Bay 12 Games Forum

Glloyd gave me a hand and found the bug that crashed my map when I tried to save.

can I board those lone traders for their juicy technology?

Yes. Right-click an independent ship with an assault pod-equipped one and choose "board." They'll attack and board it like any other ship, although it may irritate some people.

The Witcher 3 is the top selling game on Steam right now. That's curious because it's still on preorder - to be released next February. Although I never played the first two, I heard they were good games. I wouldn't doubt the dev's ability to deliver again, but a preorder offer this early scares me a little.

Hmmm...are Q-ships possible in this game? Ships that look like freighters and act like freighters but are actually armed and player-owned?

Partially. You can arm civilian ships with a single weapon and change their response to hostile ships. If you asked me, I'd strap a death ray (if applicable) to all new freighter designs and set the ships to attack enemies to the bitter end. Unfortunately, you can never gain control of a civilian ship.

I think I found one hanging around the command center of an alien base, but it's been a while since I played. Just be careful with the telepads.

Supplementary video for your pleasure.

2204.12.27: the Shakturi have been stomped into the ground by the Ancient Guardians a. I should've seen this coming with the massive firepower advantage the Guardians had, but it still surprised me how quickly they reacted. There were frequent months-long space battles going on over the Shakturi homeworld, ending with the space port being crushed and almost the entire fleet destroyed. They've managed to rebuild some of their military, but they're below twenty-fifth place on the military strength list. It's kind of sad and funny at the same time: The monstrously evil bringers of death are the only friends of the Gizurean Collective.

The Collective has yet to enter a war that wasn't started by us, although a few empires are starting to open fire on my ships when they refuse to leave their systems. The second war with the Mortalu Council has just ended after bombing their homeworld with nukes and invading both it and their last colony. Curiously, that last planet had only three billion people but seven different races. All of them are the same in the eyes of the slavers, though. The planet also provides a nice forward operating base for any operations that may be launched in the center of the galaxy, such as permanently acquiring the spice mine.

Speaking of spice: the price of it is now down to 147.4. The Shakturi and my own empire are the only ones with access, so the significant value loss is expected.

I'm 43% of the way to victory, 80% being the threshold. I'm slowly seizing the GDP and population universal conditions and I'm working on the "highest number of military ships constructed" racial condition, although ~2200 is a hard number to top, even with the oversized civilian fleet that could be escorted. My game is also starting to lag a good bit when I zoom in on certain systems.

My empire is the golden one at the top-middle.

Now that universe has been out for a while, has anyone noticed any other noticeable changes than modding support and the new story? sorry to keep asking, I'm just a bit on the fence about it as I don't care about either of those aspects, but if there were other noticeable changes I'd go for it.

Not as far as I can tell, although being able to link it with Steam is nice. Only $10 if you have all the other parts, too.

Quote from: Jacob/Lee on June 02, 2014, 01:35:31 pm

Quote from: Lord Snow on June 02, 2014, 12:58:53 pm

ok, next question: how do you make sure you have a good mix?

Didn't see any additional options, other than "load troops at nearest"

You can garrison troops at the colony through the troop menu to prevent ships from picking them up. Garrison a good chunk of all unit types so there's a desired mix of units being loaded on board. I'm honestly not sure how the game decides what troops to pick up when told to load the ships.

If you're invading a colony and meet an insane level of resistance (like on homeworlds with fifteen+ billion people), sometimes it's worth it to kill a few people or five billion with nuclear bombardment to lower their strength enough so you can invade with a reasonable army. I keep a few ships armed with nuclear devastators for just such an occasion.

EDIT: I think the Distant Worlds equivalent of World War II just started. In a matter of three days, war was declared over twenty times between different empires. This'll be fun to watch.

The game determines what units to carry via the percentages in the policy tab, I think.

I just noticed a couple tabs and was about to make a post on it.

Anyway, troop loadout is determined by percentages on the ship/fleet screen. Go to the fleet menu and select the fleet, then set the percentage of whatever units you want in the boxes at the bottom-middle of the screen. If it's a lone ship, find it on the ships menu and click the "troops & characters" tab, which has a column of boxes similar to the fleet menu.

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Korabbian Spice is worth quite a lot, apparently, like Zentabia Fluid. I had actually discovered one source of both in the galaxy, both of which were already in other empires' areas of influence, so I didn't bother at the time. However, when I was finished rubbing out the Fire Gang and most of the Mortalu Council, I decided to take a shot at it.

The Korabbian Spice was covered by the Enton Domain's area of influence, who didn't exactly like me. They didn't claim the moon it was on, though. I guess they never discovered it and the other resources on the moon were too worthless to justify building a mining station. The other problem was that it was halfway across the galaxy, smack in the middle. I got over this obstacle for the most part by parking a few resupply ships in caslon nebulae between my space and theirs.

I first started with money. I had a couple million excess credits so I showered them in wealth. I also granted them mining and refuelling rights. Eventually, with enough cash, I managed to get our relationship up to the positives and they gave me mining rights. I swooped in with a construction ship and built a mining station, claiming the Korabbian Spice for the Gizurean Collective! They were pretty pissed off after being stood up, it seems, because they demanded the station from us multiple times, to which our response was "go fuck yourselves." It's occasionally crippled by the neverending sand slugs, even with its twenty railguns, but it's repaired at a good enough pace. The civilians rabidly selling the spice and my refusal to let it go to any other empire has crashed the price from 600 to 329 in a matter of five years.

An ongoing war has given the Khulum Confederacy control over a nearby colony, placing the spice mine in their sphere of influence. They immediately demanded it from us, to which the response was the same. A resupply ship is being moved to the gas giant the moon orbits and combat vessels are being deployed to maintain control over this valuable asset. The Confederacy will be crushed before that mine is lost. The Zentabia Fluid source is held by another, even more hostile empire. I won't bother with trying to wrench that from them just yet.

Other things of note include the relocation of alien races in the Collective's space to frontier slave worlds, a hot war between half the galaxy and the Shakturi (to which we support the Shakturi via massive piles of cash), the explosion of the civilian and state fleets alike, a massive chain of declarations of war in response to the Shakturi incident, and the Collective approaching seventy-five billion members of almost purely Gizurean citizens. The year is 2191 and the Collective has yet to stumble, much less fall.