Ongoing Evolution
War Management, War Missions, and Economic Balance
Hello everyone. This is the third of three Developer Blogs we’re doing in the lead up to the release of Return of the Shakturi, the first feature expansion for Distant Worlds 2. In the first one, we focused on the Shakturi story and their unique abilities as well as the Mega Ships and Planet Destroyers. In the second, we covered Outposts, multi-Empire Alliances and the Refugee start option, which are unique new features exclusive to Return of the Shakturi.
This final blog covers several additional features and improvements which will be released as part of a free update for all Distant Worlds 2 owners, along with the Return of the Shakturi release. You can already see a preview of these by opting into the Beta branch on Steam and GOG right now and trying the latest public beta update (though be aware, public betas are not always as stable as official releases).
With Return of the Shakturi, you now get to experience what a proper endgame crisis in Distant Worlds 2 is like and what fighting against (or with) a major endgame threat like the Shakturi means for your empire.
First, let’s discuss the new tools you will have in the upcoming official update to make war management easier, especially in the late game.
The first of the major features is a greatly expanded Enemy Targets list. As you may know, this list allows the player to review all kinds of possible targets, from mining and research stations to colonies and fleets. In the past, you could queue a target or not queue it and the automation tried to take care of the rest using any available automated fleets. In addition, for performance reasons only the closer and more important targets were available through the list – the rest had to be manually attacked. Moreover, automated fleets had other competing priorities which could sometimes delay the execution of queued player targets. These were all clear limitations, but it was the best we could do at the time.
Now, we have expanded this to include every applicable attack mission type for each type of target and improved the AI to be able to fully handle each of these and intelligently coordinate automated fleets to do so. Also, during a War, you will now always see ALL targets for any empires with which you are at war. For example, for a colony world, you could choose “Clear Defenses”, “Bombard”, “Invade”, “Raid” or “Blockade”. Each of these will be enabled if a suitable fleet is available for the mission and if queued, will be the top priority for available automated fleets to execute.
For example, if you queue an Invasion, you may find that an available automated attack fleet joins in to Clear Defenses or Bombard to make sure the invasion fleet has an easier task. You can also queue these supporting orders yourself and the assigned fleets will do their best to coordinate their attack.
Similarly, you may “Attack”, “Capture”, “Raid” or “Blockade” a station instead of just attacking it. Every available target is also highlighted on the galaxy map and when you hover over a target, it pings the location for you.
Being able to queue specific missions for targets through your Enemy Targets list is a real help when it comes to managing your fleets during wartime. It’s also important to emphasize that the AI can also perform all these missions and will use them against you in a coordinated fashion. A strong AI empire is now a much more challenging opponent than they were in earlier updates. Also, in terms of friendly AI empires, when you have a queued target, if your allies have available fleets in range, they may now join in to assist you provided they are also part of the same war.
As a final point, if a target is associated with a War Mission (more on those below) it will have a special symbol to highlight it in your list.
War missions are an entirely new system which includes special unique story-related missions as part of the Shakturi DLC, but also includes more generic missions which are now a part of all wars with or without the Shakturi. War missions represent your advisors informing you of a key target or opportunity which may help with the outcome of the war.
Completing a war mission within the allotted time can help your War Score, provide boosts to Empire Happiness or reduce War Weariness as well as other rewards and can increase enemy War Weariness. As the AI looks at the War Score and War Weariness in determining when a war is won or lost and on what terms, completing War Missions can help bring a war to a successful conclusion more quickly or allow you to hang on a bit longer in a war you are otherwise losing.
There is a new policy setting which allows you to turn off War Missions for your empire, and receive them as suggestions that may be declined (the default setting – if you decline a mission, your advisors will offer another mission option every six months or so) or automatically accept any offered war missions.
In the example below, your advisors have located the enemy Science Academy and are recommending that it be destroyed. The planet with that facility has a special indicator on the enemy targets list and we’ve queued missions to Clear Defenses and Bombard the planet the hope that we will be able to destroy the facility. Our empire’s bombardment policy has been set to eliminate enemy troops and facilities to make sure the job gets done.
Perhaps you would prefer not to risk multiple fleets to bombard a well defended planet and incur the reputation cost of bombarding a populated world as well? We have two new intelligence missions coming as well and one of them allows you to Destroy a Facility. In the example below, while this is a risky mission, it gives us a chance of success at a much lower cost if it succeeds. You can also now try to Capture enemy characters or encourage them to Defect to your side.
Finally, we’ve also done a major rebalance of economies, planetary suitability and the colonization and terraforming research trees and facilities. We’ve rebalanced these areas with the goal of improving economic scaling through the mid-game and late-games, to avoid situations where there is so much income that it effectively removed economic choices. We also wanted to address the issue of some factions having far more available suitable planets than others. The result overall should be fewer initially suitable planets for colonization, a better balance between factions, and terraforming facilities which are less expensive but may require ongoing maintenance on lower quality worlds.
The one remaining piece is an overhauled message and notification system to help reduce message spam and improve player awareness, especially during wartime. That will be revealed on release day – be sure to tune in for the Return of the Shakturi livestream and release on October 24th, 2024!
COMING SOON:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2926560/Distant_Worlds_2_Return_of_the_Shakturi/