“Pathfinder”
1.0.8.3 Official Update
This massive update takes a series of steps towards completing our current roadmap to both fix reported issues with Distant Worlds 2 but also to improve a variety of gameplay areas as part of ongoing post-release support.
Based on community feedback, over the course of two months of development for this update, we have significantly improved and in some areas redesigned Research, Diplomacy and Reputation, Subjugation and Wars, Colonization and Migration, Performance and Memory Management, User Interface, AI and Ship and Fleet Behavior.
Thanks to the generous work of composer / sound designer Jeff Dodson of rainfall.tv, we have also added new significantly improved and rebalanced sound effects for most components and weapons, explosions, etc. Jeff's trailer sound design work is heard in small projects like “Star Wars” and should help spice up combat among other things.
Finally, we’ve doubled the available empire flags and colors and added guidance on the main galaxy setup for which galaxy sizes are best suited to your computer hardware. We strongly recommend starting a new game with 1.0.8.3 in order to benefit from all the changes and improvements it has to offer compared to the last official update. We wish your empire success as you travel to Distant Worlds!
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PLEASE NOTE: .Net 6 is now required to run the game. Steam should start to install it automatically. If your Steam client does not start the install, please Exit Steam and try again. This should hopefully refresh the client and force it to do so.
If the prompt with .Net 6.0.5 doesn't appear, please download .Net from the link below. Then restart your PC:
.Net 6.0
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you still experience crashes, please try the new DXVK rendering option in the game settings. This can be found under "Rendering Mode", which can be switched from DirectX 11 to DXVK. DXVK should also be used together with SDR (rather than HDR) for best results. This will likely resolve many issues caused by driver bugs or incompatibilities. If you try this setting and the game does not launch, please note there is a command line option to switch back to DirectX 11. To use add /use-dx11 as a command-line argument to DistantWorlds2.exe
Detailed Changes in 1.0.8.3 (November 1st, 2022):
CRASH FIXES
- fixed game not starting for some players who had other software that improperly mapped the wrong versions of shared files (freetype.dll)
- fixed rare crash when determining jump path time to destination star system
- fixed rare crash when determining docking bay parking spot
- fixed rare crash when calculating docking position offset
- fixed rare crash when inserting ship into docking wait queue
- fixed crash that sometimes occurred when declaring war
- fixed crash when drawing ship weapon summary
- fixed crash when ship assigns exploration mission
- fixed crash when rendering background room for character
- fixed rare crash when drawing ship health summary
- fixed rare crash when unloading troops at colony
- fixed rare crash when fleet checks whether should invade colony
- fixed rare crash when displaying trade offer with independent colony locations
- fixed crash when determining random docking position for ship
- fixed crash when drawing empire economy
- fixed crash when showing some tour screens
START NEW GAME SCREEN
- in Start New Game screen added warning borders and tooltips to indicate when the largest galaxy sizes may cause performance issues on some systems, especially if played into the late game or without victory conditions.
- ensure player starting relation level for other empires (Start New Game screen) excludes pirate protection and selects correct trade treaty (RTA, LTA, FTA)
PERFORMANCE AND MEMORY MANAGEMENT
- significant performance improvements, especially for large late-game galaxies
- improved general memory management
- improved memory management when rendering character animations
- galaxy-level star drawing and some other rendering now uses instancing, improving rendering performance
- further improved rendering performance in Control Center lists, especially in large late-games
SOUND DESIGN
- Thanks to generous work by Jeff Dodson of rainfall.tv, we have added new significantly improved and rebalanced sound effects for most components and weapons, explosions, etc. Jeff's trailer sound design work is heard in small projects like “Star Wars” and should help spice up combat among other things.
DIPLOMACY AND REPUTATION
This area has had a comprehensive overhaul, both to fix reported issues but also to rebalance reputation and relationship modifiers (including the penalties for being stronger than your neighbors), how reputation interacts with relationship and colony happiness and how much reputation affects how empires see each other and how your people see their own empire.
We’ve also added the missing Subjugated Vassal relationship and expanded the role and feedback related to Ambassadors, which are needed for the more advanced treaty types and also improve the rate of improvement for positive long-term relations and accelerate the decay of negative relations when assigned to an empire.
Finally, a lot of work went into fixing issues related to how wars end and how willing the AI was to negotiate the ends of wars correctly. All of this should make Diplomacy more rewarding as a playstyle, but also significantly decrease problems related to diplomacy and reputation for more warlike factions.
Subjugated Vassals:
- empires that are losing war now much more likely to be willing to end the war, and even to become your subjugated vassal when losing badly
- added Subjugated Vassal diplomatic relation type (see Galactopedia for details: Game Concepts > Diplomacy - Treaty Types)
- clarified description of treaty trade item for Subjugated Vassal in Diplomacy Trade screen ('Offer to become Subjugated Vassal')
- tooltips on Peace and Subjugation trade items in diplomacy trade screen now include indication of value of extra incentive required when other faction wants additional inducement to end war
- ensure vassal tribute income properly shown in Projected column of Annual Income section in Economy screen
Diplomatic Strategy:
- high-level diplomatic strategy now pays more attention to overall situation for faction, not just one-on-one relations. Thus more likely to seek out allies against threatening neighbors, even when would not normally otherwise ally with faction.
- diplomatic strategy now also affects empire evaluation of neighboring strength. Concern about strength will be greater if their diplomatic strategy towards you is a negative one.
- preserve existing diplomatic treaty when matches current strategy for faction, even when evaluation drops below typical level for the treaty (e.g. advisor suggestions)
- now force immediate update of each faction's diplomatic strategy whenever conclude trade, change treaty, etc in diplomatic conversation screen
Pirate Wars:
- fixed bug where wars would start with pirate factions when they raid your colonies
- ensure capturing pirate base eliminates pirate faction (not just when destroy pirate base)
Diplomatic Reputation:
- capped maximum and minimum reputation levels
- adjusted soft cap to impact of reputation in diplomacy
- high reputation now also reduces envy factor from other empires ('We are envious of your huge strength and power')
- reputation impact from events is halved when above or below high or low thresholds, meaning that extreme reputation levels, once achieved, are slower to shift
- reputation factors on average now decay much more slowly, especially if your reputation is strongly positive or negative
- less concern over others' reputations when you and other faction both have positive or negative reputation levels, i.e. more concerned when other faction has opposite reputation to you as well as a significant reputation gap
- you can now gain positive reputation from additional actions such as releasing prisoners, signing new treaties, researching diplomacy techs, destroying hive ships and planet destroyers
- rebalanced all reputation impacts and decay rates
- no negative reputation impact from espionage against pirates
- diplomacy trend values update faster than previously. Reputation trend values update much faster than previously. This means that as your relationship or reputation change, it will take less time for other empires to notice and reflect that change in their relationship with you.
- honoring defense treaty by declaring war on aggressor no longer incurs war justification penalty or war grace period penalty ('too soon since last war')
- fixed bug when modifying empire reputation near minimum or maximum limits
- updated Empire Reputation Galactopedia article to include explanation of Slavery and Extermination colony population policies
- reduced overall impact of very good or very poor reputation on colony happiness
- once empire reputation goes over +10 or below -10 then has diminished impact on colony happiness
Diplomatic Relationships:
- updated values for long-term diplomacy effects for some treaty types to better balance diplomatic progress
- capped display of diplomacy trend values so that do not show misleadingly high or low values even when have fast-moving trend (trend magnitude never larger than target value)
- ensure clear some positive diplomacy values with other faction when they bombard, invade or destroy one of your colonies
- lowered soft cap for some diplomacy factors: relationship and beneficial treaties with friends and enemies
- fixed buggy display of diplomatic relation incident trend values when transition from positive to negative or vice versa
- ensure cancel treaties with other faction when they bombard, invade or destroy one of your colonies
- adjusted soft cap for some diplomatic factors: relationship with friends, relationship with enemies
Ambassadors:
- some high-level treaty types now require an ambassador to be assigned to the foreign capital before they will be accepted
- ambassadors now properly apply diplomacy bonus to modify evaluation of your empire by assigned faction (when at faction capital)
- the diplomacy screen now correctly shows the consolidated effect of any assigned ambassadors and your leader on a given faction
Trade and Negotiation:
- diplomacy trade panel adds new functionality to move view to trade items that are visible to your faction. Click 'eye' icon at right side of trade item
- bases available for trade in diplomacy trade screen now show as 'Unknown Base' when not visible to player
- ensure all techs valued properly in trade deal screen (none should be zero unless truly worthless to other faction)
- fixed tech trading sometimes excluding research projects that you do not have access to (e.g. projects that your tech tree has no path to, even though other faction has researched the project). Note that tech trading does properly exclude projects based on your tech level in a research area, but this fix now deliberately includes projects that you may not have a path to (when appropriate for your tech level). Note that this fix also applies to some other situations where you can acquire tech, e.g. when conquering an enemy colony, when using spies to steal tech.
Diplomatic Techs and Assimilation:
- colony population assimilation rates for specific races now improved by researching diplomacy projects in tech tree at rate of 10% per improved relationship point
Treaty Fixes:
- ensure Intelligence Sharing treaty now properly shares results of espionage missions with partners
- ensure Research treaty properly gives bonuses to each factions research speed
War Resolution:
- lowered threshold from war losses where an empire will consider ending a war (more likely to end war when losing badly)
- empires now more willing to offer incentives to end unwanted wars
- unhappiness from war weariness now applied to colonies with race and govt mitigation factors (mainly based on war weariness reduction), so that aggressive factions now have less unhappiness from war weariness and thus less negative impact from wars
- empires now more likely to honor minimum interval between wars with same faction
- vassal empires now include minimum interval between wars with same faction when considering whether to rebel against parent empire
- fixed bug where diplomatic incidents were being applied to wrong empire when declare war while still have Defense or Non-Aggression treaty
- fixed bug where offers to end war sometimes cannot be accepted
RESEARCH
This is another area which benefited from a significant amount of development attention. Based on community feedback, we found that Random research in particular was not working as intended.
The intention was always that when choosing Random research, some techs or sub-trees could be missing from the research tree. This does not mean that they are absent from the game, but that they would need to be enabled through trade, espionage, exploration, salvage or conquest rather than just through research. We also found that some random paths were being incorrectly generated and thus required too many pre-requisites for some projects or made others available that should not have been. With this update, Random research issues should be resolved.
We also fixed a variety of other issues and began improving the research AI. More work in this area will come in the next series of updates.
- altered how research project prerequisites work: now often only require a subset of all the prerequisites for a project instead of all prerequisites as previously. This fixes the issue where race-specific techs added to the required prerequisite paths instead of just being a part of them.
- research project bonus requirement amounts now scale with galaxy size - larger galaxies have higher research bonus threshold requirements due to being easier to find the necessary research bonus locations
- fixed bug where research projects with fallback paths were sometimes not appearing on tech tree when should have
- now exclude race-specific tech from non-playable races when stealing or trading tech, or acquiring through other means (e.g. colony conquest)
- tweaked which research projects an empire can acquire through colony conquest
- tweaked which research projects are available for trade and stealing (spy missions): spies can now perform repeated steal tech missions for same project even when visible to their empire
- set default maximum concurrent research projects to 1 in empire policy
- fixed some research projects remaining invisible after steal tech spy mission or acquire through other non-standard means
- fixed bug where minimum path count for some research project prerequisites were defaulting to one, which was incorrectly reducing the number of prerequisites that needs to first be researched
- fixed research projects sometimes incorrectly showing up on tech tree when no parent paths (when using randomized research)
- fixed higher level research projects sometimes improperly being researchable even when have no path to them from base of tech tree
- fixed some research projects not generating with all required prerequisite paths
- ensure pirate factions exclude some research projects at game start that they value lower (colonization, facilities, diplomacy), thus not being available to trade or steal from them
- now allow AI to initiate research projects even when uses reserved spending (colony ships, wonders) when there are no projects in the queue and the project initiation cost is relatively low
- slightly reduced AI research priority for diplomacy techs
- slightly reduced AI research priority for some planetary facilities, especially research facilities
MIGRATION, COLONIZATION AND COLONY POPULATION POLICY
- ensure migrating populations honor colonization minimum suitability level from empire policy, i.e. race does not migrate to a colony unless suitability is +20 or better (default level)
- automated colony ship construction now considers preferred colonization race (suitability) and location of colonization target when determining where to build new colony ship (first choice is closest colony to target with preferred colonization race)
- added further improvements when selecting construction locations for automated colony ships, especially when handling multiple simultaneous manually-queued colonization targets
- fixed bug where colony ships could sometimes continually load and unload colonists but never colonize a target, especially when have many queued colonization targets and many colony ships
- reduced colonies constantly rebelling when using enslave or exterminate policy. However note that using these policies will increase unrest of affected races at your colonies, likely eventually leading to rebellion
- fixed issue where constantly rebelling colony with population set to exterminate would push population above 30 million, thus never completing extermination
- ensure colony is removed when all of its population is exterminated (population policy)
FLEETS AND SHIPS
- tweaked default fleet templates: larger Attack and Invade fleets
- ships added to fleets via topup now check whether have enough fuel to reach fleet, if not then first refuel at nearby location before proceeding to form-up with fleet
- automated generation of invasion fleets now also checks whether have enough existing troops or spare troop maintenance to supply troops from army template for new fleet
- when a ship changes fleets it now auto-cancels any escort missions for old fleet (escorting fleet capital ships)
- ensure ships that get stuck inside stars/planets/etc can always properly extricate themselves without other factors overriding that behavior
- automated construction ships now more willing to repair abandoned ships and bases when no other bases to build
- Capture ship missions now assigned and retained even when no assault pods currently available (cool down timer)
- now indicate unavailable assault pod status in Selection Panel and Weapons Report window when ship is assigned a Capture mission
- when a colony is invaded and conquered by another faction then non-military ships from the previous empire clear any missions at the colony (when two empires are still at war)
- fighters onboard carriers or bases no longer affected by location effects (storms, etc)
- ensure fleets that are manually assigned to attack enemy fleets at same location always carry out mission, even when not at war
- reduced default ratio of military ships not in fleets (empire policy)
- slightly reduced number of raid fleets for empire
- changed default engagement range for Invasion Fleets from 50% Fuel Range to Nearby
- mining ships now more careful to select mining targets within fuel range, including whether inside nebulae clouds
- troop transports in invasion fleets that are invading an enemy colony now attempt to better coordinate assault pod launch (troop drop) so that close together instead of piecemeal landing. Also indicate when waiting for extra invasion forces in mission description in Selection Panel
- fixed bug where a ships intercept weapons were sometimes incorrectly being used to bombard an enemy colony even when only assigned attack mission against colony (not bombard)
CONSTRUCTION AND SHIP DESIGN
- fixed Build Order screen sometimes building wrong design for role
- slightly adjusted construction balance for military ship types: generally fewer escorts and more larger ships
- increased military ship building levels
- ensured default design templates for defensive bases include Ion Defense components
- fixed ships not always being upgraded when research new tech
- ensure Energy To Fuel converter component works properly
UI IMPROVEMENTS
- added new button to Population Policy screen: apply policy to all colonies of this type (e.g. Marshy Swamp, Volcanic, Sandy Desert, etc)
- enabled shift-click to multi-select range of designs in Designs List screen
- Control Center now pauses list updates while hovering over list items (list items retain order) to avoid having to deal with list changes while trying to take a list action
- now immediately updates right-click mission for hovered item when select an item via hotkey (no need to move mouse), e.g. allow immediate right-click attack of hovered enemy target when select fleet via hotkey
- made it clearer in user interface when undertaking an action that will very negatively affect your reputation: Bombardment, Slavery and Extermination colony policies, declaring war in wrong situation (insufficient justification, too soon since last war, existing Non Aggression treaty, existing Defense treaty), invading independent colonies, invading colonies when not at war, destroying colonies
- now show fleet jump range for selected fleet in galaxy view as dashed orange circle (in addition to fuel range)
- ambassador contributions to diplomacy are now properly called out in the diplomacy tab
- indicate when characters drawn in list items are transferring to new location (transparent image with tooltip explanation)
- immediately update system view summary (bottom-middle of screen) when double-click item to change view
- added explanation in tooltip of action button when cannot build mining station or other base at location due to missing active design
- fixed mined and known locations amounts sometimes being out-of-date in Resources list
- fixed missing callout lines and tooltips in summary panel (bottom-middle of screen)
- fixed height of text panel in Tour screen sometimes being too short
- fixed some scrollable text panels missing their vertical scroll bar when text is higher than panel
- ensure empires have different colors and flags even when multiple empires of same race
- doubled the number of available empire flags
- fixed non-clipped rendering artifacts in Start New Game screen
- made galaxy nebula clouds more visible
- fixed some text problems with fullscreen messages
COLONY MANAGEMENT
- slightly adjusted planetary facility building levels, colony population and development should be larger before some facilities are built
- reduced population level for building a small spaceport at a colony in default policy settings
- increased target tax rate for medium-sized colonies to +20 (from +10) in default policy settings to encourage faster growth
- ensure colonies always have proper resource stock levels for building bases and ships
- avoid using reserved spending to build planetary facilities when automation is Suggest. Instead wait until have funds then suggest to player
EXPLORATION
- ensure range for discovering lost colony exceeds exploration range so that exploration ships always discover
- fixed new bug where exploration ships were sometimes stopping exploration beyond home system
- slightly reduced tech level of ships in most debris fields
- ensure abandoned ships and bases do not use excessive race-specific tech
GAME EVENTS
- ensure plagues and disasters do not strike same colony too often (no simultaneous plagues, minimum interval between)
- extended Game Events so that can have multiple filters for TriggerRaceIds and NonTriggerRaceIds
- moved AllConditionsMustBeMet flag on Game Event and Actions (no longer part of Conditions list)
- fixed minor text issue with some Hive threat messages
- fixed minor text layout issues for some ruin discovery messages
IN-GAME EDITOR
- changing a star name in game editor now also changes the corresponding system name on the galaxy map
MODDING SUPPORT
- now support overriding loaded data items by Id value for all XML file types (Races, Research Project Definitions, Ship Hulls, Troop Definitions, etc) based on additional data files that start with the same name (as a prefix). IDs should still be unique across all files.
OTHER
- fixed time to transfer character to new location sometimes being excessively long
- ensure message filter empire flag images are properly loaded
- ensure pre-expanded empire colonies (at game start) have good suitability levels
- added setting to Game Settings screen for opt-in/out of auto-sending anonymized error reporting
- auto-delete game settings to ensure new default policy settings are applied in new games
- ensure SavedGames folder exists before using Continue Game button
- enabled Sentry error reporting
- included all files in win-x64 folder that may fix freetype.dll error issues some had when launching 1.0.6.4
DATA
- various data file fixes, balance tweaks and updates, including some buffs for the Boskara and a fix for the Zenox starting with far too large a research bonus (the +20% was supposed to be only on their ancient homeworld, if you can find it)
- rebalanced some government modifiers to make certain government types less corrupt and unhappy to ease economic challenges