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.
Recent Posts
