The game mechanics are full of holes and QOL is lacking. Every aspect of the game can be automated. Full automation gives you a garbage empire, full manual gives you an Adderall addiction. Finding a tolerable balance is its own learning curve that can force you to restart your galaxy several times.  Fleets, even when being micromanaged, are a charlie foxtrot and I don't even know where to start complaining about them. And then you have your research screen... Imagine being zoomed in on earth in Aurora and having to pan through the solar system to be able to look at other objects... that is basically research.

I put 50 hours into the game and ended up not designing my ships- because on manual designs you have to update ship components yourself when you tech up, and automatic retrofitting has the AI adding/removing components as it sees fit.  After dealing with the constant crashing I just did not have the patience for more micromanagement. Speaking of which, the crashing was so bad after release that it took a month of patches to be able to reach past mid game, which lead to the next problem that performance was absolute trash by the time you reached late game.

I would say that DW2 is 'okay' if you're the type of person that doesn't pay attention to detail and if you stick to small star counts. My review is far from objective and I'm quite exhausted dealing with the mess so I probably won't pick it back up unless they make a DLC. This is the last time I will be getting a game on-release as well.

Yea, the crash report I am looking at really has nothing to do with graphics hardware:

04-05-2022 02-34-12.186: System.Threading.SynchronizationLockException: Object synchronization method was called from an unsynchronized block of code.
   at DistantWorlds.Types.IndexedList`1.Add(T item)
   at DistantWorlds.Types.PlanetaryFacilityList.GetFacilitiesAtOrBelowExplorationLevel(Byte level, Boolean shouldBeCompleted)
   at DistantWorlds.UI.SelectionPanel.RenderOrb(SpriteBatch spriteBatch, Vector2 offset, Orb orb)
That’s just a straight up programming error.

My biggest complaint is that the fleet functionality isn't granular enough. You have 4 different models of most hull types (escorts, frigates, destroyers, cruisers, etc), but you can't mix hulls within a fleet automatically - so if you have an escort cruiser model and a line cruiser model, you can't have both.

I have some 150 hours in the game and while I had some issues with crashes in the beginning, a couple of patches ago, they went away and I could play without technical problems.

What I _do_ have some issues with is, that the game is obviously made with the idea to turn a _lot_ of stuff over to automation - which I wouldn't have a problem with, if there were the tools to switch to manual and do it myself (every strategy gamer knows that when you turn something over to the AI that you could do yourself, you're screwed) - but those tools simply aren't there.

You can't set waypoints for your ships/fleets _and_ you can't que up orders _and_ you don't get a message when a ship/fleet completes it's current order - which means that by early to mid game, I have to check my ~30 explorers constantly to see, if some of them have finished their current task, check if my fleets have finished fueling up or have arrived at their staging area or if one of my ~15 construction ships has completed it's order to build that new mining base.

There are also some things you can't turn off by default (well, at least I haven't found a way to do it), like the resource reserves for mining bases, which by default will demand fuel to be stored in them. I guess they are meant as refueling points for your ships - which would be fine for those bases that are above a gas giant and are actually _mining_ fuel, but having several 1000 units of fuel in every single of my 100+ mining bases means that my shipyards are dry as the Sahara desert and while I _can_ turn the automated resource levels off and set fuel to 0, there is no way to do that globally, so I have to go through every single base, switch automatic to manual and then set the reserve level to 0 - and since you don't get a message when a new base is completed, I have to do this again and again and again.

Don't get me wrong, I still like the game (I wouldn't have 150+ hours in it otherwise), but it can get rather frustrating at times.

I gave it a try; two crashes in two hours. Looking at the change log is not very encouraging either. This game might have the record for the most number of reported crash fixes, ever.

Same conclusion really. I know I should refrain from playing it right now and wait, but I'm a bit impatient so I still try to enjoy it, but frustration is rising. Currently banging my head against the non sensical civilian freighters behaviors. Give me manual control and repeat+conditional orders and I'll show you what efficiency is! 

It's finally out!

I'm a bit on the fence about judging it right now though. Clearly DW2 saw an insane amount of work, but the sheer scope of it shows on release, the "paint is not dry" on many things. If you can wait, then wait some patches could be a quick conclusion.

The "paint is not dry" is quite apt. I'm having stability problems right now as my game has crashed multiple times. Usually when the game starts to slow down.

I would also say that performance is a problem, I used to have research tree lag which seems to be fixed now but otherwise there is a bit of mid-game lag even with just a total of <1000 civilian freighters.

The fundamentals of the game though? Jorgen_CAB was right, its all pretty much there.

The ship designer is the main change with the whole component bay business. It is certainly less flexible but not by that much. Ship hull size remains the primary limiting factory and not the component bay types. My only real complaint is that military hulls seem to be very limited on sensor mounts until you start getting proper capitals like cruisers. Idk why its impossible to mount both targeting and countermeasures with a proximity sensor. Oh and you can design your hangar strikecraft in DW2 which is new.

One thing I will say about the ship appearance at least for the humans is that their gun turrets are ugly. I do not like the "orb with noodles sticking out" model and wish that gun turret models looked a bit more substantial, kind of like wet navy turrets that we have had throughout modern naval history. It just doesn't look like the turrets are properly attached. Missile weapons look quite fine though.

It would also be nice if the ship colors adhered to your empires map color. For example, human ships have the grey/blue scheme regardless of what empire color you have. In my example I would hope for them to be something like grey/red as red is the map color for my empire.

Finally, I sincerely hope that they intend to revisit the game editor. Right now, the game editor in Distant Worlds 2 is very limited compared to what DWU had which could affect characters, research tech etc. Many of those things cannot be done through the in-game editor for DW2.

Edit: I should also mention that fleet templates are a thing now and they are great. It makes managing multiple design types for a role easier (I have missile based variants alongside the gun variants for example).

Planet colonization is also better now, you cant magically have humans live on a volcanic planet with tech now unless the planet is super high quality and even then the humans wont do too well on it. This means that multi-species empires are going to have a distinct advantage when it comes to colonizing varieties of planets.

It also means that low quality does not mean uncolonizeable. Certain races can have very strong suitability on low quality worlds like volcanics and very poor suitability for high quality continental because of racial bonuses/penalties.