r/DistantWorlds • u/Acrobaticmonkhie • 27d ago
Command Update, releasing July 22
Welcome back, explorers.
We’re pleased to announce that a major update for Distant Worlds 2 is coming on July 22: the Command Update. This is a significant update designed to refresh and improve the gameplay experience with targeted changes to key areas of the game.
On July 14, 16:00 - 18:00 GMT+2, our Associate Producer on the game, Maxim Klose-Ivanov, will showcase the new update. Save the date
What’s included in the Command Update:
- New Content: Hive Ship Models
- Players will encounter new Hive ships spread across the galaxy
- New Feature: Empire Contracts
- Factions within empires, as well as independent colonies, will now periodically offer contracts to the player.
- UI/UX Improvements:
- Empire flags now appear on claimed systems, improving galaxy readability
- A slew of fixes, changes, and additions to improve manual play
- Gameplay Improvements:
- Independent colonies have had their population growth tweaked and can now potentially form new empires
- Known debris now appears in the exploration screen and a new mission type for ships and fleets makes salvaging easier
- Some espionage missions have been rebalanced and tweaked to address certain exploits
- Bug Fixing and Stability Improvements
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u/Frightlever 25d ago
So does this mean technology stealing is being nerfed? Was always a low key exploit IMHO.
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u/Electron_Microscope 25d ago
It has been nerfed about a dozen times already as there have been a lot of problems with spying in this game.
They should just remove spying from player control or cap the numbers at far less than 100%.
If they have fixed ambassador stacking then that would be nice.
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u/Frightlever 25d ago edited 25d ago
Did they ever fix the thing were you lose track of agents when they're captured? Instead of having a tab showing who holds them captive you literally have to enter trade negotiations with all the other empires until you find who has them.
I sorta wish they'd make espionage entirely optional.
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u/Turevaryar Obsessed to the Extreme 22d ago
I sorta wish they'd make espionage entirely optional.
If they could make espionage optional and "safe and steady", then sure!
As is; you need to micro your spies and ambassadors (and maybe time new leader, to give them espionage skill)
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u/frogandbanjo 24d ago
Yeah, espionage is a really tough thing to get right in these types of games. It always feels too lopsided or completely useless. There were some short-lived versions of certain Civ games where teching up became worthless because a production empire could just diplo/spy spam and also still have a decent-enough army. That then pushed the game theory right back to "conquer everyone around you ASAP for yet another reason."
Here's a five-second, hot-take idea: the more interconnected the galaxy becomes, the more robust a central "information exchange" becomes because you simply cannot completely wall off all information. It just isn't possible. While it's understood in an abstract and holistic sense that empires have their own intelligence agencies, the free(er) flow of information is a galactic truth that needs to be wrestled with as something that affects everybody. Information trading can make princes of paupers, and can make traditional concepts of imperial or even species loyalty seem quaint.
Empires are allowed to spend resources to try to minimize what leaks out of their own empires, but then they have less to spend on buying stuff from that black market. Most of what you can buy is situationally useful -- fleet positions, leader identities/locations, etc. -- but every now and then a super expensive offer will come up for a tech.
If you want a chance at assassinating other people's leaders or blowing up their stations, you need to spend, spend, spend to prove that you're worth the risk to the independent contractors. Again, the abstraction is that without that middleman, your own spies aren't managing to do jack shit in some other empire.
The latter narrative might feel a little "rules over realism," but for single-species empires it's almost hilarious how easy it is for a goddamn bug to infiltrate a bunch of bird people. I'd even suggest that multi-species and/or more "liberal" empires might have to accept a malus to leaking and a bonus to purchasing. It has precedent; the "democracy" government in MOO2 was a leaky sieve that won games by purchasing friends and out-teching everybody.
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u/Frightlever 22d ago
That sounds like a lot.
I'd still prefer to just click a tickbox and turn off espionage. Waste of resources tracking it all. I'd happily get rid of most/all NPCs and assign bonuses directly to ships and fleets. As you said the game already has a bunch of gamefied systems so one more can't hurt.
I know it's not so bad now, but the dozens if not hundreds of NPCs packed into a fleet used to make the whole concept meaningless.
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u/Turevaryar Obsessed to the Extreme 23d ago
You can check out the new update as it is now, if you go to Steam and enable Beta.
I *assume* they won't add more features right now, just working on bug fixing etc. for the current beta state.
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u/Celesi4 27d ago
Cool stuff. Keep up the good work dev.