A Disappointing Sequel

[Omnius]

I waited for many years after playing DW sans the U DLC for DW2 to come out with the Shakturi DLC and all I can say is it's been a big disappointment. A tedious boring game that lacks challenge.

I finally met the Shakturi and found them to be total wimps. There were 4 gravitic rifts stupidly placed in my empire near many of my well established colonies and I had 4 big fleets sitting on them playing whack-a-mole since rift striders kept coming out. When the Rift Refugees came out of those 4 rifts they had a combined strength of almost 400K, my fleets were 200K each. Incredibly stupid the rifts were in my empire and were foreshadowed with a constant flow of rift striders that I was racking up experience points on. They should have only appeared when the rift refugees were ready to pop out.

I was expecting something like the formidable ancient enemy from the paradox garbage stellaris and instead got a wimpy band of refugees whom I wiped out in less than 9 months. Stupid they were all part of one big fleet as I knew the parts of the fleet would go to the rift where the fleet flagship was so wiped out the rift refugees the Die Hard way, one by one. I bushwhacked the refugees back to their galaxy before they could set up a single colony as I made sure to hunt down the 4 world ships quickly. They should have been made 4 separate fleets to make it more likely they'd establish a colony.

I did play my first long game with the Shakturi on normal difficulty to relearn the game system and had the Shakturi arrive late so I could focus on research. I had only 4 other empires as I wanted them to grow and become a challenge but the ignorant algorithm placed all 5 of the empires near each other instead of spreading them out because the algorithm is only designed for the default of 12. I wanted fewer empires which could grow instead of a dozen rinky dink empires that wouldn't grow enough to be a challenge. I ended up with 2/3 of the galaxy while the 4 wimpy AI empires only filled a third. When I pointed out this lame spread of empires early on to Maxim at Matrix all I got was a lame excuse about not wanting to fix it.

This game is basically a boring game of whack-a-mole against space bugs that aren't really much of a challenge. I had them set to very low and by the time the refugees appeared I had actually destroyed all space bugs in the galaxy. I found the game tedious since the devs have decided to not make this game friendly for those of us who enjoy manual control. No noticeable improvement there since the original and that's sad.

The Artificial Ignorance empires were a sad joke and no competition either. Too many worthless invasion fleets and too few actual combat fleets that are poorly modeled with pathetic templates. They only managed to kill a few space bugs and only the little wimpy ones and none of the swarms.

I guess if I crank up the difficulty to the max and bring in the refugees much earlier it would be a bit more of a challenge but overall this game is tedious and boring! As long as the rifts appear long before the refugees I'll know what to do to cut them off at the pass. I'll perhaps give it another try in a year or so but I'm off to play a new game that's going to be more fun and mentally stimulating.

[Lunalis]

Stupid they were all part of one big fleet as I knew the parts of the fleet would go to the rift where the fleet flagship was so wiped out the rift refugees the Die Hard way, one by one.

last game i played i always found it weird that when you click on one ship of an enemy fleet you automatically get markers for all ships of that fleet... even though you have no line of sight of ships far away and such.

or for the hive swarm fleet too... you click one ship of the hive fleet and see all ships of the swarm all over the map.

but i guess the whole "information system" would need a rewrite... like it saves the last known ships of a fleet, but doesnt show you any removed or new added ships untill they are in scan range or so.

who knows... maybe with the pirate dlc...
maybe you can disguise yourself as neutral trader and smuggle stuff around (then again not like there are illegal goods or bad drugs or such that you could smuggle to influence plantes) and then have some system of disguises or such...
but i dont think such disguises probably wouldnt work well with how dw2 works.
(probably got x4 envoy ship or starsector transponders too much in mind, or stellaris spy networks showing you empire informations)

well but it was werid that i magically know fleet ship positions in areas i have no sight of.

[Erik Rutins]

Hello Omnius,

I'm sorry you're unhappy with DW2.

I did play my first long game with the Shakturi on normal difficulty to relearn the game system and had the Shakturi arrive late so I could focus on research. I had only 4 other empires as I wanted them to grow and become a challenge but the ignorant algorithm placed all 5 of the empires near each other instead of spreading them out because the algorithm is only designed for the default of 12. I wanted fewer empires which could grow instead of a dozen rinky dink empires that wouldn't grow enough to be a challenge. I ended up with 2/3 of the galaxy while the 4 wimpy AI empires only filled a third. When I pointed out this lame spread of empires early on to Maxim at Matrix all I got was a lame excuse about not wanting to fix it.

I would emphasize that the difficulty settings and Shakturi arrival time are there specifically to let you adjust the challenge to your skill level.

Can you point me to Max's reply to you please?

This game is basically a boring game of whack-a-mole against space bugs that aren't really much of a challenge. I had them set to very low and by the time the refugees appeared I had actually destroyed all space bugs in the galaxy. I found the game tedious since the devs have decided to not make this game friendly for those of us who enjoy manual control. No noticeable improvement there since the original and that's sad.

There have been many improvements to manual control since release and the challenge level comes back very much to your chosen settings.

Regards,

- Erik

[Erik Rutins]

well but it was werid that i magically know fleet ship positions in areas i have no sight of.

That is not intended and we'd appreciate a save file showing it reproducing if you have one.

Regards,

- Erik

[Scott2933]

I waited for many years after playing DW sans the U DLC for DW2 to come out with the Shakturi DLC and all I can say is it's been a big disappointment. A tedious boring game that lacks challenge.

I finally met the Shakturi and found them to be total wimps. There were 4 gravitic rifts stupidly placed in my empire near many of my well established colonies and I had 4 big fleets sitting on them playing whack-a-mole since rift striders kept coming out. When the Rift Refugees came out of those 4 rifts they had a combined strength of almost 400K, my fleets were 200K each. Incredibly stupid the rifts were in my empire and were foreshadowed with a constant flow of rift striders that I was racking up experience points on. They should have only appeared when the rift refugees were ready to pop out.

I was expecting something like the formidable ancient enemy from the paradox garbage stellaris and instead got a wimpy band of refugees whom I wiped out in less than 9 months. Stupid they were all part of one big fleet as I knew the parts of the fleet would go to the rift where the fleet flagship was so wiped out the rift refugees the Die Hard way, one by one. I bushwhacked the refugees back to their galaxy before they could set up a single colony as I made sure to hunt down the 4 world ships quickly. They should have been made 4 separate fleets to make it more likely they'd establish a colony.

I did play my first long game with the Shakturi on normal difficulty to relearn the game system and had the Shakturi arrive late so I could focus on research. I had only 4 other empires as I wanted them to grow and become a challenge but the ignorant algorithm placed all 5 of the empires near each other instead of spreading them out because the algorithm is only designed for the default of 12. I wanted fewer empires which could grow instead of a dozen rinky dink empires that wouldn't grow enough to be a challenge. I ended up with 2/3 of the galaxy while the 4 wimpy AI empires only filled a third. When I pointed out this lame spread of empires early on to Maxim at Matrix all I got was a lame excuse about not wanting to fix it.

This game is basically a boring game of whack-a-mole against space bugs that aren't really much of a challenge. I had them set to very low and by the time the refugees appeared I had actually destroyed all space bugs in the galaxy. I found the game tedious since the devs have decided to not make this game friendly for those of us who enjoy manual control. No noticeable improvement there since the original and that's sad.

The Artificial Ignorance empires were a sad joke and no competition either. Too many worthless invasion fleets and too few actual combat fleets that are poorly modeled with pathetic templates. They only managed to kill a few space bugs and only the little wimpy ones and none of the swarms.

I guess if I crank up the difficulty to the max and bring in the refugees much earlier it would be a bit more of a challenge but overall this game is tedious and boring! As long as the rifts appear long before the refugees I'll know what to do to cut them off at the pass. I'll perhaps give it another try in a year or so but I'm off to play a new game that's going to be more fun and mentally stimulating.

I'm not saying you're wrong - but it must be the choices I make when I play because my experience is very different. I REALLY struggle on hard difficulty (see my latest youtube playthrough where I lost to another empire).

Here are some things I do to make it a real challenge (for me - your mileage may vary of course):
1) No tech trading.
2) Small galaxy (most of the time)
3) Indie to VERY RARE and Colony prev. to RARE.
4) Difficulty HARD and and aggression RESTLESS
5) I play humans mostly.

In game there are few house rules I use:
1) No custom designs of bases where I add extra research, etc. Only custom for better combat (I don't touch mining or research bases at all).
2) I do custom ship design except for fighters (not sure that last one would make much difference).
3) No save scum (unless I forgot to research etc. - but it's very rare).
4) I don't force up the TAXES manually and then force a rebellion for faster assimilation.

If you try these settings, I would be curious to see how difficult it was for you. I just won a game (with a lucky start area) but I lost my latest video series (and lost 2 games before that).

Just sharing my experience - not trying to negate your experiences.

- Scott -

[Lunalis]

well but it was werid that i magically know fleet ship positions in areas i have no sight of.

That is not intended and we'd appreciate a save file showing it reproducing if you have one.

Regards,

- Erik

hmm, its been a while since i noticed that... and i never got far enough yet with the last dlc...
so maybe its already changed by now or so.

i have a save from start of the year (april) that kinda shows what i mean... (it might been that i "bugreported" it back in march/april... so you might already seen this save... or maybe i never reported it, hmm... dont remember XD)

i do remember with this save i got to around the hive swarm being active.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sdAjGs ... drive_link

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and the very first event message about the hive being sighted did zoom the view all the way south (south yellow arrow on picture). i guess some faction down there was the first to get a hive ship in sensorrange to trigger that global event. (and that is fine, news traveling with independent traders makes sense to kinda know something was sighted down there)

a bit later a hive ship got in range near a station (at the top yellow arrow).
if i zoom out a bit i can click on the hive ship fleet icon there of the one hive ship. and it highlights where all other fleet members are on the map (blue arrows) and the info box bottom left tells me all info right away, 48000 strength, that there are destroyers in the fleet.

where in theory my empire just saw its first hive ship... and should have no idea where the other fleet ships are at, or how many are in the fleet. and that was where the whole thought came from of not knowing such info untill you seen it.

i.e. the fleet info box bottom left could have a "? box" over every ship that you cant see. so that hive fleet whould be a lot of ? ships and one frigate icon that you know of.

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Screenshot_31.jpg (305.96 KiB) Viewed 48 times

the same is with this 3rd fleet over there... i can see some ships of it at the yellow arrow... and when i select the fleet from there i can see where the other ships are right now (blue arrows) and that they are flying around the nebular to get to the yellow arrow spot.

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i guess all the fleet info is always visible so the ai knows better how much threat a fleet is and such... and doesnt have to "guess" if that fleet with 5 ships has 20 more arriving a week later or such. and instead knows there will be 25 ships attacking there.

there is a giant rabbit hole of feature bloat and over complications with this info mechanic and tons of problems going down that rabbit hole... so i think makeing it more "in depth" is probably way out of scope for dw2...
like we have the "threats" tab, that save previously seen enemies, but isnt kept up to date without sensor info.
the game would have to keep track of every enemy fleet that way and update its last known fleet composition from the ships you saw assigned to it.
or spy missions to just update one fleets info for a few months instead of all military ships.
or stealth components hiding a ship being assigned to a fleet completely untill seen or so.
and the whole pirate dlc coming up... that i guess will have something with sneakyness and your freighters looking like independent traders (i think dw1 was like that?).
also player exploits of remakeing fleets so the ai threat fleet info is totally out of date...
even just hiding the ships with a ? icon would cause so many "problems"...

its a giant rabbit hole XD
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i think by default if you select a fleet it also selects all ships in the fleet... and that (maybe) is what shows the selection circles of not visible ships when you select a enemy fleet.
so i think the most simple way to change this might be:
if you select a fleet you dont own then it doesnt "select" ships in the fleet that you cant see. so it doesnt show their selection circle? or something around that...
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i dunno... maybe its totally irrelevant and its just a me thing trying to apply logic to this XD
then again we do have scanners and such...
*shrugs*
it just felt weird to know such fleet info and where ships are without seeing them.
especially with that hive fleet showing all the info and where ships are and that there are x many destroyers etc...
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but overall i would say "dont worry about this too much"...
the last games i played with the last dlc i never even got to the hive (busy RL, not enough time to play).
and i feel i would need to play a long game that goes longer than that save and past beating the hive to get more a feel for if this feels weird still or if its fine and just me being overly picky XD.