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[Orb]

Uh. As far as I understood it, recreation and medicine increase a planets happiness, which means either higher population growth (happiness = pop growth I think) or higher taxes (higher taxes = less happiness). Having a small space port on a large population planet can pay for itself with the increased taxes. I don't think they increase development or population growth directly, but I'm not sure about the pop growth as I never directly tested it.

I've seen the AI stick medical facilities on troop transports, and I've seen troop regiments regain strength while on troop transports. I can only assume that means you need medical facilities on the troop transport to heal troops after a battle and return them to full strength.

As far as research is concerned, I'm pretty sure you'll only ever hit the "max" research potential if you have no bonuses. Bonuses increase it past that. Though I suppose I never spammed 100 research facilities and looked at the result.

Maybe we should do some hard testing and make our own guide.

[Biowraith]

I've seen the AI stick medical facilities on troop transports, and I've seen troop regiments regain strength while on troop transports. I can only assume that means you need medical facilities on the troop transport to heal troops after a battle and return them to full strength.

I'm pretty sure the blurb for the medical centre states this more or less outright.  Though I think it phrases it as it allows troops to heal faster, rather than it's required for them to heal at all.

[Mindmaker]

Does some sort of beginner guide exist for this game?

[Talfryn]

If people need help still I'd be happy to write a comprehensive guide. I've played probably... 40 hours + reading most of the up to date guides.

[Drakale]

After a game or two though, I suggest you try it out with every automation disabled. I understood so much more of the mechanics that way. As your empire grow, you can automate the more bothersome tasks like scouting.

[majikero]

Been playing this for the past week or so. I'll be dispensing some wisdom.

1. Put tax at 5% at the start. Especially when you go pre-warp. Low tax makes pops grow faster. When it maxes out, tax them as high as you can, that means 100% tax compliance. It typically means happiness should be at 20 minimum.

2. Missiles is a really, really good weapon. Low cost, low weight, low energy but also low damage. High range makes it the winner.

3. Design everything. You really really want to do this eventually. Clicking the "auto upgrade" in the design screen next to the "manual upgrade" updates relevant tech if you unlock a new component. That means you don't have to manually replace obsolete components on each design.

4. Space ports are resource hubs. Putting too many will strain your economy as they try to supply each and every one. Design a defensive base or star base with commerce, medical, entertainment and some docking.

5. Labs are dead weight on space ports. You only need one port with labs and that's your homeworld port. Expand it if necessary.

[Rez]

Seems like you might want to have one more lab-station that you can use as a holding facility for Demoralizing characters that you don't really want to dismiss

[Vendayn]

Been playing this for the past week or so. I'll be dispensing some wisdom.

1. Put tax at 5% at the start. Especially when you go pre-warp. Low tax makes pops grow faster. When it maxes out, tax them as high as you can, that means 100% tax compliance. It typically means happiness should be at 20 minimum.

I put mine at 0 (from right at the start). Which, depends on the circumstances and persons opinion (I'm not an expert by any means). But, I find I get enough income through civilian to pretty much pay for lack of taxes. I do get close to losing money (sometimes even negative, before that first space port is built)...but, it pays off in the long run. I get a huge population, really fast...and once the real wars happen, I raise taxes to whatever number sounds good and I tend to have an advantage (at least early on). Sometimes before that, I raise them to 3-5, for a brief income...but I tend to leave it at 0. I get max population home system really fast this way.

I do have more than one space port in my home system (one large, rest small)...depending on what planets are available. So if I'm a desert race, and there are 2 (or 3) desert planets...my homeworld has the large main spaceport, and the other 2 have kind of crappy greatly trimmed down ones. I could of course do star bases or whatever instead, but I prefer star ports in my home system. Why? Dunno...just feels right to me, whether its bad or not. Its my home system! Everywhere else, tends to not get any space ports (I go the star base path) except for key or best systems I come across. Too many space ports breaks economy I found out (the hard way lol)


3. Design everything. You really really want to do this eventually. Clicking the "auto upgrade" in the design screen next to the "manual upgrade" updates relevant tech if you unlock a new component. That means you don't have to manually replace obsolete components on each design.

Even if that design is shitty...DESIGN IT!

5. Labs are dead weight on space ports. You only need one port with labs and that's your homeworld port. Expand it if necessary.

As said, having an extra port with a bunch of labs to send the advisers/scientists or whatever you don't want...send them there to their deaths! TO THE WORST PLANET FURTHEST FROM YOUR HOME! MAKE THEM DIE! HAHAHAHA!...oh...I mean...you heard NOTHING...NOTHING!

[Flare]

I think I read somewhere that the best lab of a type of a stationary space object will count towards research. I think someone deduced from this that if you make a special design of each station type, and stuff labs in them just so you can build one of each, you'd get a phenomenal research stack.

[Jacob/Lee]

I do, if only for the smuggling and to crush them with my fleets of Hell later in the game.

[majikero]

I always have them on. Spawned with 3 raider pirates near me in the center of a spiral galaxy. They keep raiding my only source of materials for torpedoes.

I can't build a big enough stockpile to justify the loses from hitting their bases.

There is also a criminal network near me with no hidden base or fortress, it's weird.

[inteuniso]

The Two Other Pirate factions are raiding the Owners of the Criminal Network, destroying the Base/Fortress while the Network is under Construction.

Pirates are really aggressive with Ground Invasions, they just don't lose ships on quick Raids.

I really need to mod in Ship-Based Deployable Heavy Short-Range AOE.

[EnigmaticHat]

Want to know something fun about pirates?  The way that raids work for them isn't via troops, its via boarding modules.  This means a few things:

• If you really want to have a lot of troops, you can have a LOT of troops.
• You can raid planets as fast as the boarding modules come back on line.  You don't even have to leave.
• As a coronary to the above, if a large fight goes on long enough, you can send in more troops using the same ships.  So if one ship spawns 6 units, it can have 12 units active in the same fight as long as the fight lasts long enough.
• Pirate raids generate income but you don't have to finance the troops that carry the raids out.

So yeah, if you can get a few planets early game under you control and raid them repeatedly, it can be VERY profitable.  Also the AI doesn't really understand piracy and will only use like one boarding module per ship.

As for playing with pirates if you don't have them the game changes dramatically because you don't need defensive fleets or stations.  The only truly threatening space fauna, except maybe extremely early game, are the nanite clouds and those are incapable of leaving their system.  So as long as you have a strong enough fleet to discourage war, and don't actively piss anyone off you basically don't need to worry about defense.  If you do have pirates on the game is about measuring your expansion rate versus your ability to defend all your various planets and mining operations.  Without pirates I imagine its more about explosive expansion and grabbing every resource and planet available Galactic Civs style.

[Retropunch]

As for playing with pirates if you don't have them the game changes dramatically because you don't need defensive fleets or stations.  The only truly threatening space fauna, except maybe extremely early game, are the nanite clouds and those are incapable of leaving their system.  So as long as you have a strong enough fleet to discourage war, and don't actively piss anyone off you basically don't need to worry about defense.  If you do have pirates on the game is about measuring your expansion rate versus your ability to defend all your various planets and mining operations.  Without pirates I imagine its more about explosive expansion and grabbing every resource and planet available Galactic Civs style.

This is actually a very interesting point, and it actually shows how good it is to have the strong pirates of Distant worlds. I *HATE* the colonization grabbing game in 4x games. It just feels so forced and silly somehow and Pirates stop that becoming an issue.
However, I do wish that the pirates would be a little bit more sensible/not expand quite so much. Even with low settings you can easily end up with 20 or so pirate factions which become incredibly hard to keep track of, especially as they back track on protection agreements constantly.

[EnigmaticHat]

If you want a middle ground turn off pirate respawning.  With that option on every time a faction is eliminated a new one is created, possibly in the midst of your territory if you've expanded enough.  The best you can do is keep wiping them out until the new ones that spawn do so in other parts of the galaxy and you're basically left alone.

I've found that once you reach a certain point they're just a massive nuisance rather than a legitimate threat anyway, so its nice when they start to get trimmed down and you can focus on other civs.  My pirate game (the Ladies of Looting, a Securian pirate faction because fuck optimization) I won, but I played a bit after I won and my insanely powerful pirate faction slowly slipped into financial weakness and lost territory.  The powerful civs that were distant from me became too powerful for me to easily harass while pirate factions began muscling in on my territory and there was no profit in killing them.

I view this game as a sort of Mediterranean trading empire in space simulation.  Its not really about the war, its about expanding your influence and defending your trade.  That's why its too bad the diplomacy options are so thin, it really needs a Vicky style system for powerful civs to compete for influence over weak civs.