Distant Worlds 2 News

[h2]Ackdarians[/h2]


Ackdarians are highly industrious, semi-aquatic marine mammals. They have large webbed hands and feet, making them excellent swimmers. However their hands are also quite dexterous and they are equally happy living out of water.

Ackdarians are intelligent, peaceful and friendly. They have a rich culture that focuses on the hybrid nature of their living environment, encompassing both water and land.

They excel in building highly maintainable star ships. Their technology includes the advanced TurboThruster engine. This engine component is extremely fuel-efficient, allowing Ackdarian star ships to use less fuel and travel further.

Ackdarians are famous for cultivating Nepthys seaweed, from which they make Nepthys wine. Ackdarians grow enormous forests of the seaweed deep beneath the oceans. They regularly harvest it and then slowly ferment it into a superbly smooth wine.

They are also masters of underwater construction, building vast and elaborate underwater cities. These cities have many levels, some of which reach far down into the vast depths of the oceans they inhabit. At the deepest levels Ackdarians seek out precious resources like the rare Ucantium pearl.

Ackdarians also inhabit the small islands and shallow coastal areas of Ocean planets.



[h2]Mortalens[/h2]


Mortalens are a fierce half mammal, half reptile race. They have extremely fast reflexes, an ability that can surprise those unfamiliar with them.

They are easily provoked by the slightest insult, and will pursue an enemy relentlessly until they get vengeance.

Mortalens are excellent warriors – a pursuit they spend much time perfecting. Their warrior code is highly developed. Mortalens consider defeating an enemy in battle as the highest possible achievement. They are widely recognized as almost certainly the best fighters in the galaxy.

They have developed a powerful vectoring engine, the Swift Vector. This advanced engine component gives Mortalen star ships unrivalled agility and maneuvering.

Mortalens enjoy a fairly simple life, following many ancient traditions. These traditions mainly focus on honor and risk-taking.

One particular tradition requires any male seeking tribal leadership to hunt and kill one of the fearsome Mortaks. Mortaks are terrifying large monsters that inhabit the vast sandy desert wastelands of the Mortalen homeworlds. The name Mortalen means “Slayer of the Mortak”.

Mortalens are normally found living in simple block dwellings in the scrub-covered canyon floors of Rocky Desert planets. They can also be found on Sandy Desert or Desert Savanna planets.

[h5]Distant Worlds 2 is now available for pre-orders at 10% discount.[/h5]



Distant Worlds 2 will be released on March 10th. The critically acclaimed 4X space strategy game returns with a brand new 64-bit engine, 3D graphics and a polished interface:

Explore the vast galaxy with up to 2,000 star systems and tens of thousands of planets, discovering valuable resources, potential colonies for your empire.

Interact with other empires, discussing treaties, making trade offers, or just giving them a piece of your mind.

Develop new technologies for building your own unique ships and starbases and defend your empire.

Automate the various tasks in your empire, so that you can focus on the areas that you enjoy most.

[h5]Distant Worlds 2, The Galaxy Lives on.[/h5]

The release date of Distant Worlds 2 has been announced.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The next chapter in the critically acclaimed 4X space strategy game is almost ready.

Players will experience the full depth and detail of this real time strategy game starting from March 10th, 2022, on PC.

Distant Worlds 2 is available to wishlist, more information about the title can be found on the product page.

Welcome to our sixth Developer Diary.

This diary is a big one as it discusses the economy in more detail. You’ll learn what makes the Distant Worlds economy unique and how you can make sure that your worlds are prosperous and your empire is strong.



In Distant Worlds, your economy is divided into two parts. The first is the state-controlled economy, over which you have full control. The second is the private or civilian economy, which is everything else. As the state, while you have a great deal of influence over how your private economy is structured, you do not control it and you also have the responsibility to protect it from disruption by pirates and other threats.

As with all areas in Distant Worlds 2, if you prefer to allow your advisors to fully run the state economy for you and focus on other areas of the game, that is possible through the automation settings. For those who enjoy some economic planning and optimization, you can choose how much you wish to intervene, right down to manually controlling all state economic decisions.

The state controls space exploration and construction, colony ships, military ships, stations and troops, spaceports, research stations and monitoring stations. The state is also in charge of setting tax rates, building economic facilitie and adjusting bonus funding.

The private economy controls mining ships, mining stations, freighters, passenger ships and resort bases. It pays for its own construction, maintenance and fuel costs, but also earns revenue from its activities, which it keeps (except for the portion paid to the state in construction or fuel fees or taxes).



This process starts with your state-controlled exploration ships discovering new systems and worlds. Some of these worlds will contain valuable resources. Those resource fit into three general categories:

• Fuel, which is needed for all your space reactors and hyperdrives to function at peak efficiency (in other words, fuel is essential to just about everything in your space-faring economy)
  
• Construction Resources, which are required for your worlds to grow (they consume a variety of these on a regular basis), as well as to build or upgrade new ships, facilities and stations. Without these, nothing new really gets build and colony growth can be significantly slowed.
  
• Luxury Resources, which are required for your worlds to develop, though they also can offer other significant bonuses depending on the specific resource. Some of these are quite rare, or even unique and they come with much higher bonuses. Development is the difference between a relatively primitive frontier world eking out an existence with just enough technology to survive and a thriving core world which represents the pinnacle of your space civilization. Your population alone will increase development, but luxury resources help a great deal more.
  

Once you’ve found these resources, private Mining Ships (unless you’re playing as a Mercantile Guild, in which case you can also build and control these) can extract these resources for you. You may also effectively grant a license to the private economy to build a mining station at a particular location, using one of your state-controlled construction ships. These large mining stations are constructed by the state, but paid for and maintained by the private economy and are much faster at extracting resources, though they require private freighters to also pick up those resources and transport them to where they are needed.



This combination of state exploration and granting of mining rights combined with private resource extraction and transport is the most basic level of your economy. Keeping the flow of resources moving efficiently from your mining stations to where they are needed is up to the civilian stations and ships and you can watch them go about this business, while knowing that you don’t need to spend much time worrying about it once you’ve made sure the mining stations are where you want them.



The next most important pieces are your worlds and your spaceports. Your worlds have your population and your people will produce a certain level of productive output on their own, but without adequate Construction and Luxury resources, their potential will be greatly limited. If you supply them with abundant resources, you will find your worlds increasing much more quickly in population, development and happiness. That combination will also allow for higher tax rates and much more income from each world to flow into your state treasury. You can adjust the resource demands and the tax rate on each world if you so wish, or allow your advisors to automatically adjust these.

Spaceports are the largest state-controlled space stations and they are typically built at your populated worlds. From an economy standpoint, they act as hubs for your economy. The freighters and mining ships will transport resources first to your spaceports and from there they will be distributed further to the worlds or stations that need them.



Spaceports are also the locations where most space construction happens, both for your state ships and the private economy’s ships. The private economy pays the state when it needs the use of these shipyards, which can result in additional bonus income for the state.

Once you have a good network of mining stations, worlds and spaceports setup, the economy will generally run itself quite well barring external disruptions, either due to general threats or due to war. In those cases, your state fleets and troops may be needed to restore peace and orderly economic activity.



You can also gain access to resources and resource trading income through diplomacy. In Distant Worlds 2, by default you do not begin with the ability to trade with another Empire, but you can sign one of three trade treaties to allow trade. Each treaty has varying degrees of resource availability balanced against tariffs charged. Restricted Trade charges the highest tariffs and makes available only the most abundant resources. Limited Trade is a balance. Free Trade allows full access to all resources without any tariffs. Commerce Centers on your Spaceports as well as trading bonuses from other sources can also increase the value of trade with other empires.



Once you discover some particularly scenic locations in the galaxy that are near your populated worlds, the civilian economy will also be looking to build some resort bases. When built at good scenic locations with easy access to large populations, these can earn some nice additional tourism income for your economy.



Corruption is also something that will become a larger issue as your new worlds are farther away from your capitol world and as your worlds grow ever larger in population. This acts to reduce your taxable revenue from that world, but construction of planetary administration facilities can reduce the effects of corruption and ensure that the long arm of the law reaches across your empire.

In Distant Worlds 2, when you have a good positive cashflow as a result of a well functioning economy, you can invest those additional funds into the usual things like building new ships and stations, or new planetary facilities, or trying to “crash research” a particularly important research project. You can also invest it into bonus funding for research and colony growth. By default, this bonus funding is automatically funded once you’ve met your empire’s needs for maintenance and other expenses.



Without this funding, your research stations will roughly halve their output and your colony population will grow significantly more slowly. Under normal circumstances, this is not an issue, but when events occur that disrupt your economy, losing this bonus funding can result in significant penalties to your empire’s performance. If you build a robust economy and protect it well, hopefully you’ll never have to find out about that the hard way!

If you read through all of this, let us know if you have any questions regarding the economy in Distant Worlds 2.

We heard you loud and clear asking for updates on the DW2 release, and we assure you that DW2 is almost ready.

At the moment we don’t have a release date, but we can tell you that it will be in Q1 2022. The official date will be revealed in the upcoming months so stay tuned to find out more.

In the meantime, we invite you to join the new wave of beta testing that will open in the next few days

To sign up, head to Matrix's beta signup page and submit your application!