I don't understand the hype for the series. There's a lot of moving parts, but most of it is essentially cosmetic as there's very little meaningful interaction. All the parts that actually do something are extremely simple and basic. It's one of the most shallow 4X games I've played.
If you found it that shallow, why are you here?
The game has a very complex simulation going on under the hood, I wouldn't call it shallow. It's far more nuanced than many other titles held up as gold standards for the genre
The problem is that the "very complex simulation" is shallow. Which sounds like a contradiction, but it's not.
What I mean is, let's say for example you build some giant complex
rube goldberg machine with a thousand moving parts, but all it takes is one button to activate it... that's shallow, you know? The moving parts don't matter if you can't meaningfully interact with them.
So take distant worlds, and it's like... how does population and tax and stuff interact? I have no idea exactly, it's complex. But it does not matter, because the only real option is 0% tax (or as close to 0 as you can sustain) until population is full then max tax. It's
so much better than anything else there's no meaningful decision there.
Or take another example, mining outposts. How do they work? I don't know exactly, there's lots of moving parts. But I do know that there's a cap on how many resources you can get, and the lowest tier harvester can collect that much if you put 2(?) on the blueprint. So researching upgraded harvesting technology, or building lots of harvesting modules on a giant outpost is a total waste. There's no meaningful decisions, you put 2 on every blueprint and ignore it.
Or research. How does research work? No clue. Even the internet does not seem to understand, I've seen so many contradictory posts. You can't interact with it because it has so many moving parts that nobody understands and the game never bothers to explain it. There's no meaningful depth there, nothing to manipulate, no choices to make. You just research stuff according to some arcane formula that nobody can figure out exactly. Zero depth, even though there's (probably) a lot of moving parts.
etc, etc.....
The other problem is that the game is clearly designed for automation, everything can be automated, and there's so many numbers to tweak and things to micromanage you're practically forced to let the AI handle it. So why is that a problem? The AI is goddamn horrible, like holy crap it's stupid - so you either accept micromanagement hell or you assign stuff to the AI and then constantly get frustrated as it ruins everything with it's idiocy. One example is that I was tired of building new ships myself so I let the AI build new ships. It promptly spent
literally all of my money and built so many ships that I had a huge negative income and had to scrap a bunch of them. Why would it do that? I have no idea!
I had really high expectations of the title based on how much B12 praises it, but it's just.. it's not even mediocre, it's probably the worst or second worst 4x I've played.
As for why post if you didn't like it, everyone likes to bitch it's human nature.
Edit:
Here is a short article on depth vs complexity. TL;DR summery:
Depth is “the number of emergent, experientially different possibilities or meaningful choices that come out of one ruleset.” Games with high depth are still strategically interesting and fun even after you have mastered the game’s rules.
Complexity is how difficult it is for the player to understand the rules and their implications. If the game requires the player to track multiple rules at once, it makes it harder for the player to appreciate the depth of the game.
Distant worlds is complex, but lacks depth.
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Topic: Distant Worlds 2 (Read 9725 times)