If the Kaldos doubled its static usage, that might get interesting:
126/600 = .21
190/1200 = .158333...

Again, that's part of the picture. You're now spending 16/s at all times, and that's going to push up your reactor requirements on a ship with weapons (which will have far more than 28/s draw in combat), making that Kaldos drive expensive and force space used on additional reactors that could otherwise host more armaments...

----
Pushed up 1.1.3
The Calista-Dal are now fixed energy 38/s, a little faster in the 2nd tier, and more accurate than even before
The Gerax have a smooth improvement (linear) to their accuracy from start to finish of that line
The Kaldos now have a 16/s static draw at all levels (they used to ramp up here), and a lower 1.2M range forcing them to bounce out of hyper space more often. They also remain the least accurate jump drive making them super-responsive but will scatter your fleets a bit costing you a tactical disadvantage upon initial arrival in a system.

Hummm... the file I downloaded had long haul at 50 energy and the quick drive at 82... so not sure.

But you are right about zig zagging, but this depend on the star density (and the density of nebulas) to some degree as well if this is an issue or not and short jumps are still going to be used even for civilians as well. Hard to say how important long jump range will impact their efficiency. But speed is truly more important than jump range most of the time for cargo carrying efficiency.
I almost exclusively play in large spiral galaxies with 2000 stars and max density of nebulas. Being able to use 600 range jumps will be very rare in those galaxies.

I see that the energy efficiency will rise to some degree with technology, but I still think that each step need to be justified in using though. The quick jump drive also reduce the time they need to spend waiting for the next jump until it is nearly instantaneous anyway. Even at max technology the fact that the quick drive is about 4.5 times faster (in the files I have) and the Long haul being about 5.4 times more efficient might not matter much when you also add the base static draw of the ship you put it on as it will reduce by then.

The accuracy of the long haul probably can be more important to some degree as the ships need to spend less time using thrusters, which can be equally as important I grant you that.

When you also look at the type of reactors you put on them the very low energy draw will probably not change the equation that much, the quick jump ship probably need one extra reactor instead of a fuel cell.

I also think that reactors need to be looked at as well the fusion line is clearly much better than the quantum reactor. The Quantum reactor is only good for stations pretty much and occasionally on some ships with lots of weapons and that is big, like a battleship or something. Otherwise adding an extra reactor or two for one or two less fuel cell is way better even if they are slightly bigger in size in total. Fuel economy for ships is that important, especially civilian ships, but even for military ships it will mostly be worth it.

I probably also would put a connection from the Fission reactor the balanced Fusion reactor tech... this one is not worth using otherwise, in my opinion.

yeah - there's a lot of balance issues in the game.

If I could do "or" logic in the research files - I'd put a line from fission to balanced fusion. Sadly, the engine just doesn't support that. So I'd have to require that line in addition to the the others, which is inane.

It's generally only worth it situationally to go with those dead-end middle techs because they don't require your ships to be retrofitted - but directly upgrade them. Sometimes I've set it up that they're also research-cost discounted - to make them purely a situationally advantageous choice, if long-term never the right one.

---

What game board you play on makes a massive difference. I tend to play on absolute minimum nebulas, and medium sparse maps (I'd play on the large ones but the games is already too sluggish and I stop playing when they become too unresponsive for me).

However, basically the Quantum reactors are useless with the game as it currently stands. I never have enough fuel globally and they !@$#!@# kill my econ if try to use them. So I end up always going fusion currently. That whole tech-tree (reactors) needs some rethink to make them make any sense IMO. Further - they probably need all ships to have more general slots so that they can be meaningfully manipulated. Right now - there simply aren't enough slots to tweak them to require 3-4 reactors, and make them make a difference (or I'd have to have many kinds of reactors, which take up one slot, but variable space - say a sm,med,lg reactor at every tech & tier for all reactors -- one slot, but variable size & output.

Maybe if the game gets better -- the engine / civilian management of fuel - the Quantum line could be viable. But when you add "hard/very hard" difficulty - which kills your mining rate - again, kills it as a viable option.

I have been using this mod and I think it is really excellent: a serious improvement on the original game. Any chance of giving us back the facility in DWU to create your own empire flag?

Airbourne wrote: Wed Jun 29, 2022 10:14 am I have been using this mod and I think it is really excellent: a serious improvement on the original game. Any chance of giving us back the facility in DWU to create your own empire flag?

Glad you're enjoying it.

Unfortunately, something like that is an engine requirement. We'll have to wait for the devs to implement such a thing.

I might be able to add more stock flags? Not sure... I would like to because right now it has like 2 for each main race - so some games end up with 5 empires sharing the same flag - which sucks. Similarly - two ore more can end up with same flag and same colors - which is ludicrous. Prolly needs dev intervention on that. But simply adding more flags might be doable within this mod. I'll check into it.

Updated with a tagged release for 1.1.5

https://github.com/lucky-wolf/DW2-XL/re ... tag/v1.1.5

Have you had a chance to think about more flags? The current system is less than ideal, to put it politely. Ideally there should be lots more flags but they don't all have to be very fancy it seems to me; number is more important so that the chance of duplicates is cut down.

Airbourne wrote: Tue Jul 05, 2022 2:00 pm Have you had a chance to think about more flags? The current system is less than ideal, to put it politely. Ideally there should be lots more flags but they don't all have to be very fancy it seems to me; number is more important so that the chance of duplicates is cut down.

Just doing a quick glance at the file tree -- and the flags seem to be embedded in something else? the db/ folder maybe?

Game refers to FlagFilename for races - which has a path UserInterface/Flags/<race> -- but there's no corresponding "UserInterface" folder to be found in the installation at all... :shrug:?

So, presumably, it's embedded in some binary file that's turned into /db/...? which I Have no idea how that's accomplished or how one might extend that?

---

to get by - I manually add AI players by hand. I make sure there's 2 of each race playing (including myself and my choice) so 13 AIs total. This means there are enough flags for everyone to have their own, and this works. It's tedious... but what are you gonna do?

mordachai wrote: Wed Jul 06, 2022 10:48 pm Just doing a quick glance at the file tree -- and the flags seem to be embedded in something else? the db/ folder maybe?

Yes, they are in the db-/bundle-files, just like the research icons, too. ... and since >marksmango< has already atered these (see here: https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/view ... 9&t=382538) you maybe can ask him how he did it.

mordachai wrote: Wed Jul 06, 2022 10:48 pm So, presumably, it's embedded in some binary file that's turned into /db/...? which I Have no idea how that's accomplished or how one might extend that?

Well, you could at least use the comand-line extraction-tool for the bundle-files - see here: https://github.com/DW2MC/DistantWorlds2 ... tag/v1.1.1 ... and here is the code: https://github.com/DW2MC/DistantWorlds2 ... Program.cs

... also a little examples- and instructions-pic: ... and the web-source for this: https://www.reddit.com/r/DistantWorlds/ ... _released/