Soooo any good ways to get my leader killed? I'm a republic, if that matters. His stats are so bad. The republic can't work to get rid of him fast enough.
You can dismiss them with the button at the top of the character screen, a new one will be elected soon(a couple weeks?) after.
Oh I'm sure they think that. But the economies of scale when it comes to Steam Sales would probably make more money for the developer than they have ever made before.
Just look at Paradox who has a fairy good grasp on the power of steam sales. You release a game at normal price and you get the devoted fans. 5-6 months later you mark it down for a sale which nets new fans who would never have taken the chance on your game before.
The publisher's known for very high prices and almost (or actually) never offering sales on their products. The current price on Steam is a perpetual summer sale by their standards.
The discount on release is probably the only discount you're going to see from them for a very long time. If you didn't grab it at the time, strap in because it's going to be a journey before you see the next one.
Its kind of a trait possessed by some indie designers: the desire to put a high value on their creation. The thing is we're dealing with a nonphysical digital commodity and that artificial rarity through price doesn't make your product more attractive, it just makes less people own and try your product.
And yet the publisher's been doing well enough, prices and all, for fifteen years now. Probably rather better now, since they've certainly gotten a large spike in their customer base by opening up shop on Steam, even with their pricing.
Niche strategy games usually command fairly high prices because they've got enough people willing to pay for them (Matrix Games' prices are always high but are far from the highest). You're already getting a better-than-50% discount from their baseline prices, and given the general trend with those guys I'm not really sure they care much about the business of people who're insisting on a $20 price point or whatever people on Steam's forums are demanding this week.
I nabbed it shortly after the Steam release; I like a lot of stuff that comes from that publisher, and knowing their prices the ones they have on Steam are incredibly attractive.
But @Zibblsnrt, you're already a fan of these games and are okay with paying their premium. That market likely won't ever go away. But that price does produce an artificially exclusive market.
People like me, who have played and enjoyed Endless Space, MOO 2, GalCiv, etc., are interested in Distant Worlds, but with all the other games out there competing for attention, 60 bucks is a hard price to swallow. Not to mention that the likelihood of gifting Distant Worlds to other people is incredibly low (to almost nil) due to its price.
To someone who isn't already a devoted fan to Distant Worlds, the high price point and lack of any sale means that I'm not going to play Distant Worlds anytime soon, if ever, nor will I gift it to others when I can give 5-10 copies of GalCiv 2 or Endless Space to people who haven't played those games for the same price. And while I want to play Distant Worlds, if I never do because the price doesn't go down, oh well.
Its kind of a trait possessed by some indie designers: the desire to put a high value on their creation. The thing is we're dealing with a nonphysical digital commodity and that artificial rarity through price doesn't make your product more attractive, it just makes less people own and try your product.
Agreed, and it was a massive internal debate for me to put down the cash to grab this game. Helped only because of this thread btw...
After sinking around 20 hours, I feel like I'm finally starting to understand the basics of this game. As a first impression, it's rather dense to start off with, even with an established background in similar games (SE3-5, MOO2, Infinite Space, Sword of the Stars, Galactic Civillisations, Endless Space, StarDrive...). It feels more like sitting in the seat for a Grand Strategy game than a 4X game, though no where near the depth of the former.
Compared to the more 'traditional' 4X games that I usually cut my teeth on, the economy is a lot more hands off and feels like there's an incentive to keep your nose out of it. The economy is more based around time and growth rather than having a fixed cap. It's more guiding, not a moulding.
Research is something I can't wrap my head around when it comes to its caps. The stated goals are to prevent excessive snowballing if you gain an advantage/fall behind in tech. But by the same token, there's a bigger risk of getting locked into particular branches and early 'bad choices' in tech research have a compounded impact. In anycase, I can't work out any rhyme or method to how the empire-wide cap is calculated
It is a shame re the pricing, because like others I would happily take a punt on this were it not for the ridiculous price.
They need to realise that I'm not buying 5 games from them, I'm buying one, and right now it's the most expensive thing on my wish list by far. I'm happy to take a risk on something for £25, but not for £45.
Welp, I think I've got the basics down now quite well. Newest attempt and I did the low tax thing and let the population and economy explode. Looks like there IS a population cap for a planet (which ended up being more than half the entire galaxy's population by the time I got hyperdrive tech up and running). Before I made contact with the other empires, I controlled 83% of the economy, had a beefy lead on technologies thanks to crash researching stuff with a huge bank book and every pirate ended up in my pocket.
I ended up being the big bad with an insane amount of military and economic might and could stage military interventions on other empire's wars and crush both their fleets with one of my own. All the victory conditions are cleared, it's now just a matter of waiting until the delay expires while oppressing the neighbours.
A lot of indie devs have no understanding of the most basic demand-supply curves and the concept of higher revenue being possible with a lower price due to the increased demand. That, and some bizarre idea how their product is worth X amount of dollars, despite ample evidence that people in general won't/can't pay that for a single game. They attach some sort of a value judgement on the inherent worthiness of the game simply on the price-tag. Hell, Dwarf Fortress and plenty of other games are free, that I would rank far above a lot of games that I have to pay for. The game's price is irrelevant to the quality of the game.
I don't honestly understand the mentality with a product that can be replicated with no effort (in making more copies to sell) as opposed to one-off items like art and handcrafts. Once the game is made, I would personally try to price is so that a maximum number of people get to experience it while netting me the maximum amount of revenue.
Wow - didn't realise there was a DW thread here. Very cool! To try and avoid the thread spiraling away from the game into more pricing discussion I will just say that all our decisions are always based on our primary concern, which is maximising revenues for the developers. And for fairly complex games like DW we have not found that price reductions make up the revenue in additional sales. As @Zibblsnrt stated, we have been around for a goodly while and things are going pretty well
Back to the game - if people have questions about the game then the previously mentioned Matrix forum is a good place to get answers, but I will also ask the community there to perhaps check in here now and again to see if there is anything they can help with.
After some pretty major post-release updates the developer is on a well earned holiday, but let us know here/Steam/Matrix about anything you'll like to see in future updates (except for bird people aliens. We will NEVER accept them. They know why...).
MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited July 2014
That makes sense. Anyone idly having a look at it is going to see the complexity and be put off.
Anyone who really wants a complex game is going to research it and buy it anyway.
The few people who dither, well, you always get someone falling through the cracks of any plan.
You just have to hope those cracks aren't too big.
Morninglord on
(PSN: Morninglord) (Steam: Morninglord) (WiiU: Morninglord22) I like to record and toss up a lot of random gaming videos here.
You don't necessarily need automation, it's just a very convenient thing to use. Like, there's probably no real reason to turn it off for a lot of stuff beyond showing that you totally can on account of how cool you are. But other things are default automated that are totally more fun to do yourself, like research.
Edit: Also, I haven't been talking as much about this game as I should be: holy shit this is as close as I've gotten to Perfect 4X. So many parts just feel accurately Big Space Empire that it's beautiful.
About the only complaint I have is that holy shit it is as though they actually coded this thing in Excel. If it were bumped up like a single level in terms of not even graphical prettiness but UI smoothness it would be so improved. But man, I cannot believe how fun it is to just hop in as Empire What Are These Weird Looking Things and again set out to spread across and conquer/trade with/whatever the galaxy.
I thought this game was meant to be run while leaning on automation quite heavily?
You totally should use lots of automation as you learn the game, since you'll probably forget a ton of stuff and get wrecked by it, but I only suggested him because he usually explains why he's doing what he's doing.
Battletag BYToady#1454
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
I'll still hold out hope for Birdmen aliens, you can't stop me from hoping! *shakes fist impotently*
The other thing I think would be cool is a genuine fish race. Closest you have are the seal people.
And maybe some sort of Lovecraftian themed expansion with the Wekkarus, Quameno and some fish race all banding together around eldritch sea-gods and giant space-monsters that are more like ships, like carrier ones sort of like living hives with tons of smaller "fighter" creatures, spine/acid shooter ones that have ranged weapons, maybe even some sort of monster "faction" that is unearthed as a storyline thing and is some ancient threat from most ancient history or something. Also, more ideas a thousand other people have had.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
Urrrk, I tried watching the Larry Monte videos for the suicidal let's play but I just can't stand how much wasted time is in there. Reading the pop ups out loud missing some stuff like 'hey! your research queue is empty! It's been empty for the past 5 minutes!!!' are some things, but perhaps I'm missing things but I don't feel like I'm gaining or learning anything new or 'advanced'. I probably need to go over the earlier videos or find some other resource.
Anyhow, what's everyone's thoughts on offence/defence balance for ship designs as well as ratio of armour to shields? I'm just about wrapping up a game (the zero tax start for pre-warp is just so darn powerful) because I'm crushing things economically and tech-wise. The biggest ship I have in the fleet is about 20% shields and armour, 20% weapons and 60% other stuff like basic components, fuel, engines and support.
As another example, I know the early ships the AI is pushing out at say the 300ish size have like 10 weapons on it. My 450 size design has 8 weapons on it for about 14% of the total ship size while shields and armour are around 25%. Am I going far too defensive on the designs?
Formulating a scalable defensive strategy that requires very little eyeball time is also something that's churning away in my mind. Originally I just had a bunch of escorts floating around on auto just doing their own thing and haphazard defence fleets. Seemed to work ok. Then lots of mining outposts and stuff were getting built, and there was just no chance that I could get enough coverage when I had pirate fleets warping in to pick off a station and managing the fleets got to be a bit of a headache. So then I thought the solution was just more ships, and then I blew the budget on ship maintenance. My current plan is to have a four tier strategy. Free-floating escorts; frigates stationed in systems designed to interrupt, stall and tackle intruders; a moderate fleet that lends firepower to nearby systems then the big boy fleet that guards sectors and are supposed to engage fully committed invasion fleets long enough for a manual response to arrive, or just deal with the problem themselves. Feasible? Or just woefully inadequate?
Also, I think my favourite moment so far was watching a mining outpost repel an attack. A pretty big pirate fleet warps in, hits the warp inhibitor field and starts pushing ahead through the fighter screen. Then a ship blows up. A few seconds later, another one blows up while AoE weapons explode around them. The mining station is armed with Death Rays. Needless to say, the remainder of the fleet turns around and tries to leave as fast as possible on sub-light while the fighters pick them apart.
I ZimbraWorst song, played on ugliest guitarRegistered Userregular
I picked this up on Friday and played a decent chunk this weekend. I've taken my single pre-warp planet up to about 2 dozen colonies and things seem to be chugging along. I don't really understand the military bits yet, but I also haven't needed to. I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get brutally murdered by pirates.
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Lord_AsmodeusgoeticSobriquet:Here is your magical cryptic riddle-tumour: I AM A TIME MACHINERegistered Userregular
So, I've been getting back into this game, I got the extended AI improvement mod (which makes the AI less stupid and the extended version also includes a mod which adds a bunch of alien races, including a couple of avian races! Hooray!) Which I'd recommend to everyone, it's also got some neat UI changes and helps keep the game fresh.
One thing I'm wondering is, if there's a mod/way to change how enslavement works. I'm playing an evil empire, and enslavement slows a populations growth to 0%. Now I'm not sure if this is base growth (so it can still go up if the colony is prospering etc.) or if it's just permanently at 0%. The latter would seem odd (if you're bent on enslaving other races you might theoretically want to keep them around to do your work) does anyone know for sure? And if it is the latter, is there any way to change it?
Also sorry for dredging up such an old thread but it was here, and I thought it was better than just making a new thread.
Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if Labor had not first existed. Labor is superior to capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. - Lincoln
It's a fine thing to bring up the Distant Worlds thread, since I had sort of forgotten about it due to other taken games and various business distracting me.
No clue about AI and such, might have to look into that mod.
Posts
You can dismiss them with the button at the top of the character screen, a new one will be elected soon(a couple weeks?) after.
However: select a ship. Control + Right click, Transfer Character, select your leader. Then destroy the ship (retiring it may also work).
Yay, Steam Sale.
Boo, DW not on Steam Sale. What are the odds it might make a daily later on?
Just look at Paradox who has a fairy good grasp on the power of steam sales. You release a game at normal price and you get the devoted fans. 5-6 months later you mark it down for a sale which nets new fans who would never have taken the chance on your game before.
Niche strategy games usually command fairly high prices because they've got enough people willing to pay for them (Matrix Games' prices are always high but are far from the highest). You're already getting a better-than-50% discount from their baseline prices, and given the general trend with those guys I'm not really sure they care much about the business of people who're insisting on a $20 price point or whatever people on Steam's forums are demanding this week.
I nabbed it shortly after the Steam release; I like a lot of stuff that comes from that publisher, and knowing their prices the ones they have on Steam are incredibly attractive.
People like me, who have played and enjoyed Endless Space, MOO 2, GalCiv, etc., are interested in Distant Worlds, but with all the other games out there competing for attention, 60 bucks is a hard price to swallow. Not to mention that the likelihood of gifting Distant Worlds to other people is incredibly low (to almost nil) due to its price.
To someone who isn't already a devoted fan to Distant Worlds, the high price point and lack of any sale means that I'm not going to play Distant Worlds anytime soon, if ever, nor will I gift it to others when I can give 5-10 copies of GalCiv 2 or Endless Space to people who haven't played those games for the same price. And while I want to play Distant Worlds, if I never do because the price doesn't go down, oh well.
After sinking around 20 hours, I feel like I'm finally starting to understand the basics of this game. As a first impression, it's rather dense to start off with, even with an established background in similar games (SE3-5, MOO2, Infinite Space, Sword of the Stars, Galactic Civillisations, Endless Space, StarDrive...). It feels more like sitting in the seat for a Grand Strategy game than a 4X game, though no where near the depth of the former.
Compared to the more 'traditional' 4X games that I usually cut my teeth on, the economy is a lot more hands off and feels like there's an incentive to keep your nose out of it. The economy is more based around time and growth rather than having a fixed cap. It's more guiding, not a moulding.
Research is something I can't wrap my head around when it comes to its caps. The stated goals are to prevent excessive snowballing if you gain an advantage/fall behind in tech. But by the same token, there's a bigger risk of getting locked into particular branches and early 'bad choices' in tech research have a compounded impact. In anycase, I can't work out any rhyme or method to how the empire-wide cap is calculated
They need to realise that I'm not buying 5 games from them, I'm buying one, and right now it's the most expensive thing on my wish list by far. I'm happy to take a risk on something for £25, but not for £45.
I ended up being the big bad with an insane amount of military and economic might and could stage military interventions on other empire's wars and crush both their fleets with one of my own. All the victory conditions are cleared, it's now just a matter of waiting until the delay expires while oppressing the neighbours.
I don't honestly understand the mentality with a product that can be replicated with no effort (in making more copies to sell) as opposed to one-off items like art and handcrafts. Once the game is made, I would personally try to price is so that a maximum number of people get to experience it while netting me the maximum amount of revenue.
Back to the game - if people have questions about the game then the previously mentioned Matrix forum is a good place to get answers, but I will also ask the community there to perhaps check in here now and again to see if there is anything they can help with.
After some pretty major post-release updates the developer is on a well earned holiday, but let us know here/Steam/Matrix about anything you'll like to see in future updates (except for bird people aliens. We will NEVER accept them. They know why...).
Cheers
Pip
Anyone who really wants a complex game is going to research it and buy it anyway.
The few people who dither, well, you always get someone falling through the cracks of any plan.
You just have to hope those cracks aren't too big.
Edit: Also, I haven't been talking as much about this game as I should be: holy shit this is as close as I've gotten to Perfect 4X. So many parts just feel accurately Big Space Empire that it's beautiful.
About the only complaint I have is that holy shit it is as though they actually coded this thing in Excel. If it were bumped up like a single level in terms of not even graphical prettiness but UI smoothness it would be so improved. But man, I cannot believe how fun it is to just hop in as Empire What Are These Weird Looking Things and again set out to spread across and conquer/trade with/whatever the galaxy.
You totally should use lots of automation as you learn the game, since you'll probably forget a ton of stuff and get wrecked by it, but I only suggested him because he usually explains why he's doing what he's doing.
The other thing I think would be cool is a genuine fish race. Closest you have are the seal people.
And maybe some sort of Lovecraftian themed expansion with the Wekkarus, Quameno and some fish race all banding together around eldritch sea-gods and giant space-monsters that are more like ships, like carrier ones sort of like living hives with tons of smaller "fighter" creatures, spine/acid shooter ones that have ranged weapons, maybe even some sort of monster "faction" that is unearthed as a storyline thing and is some ancient threat from most ancient history or something. Also, more ideas a thousand other people have had.
Anyhow, what's everyone's thoughts on offence/defence balance for ship designs as well as ratio of armour to shields? I'm just about wrapping up a game (the zero tax start for pre-warp is just so darn powerful) because I'm crushing things economically and tech-wise. The biggest ship I have in the fleet is about 20% shields and armour, 20% weapons and 60% other stuff like basic components, fuel, engines and support.
As another example, I know the early ships the AI is pushing out at say the 300ish size have like 10 weapons on it. My 450 size design has 8 weapons on it for about 14% of the total ship size while shields and armour are around 25%. Am I going far too defensive on the designs?
Formulating a scalable defensive strategy that requires very little eyeball time is also something that's churning away in my mind. Originally I just had a bunch of escorts floating around on auto just doing their own thing and haphazard defence fleets. Seemed to work ok. Then lots of mining outposts and stuff were getting built, and there was just no chance that I could get enough coverage when I had pirate fleets warping in to pick off a station and managing the fleets got to be a bit of a headache. So then I thought the solution was just more ships, and then I blew the budget on ship maintenance. My current plan is to have a four tier strategy. Free-floating escorts; frigates stationed in systems designed to interrupt, stall and tackle intruders; a moderate fleet that lends firepower to nearby systems then the big boy fleet that guards sectors and are supposed to engage fully committed invasion fleets long enough for a manual response to arrive, or just deal with the problem themselves. Feasible? Or just woefully inadequate?
Also, I think my favourite moment so far was watching a mining outpost repel an attack. A pretty big pirate fleet warps in, hits the warp inhibitor field and starts pushing ahead through the fighter screen. Then a ship blows up. A few seconds later, another one blows up while AoE weapons explode around them. The mining station is armed with Death Rays. Needless to say, the remainder of the fleet turns around and tries to leave as fast as possible on sub-light while the fighters pick them apart.
One thing I'm wondering is, if there's a mod/way to change how enslavement works. I'm playing an evil empire, and enslavement slows a populations growth to 0%. Now I'm not sure if this is base growth (so it can still go up if the colony is prospering etc.) or if it's just permanently at 0%. The latter would seem odd (if you're bent on enslaving other races you might theoretically want to keep them around to do your work) does anyone know for sure? And if it is the latter, is there any way to change it?
Also sorry for dredging up such an old thread but it was here, and I thought it was better than just making a new thread.
No clue about AI and such, might have to look into that mod.
But now I have a new, huge game to learn and barely enough time as it is. Boo!
Methinks some lets plays on YouTube are in my future.