Slitherine

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ORIGINAL: Jorgen_CAB

I have played Stellaris quite allot as well but I always come back to DWU as I find that as more of a challenge no matter what I do in Stellaris the AI is really stupid and I have no time for MP so that is out for me. DWU AI actually are quite allot better, Paradox AI are for the most part not good. Paradox include way too many mechanic that are in favour of the player that their games become rather empty if you don't use them just so you can play them with some form of equality with the AI. I think that Paradox for the most part design their games wrong when they don't prioritise how the AI should use the features the add.

Stellaris is a nice game and I have played it for more than 1000 hours so I obviously like it, but it certainly is not in my opinion as good a game as DWU and I'm sure DW2 will be even better.

The biggest flaw in Stellaris is the weak economy game, it is way to deterministic and easy to exploit and there are no real strategic choices as all resources are universal and you can practically produce anything anywhere, more or less.

At least my most memorable and difficult games have been in Distant Worlds.

To Paradox credit they at least still balance their games mainly for SP. MP in Stellaris is not terribly well balanced and so seem rather bland in the amount of factions you can use and be competitive, I'm sure the same thing would happen in DW2.

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ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

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ORIGINAL: BlueTemplar
I therefore reiterate my question about point-like ships :
- How are the turrets going to deal with range ? Especially on biggest ships, where turret to target hull distance might be much shorter than center-of-ship to center-of-ship ?
- Will a turret shoot if it's line of view is blocked ? Is there going to be friendly fire ? On the ship itself and on allied ships ?

The weapon will open fire if it is within range and within its arc of a target. It will not fire at ships it cannot reach or cannot rotate to fire at. It will avoid firing if it would hit its own ship or a friendly ship. Note that some seeking weapons, such as missiles, are not really dependent on arc or obstacles as they can fire out of the ship, then change course and pursue the target. As in DW1, there is a chance, depending on course and speed changes and distance of the friendly and enemy ships, that weapons where their shots take time to reach a target may be in range when fired but not actually in range by the time they would reach the point of impact.

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ORIGINAL: swizzlewizzle

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ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

quote:

ORIGINAL: BlueTemplar
I therefore reiterate my question about point-like ships :
- How are the turrets going to deal with range ? Especially on biggest ships, where turret to target hull distance might be much shorter than center-of-ship to center-of-ship ?
- Will a turret shoot if it's line of view is blocked ? Is there going to be friendly fire ? On the ship itself and on allied ships ?

The weapon will open fire if it is within range and within its arc of a target. It will not fire at ships it cannot reach or cannot rotate to fire at. It will avoid firing if it would hit its own ship or a friendly ship. Note that some seeking weapons, such as missiles, are not really dependent on arc or obstacles as they can fire out of the ship, then change course and pursue the target. As in DW1, there is a chance, depending on course and speed changes and distance of the friendly and enemy ships, that weapons where their shots take time to reach a target may be in range when fired but not actually in range by the time they would reach the point of impact.

Erik, that brings up a good question then - since turret logic is very heavy CPU wise, and as you said, turrets will be doing raycast checks for range/arc/avoiding firing if a shot would hit it's own/friendly ship, does this mean that to allow the sim to handle the size we came to expect with DW:U, ships off-screen will have these calculations relaxed, and a more simple logic will be used to progress combat?

To be honest, in a 500 vs 500 ship battle, i'm not sure many people would see the difference between ships slightly firing through each-other and not! :)

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ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

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ORIGINAL: btd64
Definitely love the scale of things....GP

I should also note that the scale of things is adjustable. So if you want the epic realistic space feel you see in the screenshots, you can have it. But if you want ships and stations to be bigger and a bit closer to DW1, that's also going to be possible. By default, we allow for some dynamic scaling so things don't get too small to see before the icons/symbols replace them. The new interface also helps a lot with keeping track of things vs. DW1, even with the epic scale.

The new engine of course also still allows small galaxy games, but it does also allow us to go larger than DW1 if you want an even more massive living galaxy to play in.

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ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

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ORIGINAL: OJsDad
Hmm, if I'm understanding you, then it's a little disappointing. One of the things I really liked about DW1 was that you could build ships to any size and didn't have to research ship hull size tech first.

In practice, it's not as limiting as you may be thinking. Keep in mind that in Distant Worlds 1, you could not build ships to any size. You started out with size limitations (for example, Size 160 for ships initially) and you had to research to increase your maximum buildable size. The roles were mostly just ways to organize your designs and to set certain component minimums, the size was the real limitation.

In Distant Worlds 2, the ship hulls are effectively the research projects that unlock greater sizes as well as different component limits. Within each ship hull, there is still a lot of design flexibility and I haven't had any trouble duplicating my designs from DW1 so far. Roles still establish certain component minimums, but hulls also establish certain realistic maximums. However, the roles are now also much more meaningful in an absolute sense and not just as an organizational tool. This will become even more apparent when we get to the point of discussing fleets.

Regards,

- Erik

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ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

I'll mention one other thing as a bonus for you all. Most ship components now also have a fighter/bomber-sized version and in DW2, you not only can design your own ships and stations, but also your own fighters and bombers based on the technologies you have researched. Similar to ships, there are upgradable hulls and in some cases faction-unique hulls for fighters and bombers as well.

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ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

Performance is good so far. Can't talk more about all this yet, but I will when I can!

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ORIGINAL: Tanaka
The Bacon Mod has added so many extra options and settings to Distant Worlds 1 that many felt were missing. Some examples I love are No Independents and No Random Game Breaking Super Ships placed on the map from start/events and war weariness dropping slowly over time instead of instantly, setting costs, etc... Will we see such options in DW2? Any other ideas you guys might use from this amazing mod that took DW to another level? So many great options and configurable settings!

Erik Rutins
CEO, Matrix Games LLC



For official support, please use our Help Desk: http://www.matrixgames.com/helpdesk/

Freedom is not Free.

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ORIGINAL: Erik Rutins

Hi Tanaka,

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ORIGINAL: Tanaka
The Bacon Mod has added so many extra options and settings to Distant Worlds 1 that many felt were missing. Some examples I love are No Independents and No Random Game Breaking Super Ships placed on the map from start/events and war weariness dropping slowly over time instead of instantly, setting costs, etc... Will we see such options in DW2? Any other ideas you guys might use from this amazing mod that took DW to another level? So many great options and configurable settings!

We're aware of the Bacon mod and have been impressed with the author's work and happy to have it continue for DW1. When we get to the point of adding testers, we'd love to have his participation on the test team and community feedback regarding features or tweaks that would be the most popular to add to DW2 that are not already in there. The best point to have this discussion I think is once testers have had a chance to play around with DW2.

Regards,

- Erik

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ORIGINAL: R_TEAM

Hi,
cant find an answer ...
Will DW2 multiplayer or again singleplayer only .... ?

Regards

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ORIGINAL: SirHoraceHarkness

No way you could play this online multiplayer due to the sheer amount of ships in play on even a small map when you factor in the private sector. Transmitting the exact x/y coordinates in real time for every ship to every client would saturate the upload bandwidth of a typical home connection. Not even sure a higher end lan could do it though it would probably be possible. Supreme commander has thousands of units at a time in its online peer to peer matches and it can lag badly even with good rigs and connects and that's just a fraction of what a typical empire would have in the private sector alone. If this was a turned based game then yeah no problems but this is a real time grand strategy and the mechanics are very different.

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ORIGINAL: springel

There are ways to solve this problem.

If the game is deterministic, ie. random numbers use the same seed in all players instances, you only need to transmit user input, and games will remain in sync without transmitting loads of data. Europa Universalis does this, and it works rather good by now (after a lot of iterations to iron out bugs). And that game has a comparable number of units, and much more AI players.

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ORIGINAL: SirHoraceHarkness

Yes but that is a turn based game ...