>>2359560
People don't play either, noone is play Stellaris so they don't discuss it here, which is because noone wants to learn the same video game for the fourth fucking time.

I like Distant Worlds 2, but there's not much to say about it. I play a game now and then until I'm bored of colonising or the micromanagement becomes too annoying, then I put it to rest for six months again.

>>2359560
I still haven't given up on DWU

>>2359600
how do you even run it on high resolution. That shit was always annoying as fuck to deal with because of the retarded way it was coded.

Can't read shit

>>2359600
>>2359616
Kinda sad DW2 isnt getting these omega huge unbalanced alien species mod packs but it makes sense since having 3d ship models kind of limits it for modders now.
I'm not even sure if you CAN mod new species in.
I can't rememeber the name but I think it was DWU unleashed or something that added like +30 new species. My favorite were the leviathan shark dudes who had an unique overpowered huge sensor that covered half the galaxy

>>2359560
>It's basically the better Stellaris
After dozen (or 2, or 3) of hours you learned game mechanics and ready to actually play vs ai.
But then you found that ai is stupid af and can't compete even on hardest diff, and big events tied to certain triggers.
So next your step is handicap yourself even more with home rules, play suboptimal intentionally or drop the game.
On top of this design flaws and modding unfriendly engine with hardcoded things, and we got dead game.

Hey. It's me again.
Yea. Yea I'm still on the orbits thing.
I know. No its fine. I'm just not going to advocate for your game is all.

>>2359624
>>2359616
I remember the starfall mod, if you go into the forums you'll still find it through some ancient mediafire link or some shit, makes me feel ancient

>>2359644
>But then you found that ai is stupid af and can't compete even on hardest diff, and big events tied to certain triggers.
>So next your step is handicap yourself even more with home rules, play suboptimal intentionally or drop the game.
That's just stellaris

>>2359684
Correct, but its also moddable and the engine is not hardcoded, so you can make it atleast more interesting for yourself.

still not playing it until they prevent me from being able to zoom in through planets

Bought it yesterday, I looked into DW1 years ago but haven't played it. Is 2 definitely the better game?

>>2359644
What if I wanna roleplay as a xenophobic human? Is it fun? Can I turn bug pepul and reptilians into processed cat food?

>>2359827
Anyone who likes both will say they're sidegrades of each other.

>>2359827
2 actually runs on modern machines but Im still getting random crashes after some hours.
1 is impossible to run on my huge screens but I feel like I had a better "understanding" on what was going on. But 2 has too many QoL and smarter automation/Designs for me to ever go back to 1

>>2360097
You can enslave and iirc genocide, but i don't think you can recycle them.

>>2359856
> >>2360511

>>2359624
Yeah you can mod in new races, they're all loaded procedurally. There's also a video guide in the game's files that shows how to add new ship models or edit existing ones. You can also add new events, items, etc. Just about all the game's data is externalized to an XML file. The documentation on this is very bad and/or outdated though, wish it wasn't but apparently they only have one programmer lol.

>>2359560
After playing X4, it's actually just embarrassing how poorly this game runs while offering a much shallower simulation of the same things. I'm convinced whoever coded this does not know how to optimize this kind of game at all. You know it's bad when someone can vibe code an overhaul mod that makes the game run 800% faster in the late game.

>>2362508
Lmao.
Anon, in x4 your fps will be dead if you even try to get the same numbers as dw2 have. It have ships limitation per faction for solid reason, and this reason is performance.

>>2362540
?
A single carrier in X4 can carry an equivalent number of ships as the midgame navy of an entire empire in DW2 (~100). Across all the sectors there are at any time thousands of ships in the game. You lose frames when you have hundreds of ships on the screen at a time but the actual universe simulation is much larger in scope than DW2 and doesn't cause performance issues due to the low attention mechanic. And it offers an actually meaningful economy simulation that you can interact with and manipulate. In this shit game you just sit in the cuck chair and watch as civilians automatically build freighters that slow your game down and don't even serve their purpose because every colony has 40+ shortages at a time always. Just like with populations in Stellaris, you conquer empires not to roleplay but so you can genocide all their freighters and preserve your frames.

>>2362565
>And it offers an actually meaningful economy simulation
As someone who loves x4, you're full of shit

>>2362596
I accept your concession.

>>2362604
>everyone is the guy I was arguing with
True schizo hours

>>2362611
That's even worse then, because you butted into an exchange just to have no argument and make some le epic redditor quip. So I accept your concession.

>>2362620
>noooo you can't discuss games because I say so

>>2362623
You're only fueling my superiority complex by acting like this, I want you to know that.

>>2362624
Yes all retards feel they are superior

>>2362620
"i accept your concession" is a textbook reddit quip ya pinhead
you gotta lurk more

>>2362626
>no u
What a magnificent riposte, how ever will I recover.
>>2362659
Are you enjoying yourself?

>>2362565
Lmao you hard coping full of bullshit fucking retard.

>>2362776
When you're in the bullshit capital of the world, the truth is hard to swallow.

>>2359827
Having spent too much time in both, DWU is the better game by far. 2 feels like a substandard clone.

>>2368199
having spent 30 minutes in both, they both sucked and i don't want to play more of either

>>2359657
lel

Surprised this game is still getting updates when it's barely getting 3 digit concurrent players.

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>>2362659
Concession Accepted

Absolutely DEMOLISHED with FACTS and LOGIC

>>2359560
turns my pc into chernobyl so i only play during (australian) winter
it's the best space logistics game i've found but it's still disappointing
>better than stellaris
is an excruciatingly low bar
>x4
slightly higher bar but lol, lmao regardless

>>2369190
play aurora
or space empires if you want to know what it copied

>>2359560
I agree

It's a disappointment.

DWU with mods mogs it on every front except perhaps eye candy, but nobody plays these games for the eye candy.

Remnants of the Precursors is a nice little game that strikes the right balance for me.

>>2379809
>rotp
So disappointing you had to come in and bump the thread with ragebait eh?

>>2359560
On a serious note, MoO2 or SotS?

>>2380366
Make it interesting. Moo3 or sots2?

>>2380372
The answer is obviously SoSE

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>>2380372
I'm still waiting on a space game that lets me have ships like this.

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>>2380415
Me too brother. Too bad both iterations of sd flaked out.

>>2380420
That reminds me, I guess Polaris Sector wasn't so bad for what it was. I liked playing the Chernobyl Greeks with their asymmetrical tumor ships. That's where I got the idea for these kinds of games to design ships where only one side has broadsides weapons and the other has homing missiles.

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I'm too busy playing modded DWU.
Not really though, but I am about to start a new game.

>>2359560
Better Stellaris, SIT DOWN it's not even a good DW title yet

Alright fellers, I'm downloading DWU right now. What mods would you recommend?

>>2386116
DW expanded or something like that?

>>2386116
Distant Worlds Universe Refreshed-Expansion Mod edition is what I'm trying out. Universe Refreshed mostly just adds a lot of races and changes the visual style. If you want a game with just the vanilla races then just get the Expansion Mod, which adds a lot of features from the old BaconMods.

>>2386258
>>2386468
I found a Warhammer 40k mod that seems to be one dead link away from disappearing from the internet. Pretty cool stuff if you hate diplomacy.

>>2359674
based

>>2379809
I mostly play to watch big trade lanes form.

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>>2388938
Yeah.

>>2389632
This is what 38 resource shortages looks like btw.

>>2389860
Maybe? I don't think so though. I can't remember all the context of every game but most of the freighters have the little cargo shuttles moving back and forth to actually load the freighters so there's throughput of resources, and it was a game where I went all in on Teekan trading by getting as many partners as possible so volume of private freighters was needed. But I guess I could have upgraded docking bays more to make it faster to actually get the resources loaded and on their way.

>>2389876
Is joke, this game always has a bunch of shortages once you start scaling up and finding new luxury resources. I think the recent update claims to have improved the shipping AI but I didn't notice a difference when I played. I suppose that plays into the balance of merchant guilds.

>>2359567
>noone is play Stellaris so they don't discuss it here
I dont understand how Paradox managed to fuck that game up so much that it ended up feeling like a fucking chore to play.

>>2381895
I'm too fucking old to squint at that game anymore, I think I would need to buy some massive 1920x1080 tertiary monitor just to play it again.

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>>2389889
Gotcha. Still, I don't know for certain because I know I have had stalls before where something like 100 freighters will just park themselves around the homeworld with a "No Mission" status.
>>2389933
I'm on a 1440p monitor and it isn't the greatest since a lot of the UI scale isn't adjustable (like planet names in the system zoom level view) but I don't have too much trouble with it.

>>2389632
For a game about trading i wish resources abundance wasn't so extreme. I've almost never seen a scenario where I need to actually fight for a resource.

>>2389988
In DW2 there have been a few games where I'll set the start options to scarce and not have all major strategic resources guaranteed to generate in the home system which has led to some memorable moments where the entirety of the Empire's future depends on a solitary mining ship that was produced before a particular resource stockpile ran out. But there isn't much in the way of conflict no, not in the sense that the mining ship is in danger from anything other than space creatures, and if it went somewhere to mine odds are there weren't any space creatures there to begin with. And the whole reason everything became dependent on said particular miner was because I'm bad at math, not because I was actually competing for whatever resource it was.
There is this game though, >>2389987 my current one where I set my home system to be an extremely rich one but still started running out of polymer frequently enough for it to be a serious production problem. I did have a source on the homeworld, but it was something on the lower end of ~19% polymer source, not nearly enough. So, after discovering that the Tasareq system had a polymer resource I sent a construction ship over to build a mine. About a week into it's hyperspace journey, it was colonized by the former Empire that occupied Nabuu Prime, which also had polymer.
So priorities were switched to troop transports.

>>2389988
If you haven't seen it, the XL mod for DW2 does make resources and habitable worlds significantly more scarce. It also improves performance.

>>2389987
Unfortunately both my monitors are 4K because I fell for the 4K meme during COVID and its like playing with a UI designed for ants.

>>2390204
You can usually scale it up in most games.
>r the 4K meme
I don't think it makes a difference for games, really. but I enjoy 4k for text reading and some vague sense of immersion from a 32 inch monitor compared to a 24 inch. I don't often notice the edges of my screen anymore.

>>2389993
You can run out of resources very easily if you allow the AI to handle ship and station design. All those useless early weapons, and extra modules they add just to fill up the size will bankrupt you because your miners just don't have the throughput to keep up.

>>2390211
Manual ship design is unbelievably high effort.

>>2390574
Not really, if you're playing on slow research speeds (you should), you tend to get several decades out of a military design before needing to retrofit. And civilian designs you just do once at the start and then forget about, except when you get new warp drives. Also, every race has its own design quirks that you'd never notice without interacting with the system. For example, whether you'll prefer heavy frigates over t1 destroyers will depend on your race. Or the role of the hull itself changes depending on your race, like Dhayut frigates being good brawlers with all their forward facing slots and high defenses, Zenox frigates being able to fill the sensor ship role in a fleet because they get an L sensor slot, or Ackdarian/Teekan/Gizurean frigates being able to carry fighters at varying degrees of opportunity cost.

>>2390574
It's only really bad if you try to make a bunch of different sub designs for different roles. Otherwise the only real effort comes at the start when you're unfucking the starting designs or making a brand new design from scratch. But the payoff is you become much more resource efficient.

>>2390211
I play as full manual in the designs as I can every playthrough. I'm just bad at math.

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>>2359560
dw2 is a very cool sandbox, but it's certainly NOT better than stellaris. and stellaris is dogshit btw. completely broken game. braindead ai. game about resources yet resource scarcity induced purely by retarded civ traders. no replay value. etc sad really.

>>2389930
but enough about hoi4

>>2390730
>>2390574
you don't even need ships larger than a destroyer, and destroyers are purely for the sensors.

you just put best stuff you have into frigate, and also 2 or 3 marine modules. spam frigates, firepower they're the same as equivalent battleship, plus unlike battleship they will swarm the enemy fleet with boarding as soon as the shields are down. ez capture which is immediately added to the fleet.

>>2393395
Kinda, again it depends on your race. Human destroyers with missiles beat their frigates 2-to-1 for example, whereas Teekan would probably be like 5-to-1 due to how terrible their frigates are. And most races' frigates don't have enough slots for even one boarding pod module without sacrificing other components, especially early game when your reactors take up 2 slots.

Another problem is that high tech frigate spam gets very expensive and difficult to actually spam once you unlock components that use rare resources. It'd be better to use larger hulls to carry them, because they're tankier due to shield recharge stacking so you won't need to replace losses as much. Quameno have probably the single best frigates because this isn't a problem for them, their unique shields and reactors are better than the generic high tech ones, while using the same resources as low tech, so you get really tanky, really cheap frigates with good firing arcs that make for excellent direct fire brawlers, while their destroyers sit back and fire large missiles or torpedos.

>>2393601
I know it's a little out of scope but I wish it was possible to tech stack so hard you could all in on making one super powerful ship that can go full power fantasy and demolish hordes of weaker empire fleets.

>>2393601
how do i build mortalen fleets? the dino guys, they have race exlusive torpedos but they kinda suck?

>>2396994
that is just normal gameplay in dw2.

>>2397001
If I remember correctly, their designs have this pattern with the 2 rear-facing S slots that are for torpedoes. Torps and missiles let you convert otherwise useless slots like those into more forward fire, but they have lower DPS (much lower against PD) than direct-fire weapons so you don't really want to put them on forward-facing slots unless you're going for a kiting or area denial strategy, which missiles are better at due to having more range, thus torpedoes end up being best used complimenting direct-fire weapons. As for fleet doctrine, their race concept is having better military ships than everyone else, so you can do whatever you want and succeed. Even their escorts can mount L railguns and kill things.

>>2397283
Ahh that sucks, so the torpedos are more of a backup thing then? Sucks because usually race traits and weapons means you want to stack them heavily but having the race weapon be a backup weapon is kinda a bummer.

>>2397379
Well the AI designs tend to be pretty terrible so if you really wanna shoot red (I think?) balls at people you'll still do fine. Or you can play the XL mod, torpedoes are usable as main weapons there.

why is the dlc so late. I help off playing for the last half year because the dlc was so close.

>>2397379
I use torps as a primary weapon and they're fine. The only really bad weapons are early missiles but once you get a few techs in they're fine too.
Fewer bigger slots are also better than more smaller slots so I often just leave small slots unequipped if it means I can fit an extra medium or large weapon.

Just booted the game, what am i in for?

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>>2397379
you are looking for complexity where there's none.

you either spam blaster frigates packed with assault pods, or you set your fleet on "evasive" and spam swarm missiles.

alternatively you can install XL which makes all weapons more or less the same.

>better Stellaris
this isn't Endless Space 2, retard

>>2397810
can you post a design for the blaster frigates?

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>>2398581
there's no "design" in dw2. you just put your best dps weapons into the largest hull(always will be blasters in vanilla), 2 fuel tanks, 1 reactor, and as many assault pods as possible. and set automation to capture everything.

honestly assault boats don't do much against a swarm of shitty ships, you just get a stream of garbage continuously captured. frigate swarm mainly exists to capture hive carriers for techs(if you keep disassembling a ship and pausing it once the disassembly gets to the hull, it will be repeatedly deconstructed and rebuilt, giving you techs continuously. same is valid for any other hitech ship).

if you want to fight computer, optimal strat is to put your best missiles on your frigates/destroyers, and set them on evasive. and crank up overmatch ratio. though just having best blasters and frigates on aggressive will shred any ai fleet.