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.

I've been away a while. And I noticed that my old forum avatar was broken because the URL it was linked to is gone.

So, I replaced it. However, the "Personalized Picture" section on the "forum profile" area seems very vague. Unlike other forums I've participated on, there is no mention of the size (resolution) restriction for avatars, nor is there a mention of whether .PNG, .JPEG, .GIF or whatever formats are accepted.

Can anyone tell me?

I also noticed that most forum avatars are tiny at 65x65 pixels, while the automatically-generated forum avatars ("T", "W", "S", etc.) are quite large at about 125x125.

I did notice at least one large avatar that was not auto-generated which has a resolution of 120x120. So, I created my own avatar image at 120x120 resolution in .JPG and uploaded it. But, for some reason, the forum automatically reduces the display of this avatar down to 65x65...? Is that normal?

Q: Is there some combination of image format and resolution that the forum will display above a resolution of 65x65? If such a thing is really not possible, then why is it some forum avatars (e.g., forum member TMaekler) display as 120x120?

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.

>> Maybe JWST will allow that.

Sadly not, although it will be a great improvement over Hubble. To get a proper look even at the Centauri system, we'll need a space based interferometer with a synthetic aperture in the tens of km at least, and preferably a couple of hundred (although that's getting more into tracking weather on those planets, and extending our "vision" out to a few light years by that stage). As remarkable as the JWST is, it still falls way, WAY short of anything that might properly be described as "good". If you  put it on a 0 - 10 scale, with 0 being Galileio finally being able to make observations not available to the Mk1 eyeball, and 10 being a Type II Kardashev civ being able to observe all objects in the Milky Way in all wavelengths and gravitational waves in more-or-less real time, the JWST is maybe a 1. Maybe.

On the flip side, look at how much we've learned already, even without the benefit of good equipment, and most observations having to have been made through the murky gunk of Earths atmosphere. Once we have some actually good observational data to work with,. who knows what we'll find?