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I would prefer they not adjust hyperspeed to resolve this issue - I quite like that it can take a long time to get around, with very noticeable improvements by late game. The problem is in early empires there is very little to do. My suggestion is to make the planet development, population interaction, and leadership management mechanics more involved. As is, these have basically zero decision making to each of them, especially during the early game. While I appreciate the streamlining of some typical 4x systems, they are too streamlined in my opinion. I think there is some happy medium where these mechanics could help fill some of the dead time that especially plagues early, pre-warp games.
Hive ships are notoriously slippery. That's intended, and so are ships retreating in general. Goes both ways- very difficult galaxies would be especially harder if they couldn't retreat. As one who plays difficult galaxies all the time, ships retreating is a *very* important feature. Can't afford too many losses. Also, you're using a deathball fleet. Ships are supposed to run from that.
About game speed, there is no speed you're supposed to play it. It's purely an optional feature, specifically for those who feel the game is too slow or for when they want to have no difficulty doing their commands in real time. x1 speed is simply the default speed. If anything, you're supposed to speed up the game when you're just waiting and slow it down when you have more commands to give than you have time for.
So. Hyperdrive speed. The game is predominantly a strategic game- effectively a grand strategy game- which means the time it takes for your game pieces to move around the board is supposed to take time. Your prime concern should be deciding how to handle the empire's resources- most notably, its fleets. These choices benefit from foresight, understanding, and planning. Reactive choices on the strategic level are supposed to be in response to new information, including surprises- similarly, though, these become choices you made as new plans.
On the strategic level, you don't catch your foes with big fleets. You force your opponents to commit or make them pay by hitting their assets. The Hive has no assets, and like a guerilla force, is difficult to get rid of and typically takes time. Chasing them down takes a large force and a lot of fuel, or you can whittle them down with penetrating weapons over time- either way, you're taking some losses until you have rivaling technology.
Likewise, shipbuilding speed is slow. You can't just RTS-style build an appreciable force at the site of the battle, you have to decide what forces will be at your disposal first.
Tactical battles, where your choices have an impact now, are thankfully also a big part of DW2. The charge time of jump drives matters here. If a ship jumps away, it has left the battle and is effectively eliminated from the tactical engagement. You're one step closer to the battle's victory. Victory in battle is not the destruction of their ships- it is the assets you are protecting or assaulting.
A battle can take some time, long enough that both sides might see reinforcements despite the slow time- but such reinforcements are a big deal. The forces that you commit (or the AI commits) are a choice made minutes before the battle is joined, at least. Running around with a single giant deathball, this is missed. When you engage in larger-scale warfare against stronger opponents, you'll see that you'll need a lot more than a single deathball.
I don't think the game should tell you how to Strategy. The game is deliberately easy, so you can Emperor of Mankind with a big fleet and win and have good feels. No shame. It's a game. Have fun (and play at the speed you like)!
Management of assimilated ships is the most infuriating aspect of the game for me right now.
Yes, 1x-speed is the default speed in every game, and I think that the (main) reason
for this is that this is the speed where you can observe things in location view (= very close) to get a sense of the speed the simulation that should look/feel realistically and that should make it possible to watch all the things closely that you might miss or can't comprehend otherwise (= with faster time-developement) - like fueling/speeding up your ships, exploring/surveying/mining planets, or like the many actions of your private economy, etc., etc.
However this indeed can be quite boring (/give you the feel that you have to wait a lot) when there isn't much to do (for you as a manual player, or for the AI of the player-empire) at the beginning of a game - especially with a pre-warp setting. And therefore the DEVs have also given you the option to speed up these things with (almost God-like) accelerating the time to your liking (= x2/x4).
(There was also even the option to speed up things in x8-speed in some of the past Beta-versions (and I would, too, appreciate it very much if this would make a return very soon), but for some technical reasons the DEVs changed it back to x4 at max, but also stated that they plan to give us the x8-speed-option back, some time in the future.
But with bigger empires, more AI-opponents and in later games the above can get very different and if thousands of things have to be simulated - and controlled/apprehended - all together at the same time it might come in very handy to slow things down again a bit, because for the time you e.g. watch a ground-/space-battle up closely, every thing else is developing everywhere else in the simultation simultaneously and you might miss a lot you wanted to do/watch/control additionally at other places/sections of the game (which is also why you even can go below x1-speed or pause the game).
No, you're not supposed to play "the game at x2/3/4 etc. speed" (you're not supposed to play it at ANY specific speed), but you're supposed to play it at the speed that YOU like most (at the given situation/part of the game) or that suits YOU best for the given goals the game gives you or you give to yourself (as a player/leader/observer of your empire). And also no, I don't think that the game (or anybody else) should/ would need to tell you this, because, in a nutshell, this is what DW2 is all about at its core: YOU (and anybody else who might have very different opinions/feelings/expectations/play-styles, etc.) should be able to play the game YOU like best.
This, with due respect, is a bit stupid, don't you think ? (no offense or pun intended)
If you think this through - and it would be "RELATIVE to everything else" - it would be nothing less than a cheat you can activate to speed up things only for you or only for a special purpose of you - like e.g. to shorten the time for your ships to get from A to B...
Yes, I think you're missing the imagination of a simulation that can be accelerated/slowed down by your own will with (almost) God-like abilities in order to suit your own preferences or to help you with immersion -on one side- and with strategic/tactical decissions/actions -on the other side.
I certainly wont play on anything less; its just far too boring.
And yeah, I play Rimworld on 16x speed as well.
I don't let the AI build any ships or organise fleets (nor am ever likely to), so that's not an issue. All my assimilated ships were first checked for hyperdrive speed and when determined it was (at the time) better than mine, they were put into their own fleet; and they have remained there since when it became a dumping ground for such ships as they don't match the current loadout. So that, at least, is not a cause of the the issue.
But to me, it feels like it goes out of it's way to have fleets which are seemingly supposed to BE reactive, though - defence fleets, the setting for automated reaction with fuel distances etc. - but everything flies so slowly *even at the top of the tech tree* that by the time anything has reacted to something, it seems like it doesn't matter.
I've played a fair number of grand strats - and I have been seeking a successor for Sword of the Star's guilded if slightly age-tarnished crown for years. I just don't particularly recall feeling this same level of sending troops around feeling wading through molasses before.
It feels like it's set-up for a more dynamic, strategic play (which is what I expected), but that isn't reflective of what appears the ponderous nature of transit time. And I mean, I'm not talking starting out of the gate here, bottom-level FTL speed is fine. But I'm probably most of the way through the whole tech tree (and all the way through the hyperdrive) and it feels like there's a good tier or two, just like, missing.
(But I think communicating stuff to players is something DW2 needs work on particularly, especially given the fact that the best manual is essential fanmade.)
I feel like, with this revelation that, no, I AM basically at the top and it's not going to get any better that I should really just be going right back to SotS's modus operandii of having a defence fleet parked at every colony (because you simply CAN'T react in time to intercept, because it takes too long) - and every fleet MUST have an interdictor - and the one or two war fleets for actual offence. (Maybe not even have a seperate invasion fleet.) Instead of trying to keep the number of fleets down and having a more dynamic defence with fewer fleets in selected location; it feels like the game *wants* you to do that, but doesn't seem to terribly gel with it in practise.
(It does not help that there does not appear to be a way to determine what direction the AI will choose to fly a ship when you tell it to go to a location, which would really useful, given how pretty uninitutive it seems at the moment; if there is and I just don 't know what it is, I'll point back at the communication to player thing again.)
I'm trying not to harp on the game here too much, but I feel like after playing today and finding myself thinking more and more about "Things I Will Say in My Personal Traditional After First Game Feedback Thread" than *playing* said game, sommat has, as they say, gang aft a-gley. And when I realised there wasn't anywhere upwards from where I am for this, so that I wasn't just, like treading water until I got to the point Things Would Be Better With High Tech, figured I needed to do this thread.
(Sidenote: I do not, particularly, consider a 50-ship fleet to be particularly big (for a map with hundreds of stars). I fully expect to be using a fleet composed of multiple designs from across the entire breadth of hull ranges (I am glad I waited until now, because only having one class per hull size would have been intolerable). Though I threw around "deathball" earlier slightly facetiously, a true deathball I would consider having, like a few hundred ships, or, like, a fleet of 50 battle cruisers, not a mix of (currently) frigates and destroyers.)
Pretty much, yeah. Just shut the game down, but I'm pretty sure I've got them on at least my standard platforms.
I looked at the workshop and saw the XL mod and that it was by Mordachai, who (among others) did the stellar BSoTS mods for SotS; that looks like it addresses a lot of the issues I had, so next playthrough, I'mma try that.
I generally have attack policy set to "suggest" to avoid my fleets chasing down freighters and willy-nilly invading independent colonies.
I am not sure if it is Hyperdrive speed necessarily, but something feels off about combat compared to DWU
You have to work with the game and not against it and understand that the slow pace of the game is intended.
Outside of the very early game I rarely go above 1x and later on I even play on half to 1x speed as so many things need to be managed and looked over all the time. A game like this is something you play for the journey and not the destination.
This game are rewarding long term planning and does not suit very well to reactive thinking like you do in most strategy games.
You need to plan far ahead what you need and what you want to do, sometimes decades in advance to set up good defences or logistical hubs so you can do what you need to do effectively. This is especially important in more difficult galaxy settings where the AI will be way ahead of you for a very long time.
@Aotrs, I saw on Discord that you'll be shelving DW2 for a while, but will you let us know how you found Mordachai's mod in this regard? It's perpetually on my (give it a try) list...
@APhoenixSoaring: I often park dedicated colony defense fleets- they're smaller than typical defense fleets- at my 100m+ population border colonies and largest major colonies once I can afford a few attack fleets. They don't leave the systems and are designed to be cheap, durable, and pack a bite for their cost, favoring Epsilon torpedoes paired with impact blasters. Even better given the capability on smaller ships, are fighters. Issuing an automated fleet with an engagement range of System a Guard order is a quick way to reposition such a fleet temporarily to aid another colony fleet. They'll return to their home base automatically, assuming they see combat.
I also include even smaller automated fleets for defense with sector engagement range. They are faster with long-range firepower as their focus with timid retreat settings (missiles or torpedoes, not fighters, so they can retreat as needed). Between these two types of fleets, they do a decent job watching my empire's back while I oversee battle elsewhere. In my last game, this approach held back a sudden (but anticipated) Gizurean attack long enough for my attack fleets to divert from an opportunistic war with Teekans on the other side of the empire.
The AI will cancel an attack if too many defense forces arrive, but are less willing to call off the attack if they're actually engaged. Using numerous skirmishers this way can whittle down larger forces while slowing down their offense, and if done just right, can declaw fleets that overestimated their ability compared to the cheap defenders.
That's not all. I employ more raid fleets than anything, no stronger than a single light cruiser. Their sole purpose is to capture ships and stations with a mix of tactical and retreat settings and stealth. The AI hates losing stations to marines and will throw an entire attack fleet at your pesky 3 frigate force armed with just 6 impact blasters between them and a bunch of assault pods. Laugh as your stealth variation raiders hit their Attack Point under Do Not Engage engagement range and run away just as a full battle fleet arrives to see the station switch banners. Cheap as cookies, and a relatively easy way to start starving a real threat of caslon. Bonus points for capturing stations of value, especially that +20% All Research station. Completely disposable. However, they can only work in tandem with attack fleets- on their own, they'll be wiped out soon enough.
Like Jorgen said, though, I don't value most stations themselves. Mining stations aren't just replaceable, they're profitable to rebuild, so long as the civilians can afford it (one reason I don't squeeze my civilians dry). Still, engaging the enemy with long-range, cautious ships can tie up a lot of enemy potential in skirmishing, buying time for your real battle fleets to get where you need them to do their work.
On top of that, I now almost always use robotic troops to defend colonies, shuffled around automatically by solo troop transports- not to prevent them from being captured by themselves, but like dedicated colony defense fleets, is just there to slow down the enemy and force them to commit a more serious force. As soon as I see "Invasion Fleet Incoming", I grab a counter-invasion troop fleet of pure infantry and send it that way (provided it is sensible). Killing troop transports loaded with battalions is preferable, but infantry is dirt cheap and strong defensively and will slow down the AI better than dedicating more defense ships of the same cost. Ships can retreat, but committed armies can't. You can cripple the invasion capability of much mightier opponents using this method, if you can keep the transports safe and not forget to get them out of town before hostile ships bear down on them (not that I'd ever forget about my loyal troop transport captains *nervous sweat*). It requires manual input and attention in order to time their landing during an assault, however, and your army could end up stranded on the colony if the AI throws a huge number of ships at the colony to wait for another, much bigger, invasion. Still, that's a win- you've stalled the enemy for a long time and forced them to commit more of their forces - and constructing a fortification at that point might save your bacon. Assuming you don't build big expensive transports for this purpose. They're supposed to be expendable.
Meanwhile, you're planting your flag on their juicy colonies, right? RIGHT? Ironically, if you don't want to war due to comparatively weak forces, posturing to invade their colonies is the best way to end the war quickly- at least, so I've found. Really not sure if that's the best way, but I notice the AI in a war they actually engage in most typically offers to end it just as an invasion fleet is pulling up on the door of a colony. I have seen AI offer to end wars after a desperate but successful defense that crippled its offensive capability, typically in the early game. However, clearly economically superior empires seem to rarely, if ever, offer to end in this manner.
All that to say, while interstellar movement is slow, and sub-FTL movement is too, it's fast enough- and slow enough- to satisfy the strategic element of the game in dynamic strategic and tactical engagements. DW:U combat was almost instantly joined and relatively quickly ended- a proverbial siege of a colony could take just a moment with an overwhelming enough force (flashbacks of the giant pirate fleet come to mind), but not so in DW2.
Reinforcements are commonplace before battle is effectively over and to be expected with automation- as said earlier, reinforcements are a big deal for DW2. This is a distinct contributing reason to why blasters aren't the end-all weapon in DW2 in more difficult galaxies. Reinforcements typically join the battle at long range and can whittle down short-ranged fleets with long-range weapons, and cause them to split over a space much larger than their maximum range. Reinforcing fleets arrive with a high concentration of force, allowing them to easily dispatch spread-out blaster fleets. Long-ranged fleets are much better at dealing with being spread out and can even perform their mission better in doing so in some circumstances- like the above strategy with sector-range small fleets with missiles against enemies with Titan Blasters while you're sporting mid-tier tech.
Many strategy games don't handle reinforcements as fluidly as DW2 does either (please no more games that allow reinforcements based on the number of units you have in the battle *disgruntled glare at Age of Empires 4*). And with a history of games that instantly resolve combat on the strategic level (like SotS2), I think that this can make it feel strange. I find it refreshing.
Will try and do so when I do.
I didn't really mention it on discord (because I was too shattered both when I finished the game and yesterday), but I did find to one war I fought was instructive, and at very least, very different to the usual "balls of fleets" things. Strong point in DW2's favour on the strategic level.
(For the record, for people here, the shelving is happening simply because I have an absolutely metric-frack-ton of work to do; soul-crushingly tedious uploading of files to a new webstore front where I sells wargames models, but that demands just enough attention that after a full day's work, I'm too knackered (especially in recovering from a nasty flu-y cold); which combined lead me to the decision that starting a new game (mod or not) was probably too much effort at this point. (Ditto, for example, going back to my ongoing Aurora 4X game.) Hell, I'm here typing this because I conned myself into doing another hour's overtime and I'm not even sure what I DO want to play next...
As prior to DW2, I spent Dec-April playing Wrath of the Rightetous and April to Sept playing Rimworld - a single game in each case - maybe something, like... Shorter...!)
I found myself leaving short-ranged weapons somewhat by the wayside as the game progressed, simply because the "charge screaming to point-blank range" tactic that would favour them isn't fast enough, which skews towards long-range weapons just being better. I feel like there is a strong argument (and I think it might have been mentioned in Scott's guide?) that missiles are along the best weapons simple because of their long range.
(But I tried a mix of weapons anyway, though, because fitting out starships to do different jobs with different loadouts is, like 75% of the point of a starship game in my opinion. Granted, I may be slightly biased as someone why literally (on a good day) makes starship fleets for a living, but stuff like (especially in Stellaris's meta) monofleet ships is a total athema.)
On the subject of reinforcements, I thought SotS 1's way of handling it (and I guess similarly Empire at War's) in effectively only having a discrete element of your fleets around at once wasn't terrible, myself... But I feel like it also might have been more of an engine limitation, since SotS 1 still only runs adequately on my modern machine even with the memory patch and such.