Distant Worlds 2 News

[h2]The Rise of the Shakturi[/h2]


Hello everyone. This is the first of three Developer Blogs we’ll be doing in the lead up to the release of Return of the Shakturi, the first feature expansion for Distant Worlds 2. This initial blog will focus on the Shakturi crisis, Planet Destroyers, and Mega Ships. Please note that you will have a choice of whether you want to play with the Shakturi crisis or not and the ability to adjust when the crisis begins to suit your challenge level.
The second and third blogs will go into detail on additional features and improvements that this expansion brings to the base game, including those that will be available as part of a free update for all Distant Worlds 2 players and those that are available even if you are not playing through the actual Shakturi crisis.

As most Distant Worlds players know, the Shakturi are an ancient and terrible threat which was responsible for the last cataclysmic galactic war, the scars and remains of which are visible throughout the current galaxy. The story to date through the base game and the faction DLCs has given various clues about the Shakturi. You’ve seen places of gravitic instability and ancient closed wormholes, bits and pieces of old communication logs detailing a massive conflict, mind-affecting viruses, and some remaining “vaults” set up by artificial intelligences called the Ancient Guardians to preserve knowledge from that previous era. Along with all that, for those who searched well enough, there was even a single ancient but non-functioning Mortalen planet destroyer.
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.

The crisis begins with a gradual build-up, which can be seen in the livestream preview we did, but once the Shakturi arrive, it becomes evident fairly quickly that they have some knowledge and abilities that are beyond other empires. The Shakturi have mastered certain areas of research that appear for the first time in this expansion – namely Psychic, Genetic Engineering and Biowarfare. We’ll go through each of these in detail below.
Their powerful Psychic abilities allow the Shakturi to enhance their diplomacy, espionage, counter-espionage, space and ground combat. They can take over characters and even in the worst case take over the leader of an empire, at a minimum causing chaos but for some empires like Hive Minds, potentially even vassalizing that empire. In space combat, the Shakturi can incapacitate the crews of your ships, or even cause them to hallucinate and fire on their own allies. In ground combat, your divisions can be disabled or even caused to temporarily defect to the Shakturi side.

All of these are limited by the psychic energy generated by the Shakturi in the galaxy. In other words, the more Shakturi there are, the more frequent and more powerful their capabilities will be. You will need to start from the beginning, understanding what psychic energy is, how to disrupt it and how to defend against it in all of those areas. There is a large defensive Psychic research tree for you to unlock to help level the field against the Shakturi.
The Shakturi have also long been focused on “perfecting” their own forms and abilities and experiment relentlessly with Genetic Engineering to create better servants for themselves. You can follow their lead and research ways to improve your own species, to make your empire, ships and ground troops more powerful. The Shakturi are also busy creating and manufacturing new space creatures to unleash against you as well as influencing those that already exist to become hostile against all that are not in the Shaktur Axis. If you want to be able to better counter the Shakturi influence over these creatures, this is where you should focus your research.

Biowarfare gives the Shakturi the ability to design and unleash plagues of various kinds to weaken and prepare other factions for conquest, including making them more susceptible to Psychic influence and control. This area of research will allow you to cure those plagues, saving many millions of your empire’s population and making them a harder target for the Shakturi. You may also be able to design and deploy some plagues of your own, specifically targeted against the Shakturi. Take care though as Biowarfare often leads to unintended consequences.
The Shakturi endgame crisis progresses through various stages, culminating with a massive Alliance vs. Alliance war between the Shaktur Axis and the Freedom Alliance for control of the galaxy. Depending on your choices, you may end up helping the Freedom Alliance, the Shakturi Axis or trying to stay neutral (or fighting against both!). Good luck!

To make that final war more epic, Return of the Shakturi also comes packed with Planet Destroyers and Mega Ships. Each faction in the game, including those added post-release (with the exception of the Ikkuro, they’ll get something special post-release), will now have access to a special Mega Ship. Most of them act as Planet Destroyers and since the Shakturi will bring their own Planet Destroyers, it’s good to have an equivalent counter if you need it. Some are different though and I’ll review those below. These mega ships will also now be available separate from that endgame crisis in normal gameplay, as long as you have the Return of the Shakturi expansion.

Humans: Planet Destroyer with a Super Mass Driver weapon

Ackdarians: Planet Destroyer with a Super Beam weapon

Mortalen: Planet Destroyer with a Super Mass Driver weapon

Haakonish: Mega Ship with a Massive Gravitic Pulse weapon

Teekan: Mega Ship with a Massive Ion Bomb weapon

Boskara: Planet Destroyer with a Super Firestorm Torpedo weapon

Zenox: Stealthy Mega Ship with Super Long Range Sensors (a mobile Stealth Mega Monitoring Station which can fight)

Dhayut: Planet Destroyer with a Super Beam weapon

Quameno: Mega Ship with a Mobile Robotic Troop Foundry

Gizurean: Planet Destroyer with a Super Beam weapon

In the next blog, we’ll talk more about Outposts, the new multi-Empire Alliances and the space-based start option for your civilization, which are additional new features included in this expansion.

Wish list now:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2926560/Distant_Worlds_2_Return_of_the_Shakturi/

Welcome Back, explorers.

We're thrilled to announce that Distant Worlds 2: Return of the Shakturi, the first feature expansion for the acclaimed 4X space strategy game Distant Worlds 2, will be launched on the 24th of October. Prepare yourself for an epic new chapter in the Distant Worlds saga, as an ancient and sinister force reawakens to threaten the very fabric of the galaxy.

In this expansion, the galaxy faces the terrifying return of the Shakturi, a powerful alien faction whose last invasion nearly obliterated all life.
[h3]Key Features:[/h3]

• Genetic Engineering in the game introduces a brand-new space creature and allows the Shakturi to manufacture these creatures for scouting and combat. It also grants the Shakturi influence over existing space creatures in the galaxy, enabling them to use these creatures to further their own goals.
  
• Biowarfare enables the Shakturi to deploy plagues that weaken other factions, making them more susceptible to Psychic influence and control.
  
• Psychic Abilities enhance the Shakturi's effectiveness in space and ground combat, diplomacy, espionage, and research. Countering these abilities requires innovative strategies that could potentially turn the Shakturi's strengths into weaknesses.
  
• Planet Destroyers and Mega Ships are powerful tools available to all factions, including those introduced post-release. These formidable assets are crucial in battles against the Shakturi, with Mega Ships offering unique functionalities, such as the Quameno Mobile Robotic Troop Foundry.
  
• New Space Creature – The Rift Strider introduces fresh challenges and opportunities within the game.
  
• Outposts allow factions to establish a presence on worlds unsuitable for full colonization, securing valuable territory for future expansion.
  
• The Multi-Empire Alliance System introduces new ways to coordinate and cooperate with allies, enhancing strategic collaboration across empires.
  
• New Space-based start with just a single colony ship and a small fleet.
  
• Ancient Guardian Vaults and Special Artifacts add depth to exploration and gameplay.
  

On August 26th Erik Rutins, producer and co-designer of Distant Worlds 2, gave a sneak peak of the new DLC Return of the Shakturi. In case you missed the stream, you can watch it here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

To celebrate the announcement of Return of the Shakuri, starting at 18.00 GMT, Distant Worlds 2 will take part to the Space Exploration Fest.
Check all the details here.

Prepare for a galaxy-shattering crisis unlike any other. The Shakturi are back, and only the bravest and most cunning of explorers will be able to stop their return. Will you be ready?

The Galaxy lives on

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2926560/Distant_Worlds_2_Return_of_the_Shakturi/

An ancient evil returns to the galaxy—will you be ready?
The producer and co-designer Erik Rutins did a preview stream of the new upcoming DLC Return of The Shakturi

[h3]Distant Worlds 2 - State of the Game and Roadmap (July 2024)
(Official Version “Game Faction” 1.2.2.0)[/h3]


We send greetings once again to everyone in the Distant Worlds 2 community.
As before, Elliot and I would like to thank our players for their patience and support since Distant Worlds 2 was released. 2023 saw our first two expansions for Distant Worlds 2 along with four Major updates (Aurora, Hyperspeed, Discovery and Fleet). We continued improving DW2 with the free "Game Faction" update in April, which followed a series of public beta updates. In addition to a wide range of other improvements, the Game Faction update included the first base game faction refresh with the Humans and Mortalen being brought up to a similar level as the new DLC factions.

After the release of that update, we announced that we would pause the update releases for a bit while focusing on the development of the first full expansion for Distant Worlds 2 - "The Return of the Shakturi".


The Current State of the Game
After the “Aurora” update resolved the worst technical issues with the initial release, the “Hyperspeed” update massively improved performance and the “Discovery” update gave us a revamped Hive and some improved Pirates as well as the first Ancient Guardian Vaults, the “Fleet” update released as official in November with many improvements to automated and manual fleet and ship behaviors. The "Game Faction" update then further improved various fleet and ship behaviors as well as improving the gameplay for the Human and Mortalen factions in various ways. Throughout these updates we continue to improve almost all gameplay areas as well as the AI, which is now much more competent and challenging than it was a year ago. You can see a summary of all the changes in the update announcements, there are far too many to go over here but if you haven’t updated lately we recommend it!

The feedback on the "Game Faction" update was overall quite positive. We know there are more issues to resolve, more UI improvements and AI improvements to make and we've made some of these behind the scenes while working on "Return of the Shakturi". Others will follow along with the "Shakturi" release or with the update after that.

We've also been working to update more base game factions as well as continue to tweak the DLC factions where appropriate. The Boskara and Zenox will be the next base factions updated.

The main change to our schedule has been a longer delay in the updates and future DLCs than originally expected because of the amount of work we've been putting into "Return of the Shakturi", which adds a proper endgame crisis to DW2 along with many other changes and improvements. The initial internal test and development stage for that has taken more time, but we are determined to make right and make it well. We expect a wider beta test to begin in August and we plan to officially announce "Return of the Shakturi" and start speaking more about its features before the end of August, 2024. That announcement will also include the official release date.

We have had some parallel work going on the next faction DLC after the Shakturi, which I expect we'll speak more about after "Return of the Shakturi" expansion releases.

While we are a small team, we are committed to both continuing to expand the game with new DLCs and expansions but also to continue updating and improving the base game through our ongoing free updates. We want to make sure everyone who purchased DW2 can enjoy it to its fullest on their system and for their playstyle.

Our next areas to focus on are listed below…


Future Priorities
I've included all those we listed in our previous roadmap to comment on those we completed and those that are partially completed or still in progress.


In Progress:
1. Update the base factions in the game, one by one, to a similar level as the recently released DLCs when it comes to faction and government gameplay differentiation. Completed for the Humans and Mortalen, still in progress for the other base factions.
2. Continuing improvements on fleet and ship behavior. We plan to also add a tutorial for fleet and ship tactical settings as well as more detail in the galactopedia to help with these issues. There were major improvements in these areas in the "Fleet" and "Game Faction" updates. We continue to make improvements in this area as part of our work for "Return of the Shakturi".
3. Further improvements to pathing issues as well as pathfinding performance. There are long-standing issues which in some cases result in sub-optimal paths as well as ridiculous paths around the galaxy. We plan to review the area of storms and galactic terrain to make sure that they are providing the gameplay benefits we were hoping to see and if not, we will rebalance them. We are also looking into the question of making it easier to plan jumps that do not require star system waypoints. Major improvements to the long-standing issues were made in the "Game Faction" update. More improvements continue as part of the Shakturi development work.
4. Improve the AI further, especially in the areas of economic management and diplomatic/military grand strategy. We’ve also seen more feedback and suggestions on the population policy side, specific to slavery but also other policies. We plan to revisit the design of these in the future and also improve the AI’s management of population policies. The "Return of the Shakturi" development is leading to many AI improvements across the board, but especially related to the prosecution of wars.


Completed:
1. Improve the appearance of empire borders, adding a thicker border line at the edges of an empire to help distinguish it from nearby empires with similar flags and colors.
2. Further improvements to ship auto-design and auto-upgrade to better consider nebula/storm defenses as well as existing weapon component categories and sizes for the upgrade system, so that players will find the upgrade tool more generally useful and so the AI empires will be better able to manage your empire and their own when it comes to navigating the galactic terrain. We plan to improve the policy settings which allow players to specify which component families their auto-designer should emphasize. Specifically we want to allow this to affect other components beyond weapons and also to allow “do not use this” to be a choice, so the AI can be guided to specialize its automatic designs more. This is completed for now, though we have plans for additional features here in the future.


To Be Addressed:
1. Improve quality of life for manual players further. We have already made a series of improvements here, but our plan includes returning the full manual play functionality of DW1. While DW2 includes quite a few new semi-automated features which can help with manual play, for example the global queues and fleet and army templates that were not in DW1, we recognize that many players are still missing tools that would make manual play more enjoyable. Next in line as a large task are ship and fleet order queueing as well as a lot of additional minor improvements to various UI areas.
2. Improve message handling further, especially regarding attack notification message spam and repeating advisor messages. We plan to add additional message filters for “all Pirates” and “all Empires” and rethink and improve the message purge system. We also hope to add the ability to tell an advisor “do not suggest this again” or to tell a Pirate or an Empire “do not contact me again with this offer”.
3. Adding a Galactopedia and Galaxy map Search function. A new Distance Measurement tool is in the latest public beta update already.
4. Modding support will continue to be a priority. We’ve expanded this greatly since release, including the addition of an in-game mod manager, Steam Workshop support and much better handling of multiple mods. We also recently added support for code modding and have been working on a new open source tool to make both data and bundle modding easier. (Further modding improvements are a priority after "Return of the Shakturi" releases)

There are also other reported issues beyond those above which we will also address as we go forward, this is by no means an exhaustive list, but these are our current highest priority goals. We have been compiling master lists of all issue reports by category and as our time allows, we work our way through these areas to make sure we continue to improve the player experience with DW2.


Future Expansions
As always, the Content and Art teams are not heavily involved in most of the game fixes we’ve been working through, so they have been spending most of their time working on future releases.
Our first priority is the “Return of the Shakturi” expansion, which will release in 2024. Stay tuned for our official announcement in late August which will reveal the release date later this year..
This is our main priority and will finally give DW2 a major end-game threat to pit your fully developed empire against, with a much more developed story and new gameplay options and research areas. This will be a feature expansion, rather than just a content expansion and some future feature support (such as planet destroyers and mega-ships for each faction and certain unique research branches) will depend on features in “Return of the Shakturi”. This has taken more time than originally expected, but we are giving it the time it needs to make sure the endgame is fully tested and fun.

We now plan to release a third “Factions” DLC content expansion in Q1 2025 (exact timing dependent on how much time Return of the Shakturi needs). This will add the Wekkarus and Atuuk to the game. The Wekkarus are among the most ancient and mysterious aliens in DW2 with possible connections to the Shakturi. The Atuuk are space lemmings of a sort who were just barely smart enough to figure out FTL. This DLC will work fine whether you have “Return of the Shakturi” or not, but will have some additional features/content related to that expansion if you have it.
Work has also begun on the fourth "Factions" DLC for 2025. All we can say about that now is that it includes the Securans and the Naxxilians.
We are also in the planning stages for the next feature expansion after "Return of the Shakturi" but that's all I can say about that for now.



Update Schedule
Our public update schedule has slowed down considerably due to "Return of the Shakturi" development, though internally we're already on version 1.2.4.3! We expect to resume the public update releases in the next month or two.
As before, we will be aiming for a bi-weekly public beta update schedule. It will generally take 6-12 weeks of beta updates to get to an update that is stable enough to become official. This means we expect public beta updates roughly every two weeks and new free official updates every 2-3 months once public updates resume.


Our Thanks
Thank you again if you took the time to read all of this and for your support of Distant Worlds 2. Please check in regularly going forward and try the newest beta updates if you’d like to see how things are shaping up.
Please stay tuned for more information on the Return of the Shakturi expansion in the late August announcement and on the following Faction DLCs after the Return of the Shakturi release later this year.

Sincerely,
Erik Rutins and Elliot Gibbs
Matrix Games and CodeForce

This update includes a refresh of the Human and Mortalen factions as well as many other changes, including improved border graphics and a new visualization for Fleet Engagement ranges. Future updates will cover the remaining base game factions until all are refreshed.


BASE FACTION AND GOVERNMENT REFRESH

This update includes a refresh of the Human and Mortalen base game factions as well as all the base game government types. A summary of changes is below, but for the full information, please read through the in-game faction and government descriptions carefully. There are also new event illustrations and loading screens to go along with these changes.


FLEET AND SHIP BEHAVIORS

We added additional Fleet Engagement ranges and a new map overlay for engagement range visualization to help you plan your fleet home bases, engagement ranges and targets.

GAME SPEED

We recommend only using x8 speed sparingly, as it can be too easy to miss important notifications otherwise.

- added new x8 and x1/8 game speed controls.



For those eager to delve into the nitty-gritty details of the changes, a detailed changelog is available here, detailing everything from major enhancements to minor bug fixes.

Play Now:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1531540/Distant_Worlds_2/

[h2]Don't miss DasTactic's stream playing the Game Faction Update on our Twitch channel at 8:00 PM UK time[/h2]