Legends is Distant Worlds’ second expansion pack, after Return of the Shakturi, released 11 months before and Distant Worlds original 9 months before that. Distant Worlds is a single-player 4X real-time space strategy game for the PC.

Both the devs and the community have been very active lately and a couple of days ago Matrix Games and CodeForce released Legends’ first official patch (v1.7.0.6). After trying that and after playing quite extensively for the past 2 weeks I’m now finally ready to properly review Legends. So, here we go.

What’s new in Legends?

The major additions and changes that were promised (at least that I could take note before release) were:

- Leaders / new character system
- Influence spheres
- New ships models (around 600!) with better graphics
- Ability to track where your ships are headed (ship vectors overlay)
- Potential colonies, scenic and research locations shown on main map (more overlays)
- Expanded technology tree (e.g. carriers, new planetary facilities, wonders)
- Race-specific events and victory conditions
- Improved fleet management and automation, including fleet postures
- Improved modding support, including full race and character modding
- Improved refueling system (more intelligent fuel management)
- Improved diplomacy system with refueling and mining rights and immigration policies
- Improved performance and sharper graphics

I can confirm that’s all in Legends plus these other interesting new additions:

- Research events (setbacks, research crash breakthroughs)
- Declarations of war now shown on main screen as galactic news
- Elegant new race-specific victory conditions system
- Resources events with new resources found on planets
- Catastrophe events and more menacing space creatures (the dreaded Silvermist)
- Races now have key resources that provide specific bonuses
- We can now see where ships are headed (with a vector, not just coordinates as before)
- Custom ship designs are now signaled with a different color
- You can set the game’s difficulty level

Characters

The character system is Distant Worlds Legends major improvement. Characters are special people who specialize in different aspects of your empire like economical, social, intelligence or military aspects. You have Embassadors, Colony Governors, Special Scientists, Intelligence Agents, Troop Leaders and Fleet Leaders. These characters are varied in nature and you can tell that your play style does influence their appearance and progression. For example if you negotiate often in the diplomacy screen you get diplomacy skill increase on your existing Embassadors and new Embassador characters also tend to emerge more. At least I experienced that.

Characters have positive and negative traits which makes them feel realistic and fun to play. You have a leader, only one; that’s you. If you don’t like yourself much, or other characters, you can dismiss them and new ones will eventually be generated. Some character traits are unknown at start so you have to put your character to the test before discovering their abilities. This is a very interesting and fun detail, since it involves a surprise factor.

Your characters level up with time, according to their past events (which are logged by the game for you to consult at any time). It’s really very cool to see your agents for example get specialized in sabotage or espionage due to the fact that you keep sending them to those kinds of missions. If they keep succeeding in their missions they will continue to level up those skills which makes the intelligence system much more fun and immersive to play now. Moreover you can’t recruit as many agents as you want as before. Agents now emerge so you have to take care of them much more carefully than before. I particularly prefer how the intelligence system works now.

In summary the Legend’s Character system is what I was expecting it to be and more. It is really a new experience to play Legends over Return of the Shakturi just because of that believe me. Characters provide extra strategic choices, gameplay depth, personality and immersion. And the expansion would probably be already worthwhile just because of that.

But there’s plenty more

Your colonies now project influence spheres. At first I didn’t quite understand what those were really about, but after playing Legends for a while, and after going through the galactopedia and the manual (both very good by the way), I finally got what they’re real aim is. By the way, in-game documentation is very good with links to the galactopedia spread all over the different screens to assist you in case you have doubts. I guarantee that you’ll have doubts many times :)

Planets project these influence spheres based on their strategic value (population and development level). The more of it they have the bigger the spheres will be. Inside your sphere of influence is all the territory that the other races see as under your control so they will avoid building mining stations and colonies inside your space. Due to this new feature you can now grant mining rights to the races you want, another cool new feature that deepens diplomacy options even more.

In addition to mining rights you can also decide to offer refueling rights to your neighbors, for the ones you’re not in a mutual defense pack already that is. Another nice one.

Another interesting new diplomacy feature is the ability to set immigration policies on your colonies. Distant Worlds allows several races to peacefully (or not so peacefully) co-exist in the same planets, which is a good feature in my opinion. In Legends you can now set policies to influence the way immigration works. For instance if you don’t want a particular race to be present in your colony you can set it up for relocation and slowly your private sector passenger ships will transport those races elsewhere (you can set immigration policies empire-wide if you need). If you want to enslave a particular race for economic bonuses on a colony you can also set that up, among other options like don’t accept a particular race completely at a colony (or colonies) or decide to slowly exterminate a particular race. Enslavement and extermination have a strong negative impact in your reputation (the way other races see you).

An old negative aspect of Distant Worlds has finally (and thankfully) been addressed in Legends, which is the way ships looked. This was a big complaint of mine in Distant Worlds since the beginning, as you can judge by my Distant Worlds original review. Ships looks were really very poor and unappealing. That is no more! With the help of a mod fan (nicknamed WoodMan in the Distant Worlds forum) the devs have injected 600 (yes, 600!) new ship models. Ships are now sharper and much more interesting, however there’s an option that allows you to use the old models if you prefer.

Research and the tech tree also had some improvements. There are now new weapons (rail guns that partly bypass shields); carriers (a special type of ship hull class that is suited to hold fighters); new planetary buildings (like the terraforming facility that is used to increase the colony development after a major catastrophe). There are also wonders now, Sid Meier’s Civ style. Below you can see 3 of them. From left to right you have the Gizurean Universal Hive, the Rusan Technology Installation and the Shandar Lava Palace Resort.

Wonders are special structures that provide significant bonuses to the race that finishes them first and are unlocked by researching required techs. There are 15, which vary in development, research, ships speed, defense, among other bonuses.

There are also two new nice twists to research that made it even more interesting. Now there are research crash breakthroughs and research setbacks events. The former causes a tech to breakthrough much faster, the latter causes an entire research on a particular field to be lost. Scientist characters also play a role here. If you happen to find one with the Creative trait your chances to breakthrough techs increase. Here is another example of good association between characters and gameplay.

Refueling, another headache from the past has now been further improved. In order to solve past annoyances which required too much fuel micromanagement we can now set a % that determines how many (a % of) ships in a fleet need to be out of fuel before they ‘assemble’, meaning they will get more gas before attacking (\Edit this only works when your fleets are automated). This is a VERY important implementation. In DW previous installments it was very annoying to witness that sometimes your fleets were crawling because of a single frigate having no gas. Now if you set a low % of refuel order before attacking, that fleet will refuel at the nearest refuelling point before embarking on its attacking plan. This is another big plus.

There’s plenty more meaningful events added in Legends. There are now the new race-specific events. For example a race enters in a biological cycle where it will behave differently, more aggressively or friendlier. There’s the new catastrophe events. For example I had a major earthquake in one of my major colonies that decreased the planet’s quality significantly and I also lost a good amount of population. There are resource events now. I was surprised and very pleased to see this new feature. Now your colonies may occasionally discover a new source of a particular resource not found before. This seems to be a particularly rare event (it only happened to me once) but it is a nice new touch. And there are also the new research events (crash breakthroughs and setbacks) that I already mentioned above.

A word on the new victory conditions system

Till now Distant Worlds provided only the traditional dominance, conquest, time types of victory conditions. You reach a certain percentage of population, or number of colonies and you win. Although not a complete innovation in these types of games Legends introduces a new and more elegant victory conditions concept: races have their own victory conditions. These are specific goals that each race has to obtain to achieve victory. If you play with the humans you must achieve more mutual defense pacts, earn more income from tourism and trade than other races, for example. If you’re an Ackdarian you must possess the biggest capital ship of the galaxy and possess at least 50% of all ocean planets (Ackdarians are amphibians). And so on. Then there are many other interesting goals like the need to destroy most enemy troops (of the Boskara), enslave 25% of other races present in your colonies (of the Dahyut), build the Universal Hive Wonder (of the Gizurean) or start the fewest wars in the galaxy (of the peacekeeping Ketarov).

There’s really plenty of different flavors and variety on these goals, and that’s why I thought this new victory conditions system would deserve a section of its own in this review. The way victory progress is calculated and measured it’s also very interesting as you can see below.

Depending on your victory conditions setup at game start you will see victory progress which includes both the traditional and the race specific victory conditions. In red you can see the percentage of victory progression with respect to the Humans specific victory conditions. In blue it’s the economies’ %, in green the population and in yellow the territory %. This is all merged into a global victory progress bar which makes it very easy to grasp who’s in the lead. The first race to achieve the red line boundary on the right wins. You can set the weight of the victory conditions boundary now also. Default is 80% but you can be stricter or looser on your approach to victory. You can disable race victory conditions if you want and go only with the traditional population, territory, time or economy goals.

User Interface improvements

The User Interface has always been Distant World’s Achilles heel, its major weakness. The original game’s UI was inappropriate to play a game of this magnitude. The game’s potential was there already but without a good UI, sadly, we couldn’t experience enough pleasure playing the title. And unfortunately players can’t play potential alone yet. Return of the Shakturi solved most of the UI problems by introducing quick action buttons and the empire navigation tool which were surely most welcome.

Legends improves the UI even further, to the point where finally I have no major complaints about it anymore. For instance, now you’re (finally!) able to track where your ships are going by clicking on them or by turning on the ship vectors overlay, which will show you where all your civilian private ships or your state controlled ships are headed. Previously you could only guess where most ships were headed (particularly civilian ships). You would need to check the ships coordinates to know the ships’ direction. Clearly this was insufficient to say the least. This is now fixed and the ship overlays and vectors shown when you click ships are extremely useful features to have and another big plus for Legends.

Another interesting new UI feature is the ability to track colonies, scenic locations and research locations directly on the main map through overlays highlighting. Previously you could already see those special locations if you accessed the Empire Navigation Tool (a menu in the left side of the screen) but now you can switch on/off map overlays that show you where those places are with a circle around them all together. This is a very interesting and damn important feature to have during expansion planning since we can now zoom-out the map and look into the exploration’s big picture. Instead of going one by one we can now see everything glowing in the map which eases exploration and expansion by a significant order of magnitude.

Another simple, but very, very important new feature is the ability to track who declared war to whom in the main screen without having to go check that in the diplomacy screen every 5 turns or so. The devs were listening, as always. Simple thing to do, big plus.

The first Legends’ patch solved many fixes and improved the game’s balancing, judging from the patch notes, but it also added a very nice little tweak to the design screen interface. It’s now possible to easily distinguish your custom designs from the default and AI made ones. A simple new addition, but all helps.

Last but not the least fleet management is also significantly improved. There are now fleet postures. These are orders you can give to your fleets for them to act autonomously. You can order your fleets to attack or defend and you can set the range to which they will defend your territory independently from your actions (system, nearby systems or a whole sector away from the home base you set). This is also a VERY important new feature, specially against pirate raids or space monsters that appear out of nowhere (or other alien races as well). Many times you would have a fleet stationed in a planet and a marauding pirate would assault your mining stations nearby and the fleet would just seat there. Now you can set these fleet postures and not worry about minor skirmishes. Another big plus!

AI and automation

I don’t know if the AI is competent enough, I probably would need to play Distant Worlds Legends in full automation for a month straight to know that for sure but what I can tell you is that after dozens of hours of play (through DW original, RotS and now Legends) the AI feels competent. Diplomacy interactions are a good example of this. Negotiations feel appropriate, there are no WTF moments whatsoever. Overall diplomacy feels “authentic” and appropriate.

An important aspect about Distant Worlds automation is that if you like to play a higher-level strategy game style you can! Just turn many of the game’s aspects automated (for example ship design, colonization, diplomacy or espionage) and concentrate on other areas you enjoy more. The beauty of Distant Worlds is that it allows you to play in many different ways so you end up with many kinds of experiences and play styles.

The game is immensely complex so for many of you folks just starting now it is recommended that you leave automation on for some aspects of the game while you concentrate on others. I suggest you do this at least at the beginning, then you can slowly start switching off automation options one by one and start getting your hands dirty. I play fully manual now with some occasional suggestions left on and I can guarantee you that it is more than possible to control everything and have lots of fun with that at the same time. Even for an RTS. You just need to pause a lot to review your planning carefully from time to time and you’ll be fine.

Migration is 100% controlled by the AI and it works great. You can see your private sector moving people from planet to planet (from less desirable to higher desirable places) and also from other race’s planets to your own and vice versa. This feels realistic and it is at least fun to watch (since you can’t control anything that’s part of the private sector).

Your freighters are also 100% controlled by the AI. Freighters are the economic backbone of the game. They move all kinds of resources, luxuries to where they’re needed for construction, planet development or trade. There were some issues with freighters running out of fuel constantly in the past, going to the other side of the galaxy or moving around pointlessly in the game, but now, after the first Legends patch, that sort of things seems to have been finally resolved.

The bad, the not so good, and some suggestions

Let’s start with the worse thing about Legends, and Distant Worlds in general. Font sizes, blurriness and color contrast are a serious issue. It’s not just me, many people are complaining that some text in the game is very small and blurry/unfocused to read in places (tech tree and diplomacy screen in particular). Sometimes we can’t even distinguish a ‘+’ from a ‘-’. This is somewhat serious. Click on the image below to see an example of this (tech tree description text is very small and blurry).

This font size issue is not really game breaking or anything like that, but unlucky folks running this game on higher resolutions displays than the standard resolutions can get in trouble. Sometimes I have to lean on and put my glasses on in order to read stuff. Many people are complaining (myself included), others seem to be fine with it. I don’t know what’s causing this or how it can be fixed, so consider yourself warned. This is a serious minus.

Also, something that is really still a bit of a downer is that, although there are plenty of game setup customizations for you to choose from and many races to pick from you can’t yet customize your own race from scratch in Legends. This is surely one of the things that the devs should focus on providing next since it should not be too difficult to implement from what they have already. This is a slight minus.

When we give mining rights to a race the AI should acknowledge that. Currently they don’t say anything like “thank you” etc like with other gifts or treaties. It’s a small thing however. And we can’t request mining or refueling rights either, races are only allowed to offer them. In my opinion this is a slight minus also. The refueling and mining rights concept seems to be a bit rough on the edges still.

Another important thing to point out is that a couple more portraits for the characters of each race would surely be a nice thing to have. At least to have a small degree of variety. This is really not a serious issue but more character portraits would help with immersion.

Now some suggestions

When designing a ship it should be possible to increase or decrease the number of modules (or scrap them completely) in a faster way. Right now you have to click constantly to increase or decrease the number of components added/removed. It should be possible to edit the number of components directly if required.

Ships and facilities (the little icons on space ports and planets) could show build progress (as with a fill color that gets filled up as ships get built). This would be a very nice feature to have for colony ships and space ports construction in particular since they take A LOT of time to build. Instead of going through screens and menus we could just check build progress in real-time. That would be a great new feature since I lose a lot of time with building progress checking.

Another suggestion would be to show how many resources we have of a particular resource when we click on one in a planet. This would enhance exploration smoothness. That way we could know the number of resources we have in a nutshell without the need to go to the expansion planner. This would avoid breaking the flow of thinking also when we are carefully reviewing which systems and planets to colonize next.

You could have a way to store map snapshots. There are many levels of zooming and sometimes I find the need to capture a map (zoom and position) to restore later by pressing some hot key. I keep centering my maps on particular places all the time after being “distracted” by some event. This feature would surely be nice to have.

Further scattered thoughts

Another very interesting aspect about Legends is that you can actually, and surely be able to, win games peacefully if you want. This is not so common in 4X games but Distant Worlds manages to accomplish that for you if you want.

There’s a couple of new great music soundtracks (to add to the existing ones which were already very good).

You can now set the game’s difficulty from very easy to very hard. This will affect the amount of income generated by your colonies. Play very easy and you’ll earn more income than the other races, play very hard and it’ll be the other way around.

There is no multiplayer in Legends. Distant Worlds’ games are currently single-player only.

To play Legends you will need to own both the original Distant Worlds game and the Return of the Shakturi expansion. So, the all set, for the ones that don’t own the previous installments, will cost you around $63 (if you exclude VAT or other taxes required in some countries). It may seem a bit pricy but when comparing with some of the so called AAA games (that are “supposed” to be very good) that cost you from $50 to $70 for a single installment it doesn’t seem so much. Legends is to 4X space strategy fans as Skyrim is to RPG lovers, so the price doesn’t really shocks me.

Why wouldn’t Distant Worlds Legends be worth that much? Some will argue that Distant Worlds is a niche players-only game and that the price doesn’t really matter. I disagree. Legends is good enough to be appreciated by many more people other than the genre fans and, in my opinion, is totally worth the price.

Bottom Line

A very long review for an expansion pack wouldn’t you say? Yes, Distant Worlds Legends has it all. Powerful enough automation options for people who don’t like to micromanage and plenty of detail and depth for the micromanagers to be entertained for many months. What you can’t say is that there’s nothing to do in Legends. Boredom is to be found elsewhere.

The new character RPG system re-emerged Master of Orion 2′ leaders concept. DW Legends devs were wise to take the best of it and perfected it. Really, Distant Worlds Legends is what Master of Orion 3 should have been.

For people who never played these kind of games, that is to say: 4X, grand-scale, highly complex, space empire building games then Distant Worlds Legends is the perfect game for you to make your entrance. Don’t be afraid if at first you feel overwhelmed, I’m sure many of you will. Just go through the tutorials, the manual, start automated and then progressively turn-off automation and slowly you’ll get the taste of what it is to be in control of a space faring civilization. The Distant Worlds forum community is also a very helpful one so they will help you move around if you have doubts or need advice, for sure.

For the hardcore 4X space fans (that didn’t know much about Legends yet and didn’t play it yet) I don’t have much to say to them really. Buy it NOW! Most of you have it already anyway.

In my Distant Worlds Legends preview I stated the following: “In my opinion Distant Worlds Legends shows enough potential to be running for the best 4X space strategy game ever made (Space Sector: Adam Solo)“. I’m not disappointed. After playing Legends for a while now it really is what I thought it would be and much more.

I consider myself fairly unbiased about the game. Yes, I’m a fan of these types of games but the ones who know me know that I value honesty and sincerity. Take into account that I gave a 5.0 score out of 10 to the original Distant Worlds when it first came out. Also, if you need further proof of sincerity just check my Sword of the Stars 2 first impressions article. So, take that into account when you make your judgement.

I finish with this. If Master of Orion 2 was the 4X space strategy gaming reference of the nineties, then Distant Worlds Legends is the 4X space strategy gaming reference of the early XXI century. What are you waiting for? Buy it now!

Distant Worlds: Legends Buy it at the Matrix Games Store.	Space Sector score: 9.4 (about the score system)

Legends changes and additions:

- Leaders / characters
- Influence spheres
- New ships models (around 600!) with better graphics
- Ability to track where your ships are heading (ship vectors overlay)
- Potential colonies, scenic and research locations shown on main map (more overlays)
- Expanded technology tree (e.g. cutting lasers, new planetary facilities, wonders)
- Race-specific events and victory conditions
- Improved fleet management and automation, including fleet postures
- Improved modding support, including full race and character modding
- Improved refueling system (more intelligent fuel management)
- Improved diplomacy system with refueling and mining rights and immigration policies
- Improved performance, memory usage decrease and sharper graphics

For complete details on what’s new on Legends I invite you to read the Distant Worlds Legends preview article. I’ll post here the bottom line of that preview for the hasty:

«I am really looking forward for Legends. And if you’re a 4X space strategy game lover, as I am, I think you cannot afford to miss this one either. I think they’re making history here. In my opinion Distant Worlds Legends shows enough potential to be running for the best 4X space strategy game ever made. That’s a very controversial and bold statement to throw I know, but I’m totally convinced that Legends may be that good (Space Sector: Adam Solo)»

For even more details I recommend you have a look at the next trailer made by the developers and the publisher, which features Legends new gameplay features.

You can buy Legends at the publisher’s store (Matrix Games), the only place where it is being sold at the moment. There’s a digital download version and a physical copy version of the game that also allows you to download your game for free.

Buy Distant Worlds: Legends (20% off release promotion)
Buy Distant Worlds (33% off)	Buy Distant Worlds: Return of the Shakturi (32% off)

Don’t forget that Matrix Games is at a sale right now, so don’t miss the opportunity! Note that you need to buy the base game (Distant Worlds) and Return of the Shakturi in order to play Legends.

Combine this video with the Space Sector’s DW Legends Preview and you should get a good idea of what to expect from this second expansion. There is not a firm release date yet but the devs state that it will happen this November 2011 still. So, stay tuned! :)

Matrix Games and Code Force announced Legends last September 2011. The list of additions to Return of the Shakturi (DW’s first expansion) is very promising so I decided to write this Legends’ preview to try and condensate these changes and present them in a nice wrapper for you guys, so that you know a bit more about what to expect in November 2011, current Legends’ release date target.

So, what’ll be new in Legends?

The major additions and changes to Return of the Shakturi, that I could take note of, are:

- Leaders / characters
- Influence spheres
- New ships models (around 600!) with better graphics
- Ability to track where your ships are heading (ship vectors overlay)
- Potential colonies, scenic and research locations shown on main map (more overlays)
- Expanded technology tree (e.g. cutting lasers, new planetary facilities, wonders)
- Race-specific events and victory conditions
- Improved fleet management and automation, including fleet postures
- Improved modding support, including full race and character modding
- Improved refueling system (more intelligent fuel management)
- Improved diplomacy system with refueling and mining rights and immigration policies
- Improved performance, memory usage decrease and sharper graphics

Wow! Where to begin.

The major new addition of Legends is no doubt the new character system. Legends brings Leaders, Admirals, Generals, Ambassadors, Governors, Agents and Scientists to scene. All of them with their own skills and traits with the opportunity to advance and improve them along the way. The character you start with, in the beginning of your games is your leader. Leaders have effects that are empire-wide, that is, they influence your entire empire, every planet, base, etc. Some factions are more likely to get certain types of characters than others. Characters can be lost along the way though due to violent events, accidents or retirement.

Each character has some skills. Next to each of these skills there’s a progress bar (0% in the example below), that measures progress towards the next level in that skill. You can increase skills (or acquire new ones) through experience in areas related to those skills. Characters also have traits. Your characters may start with one or more traits and may acquire more based on their experiences. You may start with additional characters. For example Randul Shokia (seen below) is a special scientist character.

Randul provides bonus to research, in the research base you decide to put him in. In the example above he adds bonuses to all types of research fields. If you assign Randul to a particular Energy Research station with a +15% bonus to Energy Research, his +34% would add on top of that to give you a combined +49% bonus to Energy Research at that location. Besides skills Randul also has a special trait. Randul is methodical which means that your empire is less likely to suffer critical research failures (critical research is a new feature in Legends, which can give you a spontaneous crash program or a boost in a research area). He gives more reliability to your research in that sense.

One feature I found particularly interesting in the character’s system is that some characters remain mysterious until you actually use them and find out about their abilities. In the example below Kweeki Woppit has known traits but unknown skills. This is an interesting touch in my opinion since it adds an element of surprise and gets the player a little curious (two essentials elements in 4X strategy games) of what to expect from their characters.

Kweeki is a Colony Governor. You can assign Colony Governors to a particular colony and their bonuses apply only to that colony. Similarly, Fleet Admirals are assigned to a particular Fleet or Base, Troop Generals to a particular Fleet or Colony, and so on.

You can assign more than one character to a particular location and bonus from them will add up, though they may not be purely additive. In Erik Rutins’ own words (one of DW’s main developers) «(…) if for example you have a Fleet Admiral who is great at combat and another Fleet Admiral who excels at Fighter Operations, assigning both to a fleet that has Capital Ships as well as Carriers can lead to better results than just having one or the other. However, since you generally will have fewer exceptional Fleet Admirals than fleets, you have to weigh the benefits of having one exceptional fleet against the flexibility of having two fleets that are each pretty good».

Another important aspect in Legends is that the devs state they’ve implemented a better memory management method. This should allow for better performance and memory usage decrease. They also state that this has allowed them to remove the compression mechanism they were using previously, on many of the ship and planet graphics. The result is that Legends should look better, or at least sharper from what I was lead to believe (less blurriness that you could spot in RotS here and there).

In addition to sharper graphics Legends shall also feature 22 new high resolution ship sets (added to the existing ones from Distant Worlds and Distant Worlds: Return of the Shakturi), all obtained from one of Distant Worlds’ players and modders, artist Martin Wood. Here’s an example of some of the new Teekan ships.

That’s approximately 600 new ship/base images right there in Legends! (if you didn’t use Martin Wood’s mod before that is). This was one of the weakest points in Return of the Shakturi in my opinion, and now that seems to have been properly addressed. Big plus! Don’t know if planets and ruins have also been worked at or not though. We’ll have to see.

Legends also brings spheres of influence, or borders. The actual use for them is still a bit unclear to me. My best guess is that they tell how likely foreign colonies are to flip (turn to other empires) if they are inside an empire’s influence sphere. In that regard I think they serve as cultural/influence borders but I’m not sure of their full scope. In Erik’s own words «Spheres of influence are not quite the same as the way we think of borders here on our planet. They project from your colonies and define the space that you could control. Systems within your sphere of influence that you have at least explored are considered under your control. Borders in space are enforced within each controlled system but not in the deep space between systems. Also, building a mining station (for example) outside of your sphere of influence does not give you control over that system (though colonizing it does)». 

An interesting feature would be for these influence spheres to represent a race’s space territorial dominance. Aggressive races would tend to get annoyed if their space was trespassed or if other race’s colonies or mining stations are built inside their influence zones, but I’m just speculating here. It would be cool to have that kind of territoriality though, although I now that theme is a bit controversial and would not be appreciated by some.

In addition to all this Legends will feature new faction-specific victory conditions that can completely change how a faction plays, to faction-specific special events and resource bonuses. In the example below the Ugnari have 4 particular victory conditions: two of them (as examples) are to get 25% most trade and 25% most mining stations.

Another aspect where Legends devs invested a bit was on a new UI system that provides overlay information directly on the main map. At the choice of the player it shall now be possible to switch on/off layers for ship vectors, i.e. see where ships are going, potential colonies, scenic and research locations all in the main map with no need for more actions and clicks through secondary screens. This is a brilliant new addition that could be exploited for even more overlays that may be considered useful in the future.

Potential colonies shown directly in the main map are a particularly interesting feature to have in my opinion since they’ll surely help late game expansion, where there are simply too many planets to look in the expansion planner and what you simply need is a quick way to see where are the potential worlds for suitable colonies in favorable strategic locations. I was very happy to see these new overlays. The UI accessibility was already very good in RotS, now it will be brought to the next level.

Besides all that has been described already there are more things new in Legends. Examples are the expanded technology tree, the improved fleet management and automation (including fleet postures), the improved modding support (including full race and character modding), the improved refueling system (more intelligent fuel management is also a big plus) and the improved diplomacy system with refueling and mining rights and immigration policies (which should provide even richer diplomatic experiences).

Bottom Line

This preview is by no means thorough. Believe it or not, it is more a sneak peak on major changes. Legends adds much more stuff (judging from what I could understand in the game forums, from what I didn’t have access to and others I couldn’t find in detail in my digging). The preview was based on information provided by the devs and the DW’s community on matrix games’ distant world forums. If you want to get more information on Legends, or Distant Worlds in general, that’s the place I suggest you have a look at. I’m sure I missed a lot of things but judging from the changes featured in this preview alone it’s amazing the amount of new things this new expansion will bring, on top of so much RotS already offered.

I am really looking forward for Legends. And if you’re a 4X space strategy game lover, as I am, I think you cannot afford to miss this one either. I think they’re making history here. In my opinion Distant Worlds Legends shows enough potential to be running for the best 4X space strategy game ever made. That’s a very controversial and bold statement to throw I know, but I’m totally convinced that Legends may be that good.

\Edit (23/11/2011): Legends is out! Get it here.

Distant Worlds Legends is the second expansion to the 4x real-time space strategy game, Distant Worlds.  The first expansion (very well received by gamers by the way) was Distant Worlds: Return of the Shakturi.

Distant Worlds: Legends is currently in final testing and expected to release by November 2011.

New features

• New character system, including Leaders, Admirals, Generals, Ambassadors, Governors, Agents and Scientists, all with defined skills and traits and the opportunity to advance and improve
• New modelling of borders and spheres of influence
• New expanded gameplay with race-specific events and victory conditions, as well as a new hidden faction!
• Expanded technology tree, including dedicated carriers, cutting lasers, rail guns, new planetary facilities and wonders
• Improved AI and an updated Diplomacy system with refuelling and mining rights as well as immigration policies
• Improved fleet management and automation, including fleet postures
• Improved modding support, including full race and character modding

Note: Distant Worlds Legends requires ownership of the original full Distant Worlds game.

You can have a look at the Distant Worlds (vanilla) review I’ve made when the game was first released. The game had many problems by then (acknowledged by many) and so the score was a bit low. DW RotS expansion fixed many problems and improved gameplay experience drastically. You can check the DW: RotS review for details on what’s changed on the DW universe.

A contest was also announced (to spice up the release). Read the full press release below.

——

Distant Worlds – Legends Announced and we’re looking for a Space Creature!

A new expansion to the award-winning space strategy game is headed this way with a creature contest!
East Arlington , VT , September 27^th, 2011 – Matrix Games (www.matrixgames.com), Slitherine (www.slitherine.com) and Code Force (www.codeforce.co.nz) are thrilled to announce Distant Worlds – Legends.  Currently in final testing and expected to release by November, Distant Worlds – Legends is the second expansion to the widely acclaimed space strategy game,Distant Worlds.  Distant Worlds – Legends is packed with exciting new features and improvements, including a brand new character system with skills, traits and advancements based on each character’s actions.  Gameplay has been greatly expanded for each race wiith new race-specific events and victory conditions, a new system for borders and spheres of influence, an expanded tech tree with new weapons, facilities and wonders, improved AI, improved diplomacy including mining and refueling rights, greatly improved fleet management, new main map overlays to show ship routes and fleet postures, improved mod support, and more!

Also announced today is the new creature contest for Distant Worlds – Legends.  As part of the release, a new space creature will be included in theDistant Worlds universe, joining the likes of the Kaltor, Ardilus and Sand Slug.  This time, we’re giving ­you a chance to add your signature to Distant Worlds by submitting your idea for a new space creature!  For full contest rules, please see this post in our forums.  You have two weeks before the winner is chosen, and the winner will receive a free copy of the entire Distant Worlds series and an in-game credit for their creature contribution!

Erik Rutins, Director of Product Development Matrix Games, said “Distant Worlds – Legends is a huge and highly anticipated step forward for the Distant Worldsseries. CodeForce has been listening to ideas and suggestions from Distant Worlds players, and Legends brings many of the most requested improvements to life, such as the much anticipated character system.  Now you can choose where to send your best Ambassador, assign your best Admiral to lead your main fleet in a key battle, let your General lead your next invasion from orbit, and make sure you have the right Colony Governor assigned to that new frontier world!  We’ll be releasing more information on Distant Worlds – Legends over the next few weeks as it approaches release, so check back often.”

Distant Worlds: Legends is the highly anticipated second expansion to the critically acclaimed 4X space strategy game Distant Worlds. Legends is a huge step forward which brings the Distant Worlds universe to life.  A new character system includes Leaders, Admirals, Generals, Governors, Ambassadors, Scientists and Agents, each with defined abilities and traits and opportunities to advance and grow over time.  Expanded gameplay for all existing races includes new race-specific events, technologies and victory conditions which create a completely different game depending on your choices.  An expanded tech tree also awaits, with dedicated carriers, cutting lasers, rail guns, new planetary facilities and wonders, and much more (including a new hidden faction)!

Distant Worlds: Legends also includes a new model for borders and spheres of influence for each faction, as well as new fleet management and automation commands.  The interface has been improved with additional overlays for the main galaxy map, including route indicators for all ships and fleet posture indicators, all to make it easier to keep track of activity and strategy. A new setup option allows galaxies to also be larger in map size as well as number of stars.  Empire Policies have been expanded with new options and Diplomacy has been overhauled to be much more intelligent and to include mining and refueling rights.  Finally, the AI has been improved in all areas and modding support has been greatly expanded to allow modders to take full advantage of all the new features.

All of this together makes Distant Worlds: Legends an essential addition to the vast, living galaxy of Distant Worlds!

Please note: Distant Worlds – Legends REQUIRES ownership of the original full Distant Worlds game.

Get more information on Distant Worlds – Legends from its official product page.

ABOUT SLITHERINE LTD. AND MATRIX GAMES LTD.

Slitherine Ltd. and Matrix Games Ltd. are the world’s leading video games producers and publishers of historical and strategy titles. Since 2000, both brands have published literally hundreds of games with many award-winning titles in their portfolio spanning all digital and console platforms. Slitherine is also involved with book publishing, and board gaming and work with a wide array of key licensing partners such as HISTORY™, MILITARY HISTORY™, Horrible Histories™, Showtime, BBC, Osprey, Scholastic, Casemate Publishing and many others to deliver the best blend of historical accuracy in an exciting and entertaining way. The two companies merged in May 2010 and formed the world’s largest organization specializing in this niche but important market sector. Slitherine’s mission over the coming years is to lead the way in innovation and growth in this expanding industry sector.

###

Armada 2526 Supernova will be released in April 2011. In Bob Smith’s (Ntronium Games Managing Director) own words: “There’s no definite release date yet, it’ll be done when it’s done, but the aim is to have it in shops in Europe in April, and probably on the dl services by the end of March.”

A Word about Armada 2526 Original

About Armada 2526 I can say this: it is one of the best 4x sci-fi strategy games currently available in the market. I recommend it any day to any sci-fi strategy game fan.

The founder of Ntronium games is Bob Smith who was the project director and lead designer of Medieval 2 Total War, as for the other preceding Total War Games: Rome Total War, Shogun: Total War, and … Armada 2525, the preceding 1991 oldie.

Armada 2526 is said to be Master of Orion meets Total War. Impressing combination right? The question is, do words turn into facts? In my opinion they do! I invite you to read my Armada 2526 review for an in-depth appreciation of Armada 2526 (I reviewed version 1.02).

Supernova Hands-on First-Impressions

I got my hands on Armada 2526: Supernova a week ago.  After playing for a while here are my Supernova first impressions. But first let’s look at what’s new.

New Features

These are the main new features introduced by the Supernova expansion:

• New Star and Planet Types
• Planets now have special features
• 2 New Races
• 50 New Technologies
• New and more powerful Spaceships
• New Ground Units
• New Defenses
• Stealth Ships
• Trade Networks
• Defenses Sabotage before Battle
• Espionage Missions
• Multiplayer: Play via Lan, Hotseat or PBEM (Play by Email)

New Planet Types and Special Features

In Supernova exploration is now cooler than ever. There are new types of stars and planets. I found 2 new types: Venusian and Eccentric. Venusian planets are, well, like Venus :) They are hostile, very hot and toxic planets. Upkeep is higher in these planets but in the other hand they are easier to improve to more hospitable planets than others.

Venusian Planet Type

Eccentric planets orbit their stars in elongated orbits. The suitability for life varies during the orbital period.

One fabulous new feature in Supernova is that planets now may have special features. These features may be permanent or temporary. This is an extraordinary new addition. These special features alone increase the value of exploration dramatically since owning planets with special features may be determinant for the overall strategy for domination.

For example, a planet may have a pollution resistance, may be cursed or may have exceptional gems on it, just to name a few specials. Pollution resistance is obvious. A cursed planet has increased unhappiness. Exceptional gems present in the planet can be exported using the new and exciting trade network feature. There are plenty more special features like deep caverns, biodiversity, past civilizations, gravitic anomaly, solar flares and surely others that I did not encounter yet.

Trade Networks add a new Strategy Dimension

Trade networks are probably one of the best additions of the expansion pack in my opinion. It’s possible now to build space ports in the planets. They begin by being landing stations, which makes the planet able to import goods from your own colonies or from abroad. The landing stations can be upgraded to space ports.

Passanger Spaceport and Landing Station

With a space port a planet is not only able to import but also to export goods present in the planet (example: gems) to your other planets or abroad to other races. A space port can be upgraded to a passenger space port. When a planet has a passenger space port it can export tourism, this means that if the planet has extraordinary wildlife (one planetary special feature) the planet can cash in extra revenue from tourism each turn.

Trade Networks

When trade routes are established the player can see them as lines connecting the planets with goods flowing from the exporting planet to the importing planets. Players may raise trade embargoes at any time. Embargoes may be fine-tuned for specific goods or for all trade. This embargo feature is also very interesting from a diplomacy point of view. You may launch an embargo upon a player or negotiate the lift of an embargo set by another race.

Two New Races: Giant Crabs and Carnivorous Plants

Supernova introduces 2 new Races: The Florian Diaspora, intelligent carnivorous plants that may seed planets to grow more of their kin. These sentient “flowers” favor ideal planets.

Florian Diaspora and Cancerian Potentate

The other new race is The Cancerian Potentate. These slow moving highly armored giant crabs favor aquatic planets. They tend to be cautious and defensive.

New Espionage System is Simple but Effective

Another new interesting aspect of Supernova is that it allows the player to train spies and send them in espionage missions, to steal information and secrets from the planets where they are based. Spies may inform the player about techs the spied race has and other pieces of information. If spies are caught this may harm diplomatic relations severely which can even lead the race to raise a trade embargo, or worse.

Spy Trained in Grey Order's Planet

This actually happened to me. I trained a spy in a nearby planet owned by another race. I obtained information from that spy. At some point my spy was caught by the Grey Order. They immediately raised a complete trade embargo on me. Ohh and watch out for tourists, as they may, also, be spies :)

More Techs, Spaceships and Ground Units

Supernova adds 50 new technologies to the original game. There are new weapon’s research, like beam weapons range and power increase. There are new shield’s technologies, like anti-matter warheads (that require an available antimatter resource). The stasis shield that enables a vessel to be temporarily immune to attacks. There are also other types of shield improvement technologies.

There are new spaceships like the Neutrinum Dragon and the Battlecruiser Heavy Spaceship.

Batlecruiser

In addition to new ships, Supernova adds new ground units, Special Forces and Extreme Ops that can infiltrate enemy colonies. There are also new defenses (the Guardian II or a the Fighter Station), stealth ships that can scout and gather intelligence without being detected, and plenty more.

Armada 2526 gained Multiplayer

Supernova adds multiplayer to Armada 2526. With Supernova the player is able to play via Lan, to play as hot seat or to play by email. I did not try the multiplayer options because they were not finished, or stable, in the Supernova version that I had access to.

Supernova Multiplayer

You may play in hot seat, setting up a game in your computer for multiple players to play in rounds. You may play via Lan, you can host and join previously created games. In addition to this you can also play by email.

First Impressions Bottom line

I am really impressed with this Armada 2526 first expansion. Supernova really adds a lot on top of an already solid and fun Armada 2526 gaming experience. Ntronium Games deserves an applause by delivering the goods and holding to what they promised in the promo video trailer (that you can find below).

I think Supernova has all the ingredients to be a success. It adds significant new features that improve the original game in many ways. Although, there are probably areas to improve, there always are, I dare to say that Armada 2526 Supernova has been the best 4x sci-fi strategy gaming experience I had since Master of Orion 2 and Galactic Civilizations 2, and that is saying a lot.

There is still room for improvement of course. For instance there is no spaceship design in Armada 2526 yet (and probably never will be) which is so dear to so many 4x sci-fi fans. There is also not a great deal of personality in spaceships, for instance there are no leaders nor spaceship RPG elements (like levels, experience or special powers).

There is also no central story in Armada 2526 yet (besides each race own story) and there are no single player campaigns (although there are a couple of custom maps available in Supernova). This last aspect is not very important, but the first 2 aspects (spaceship design and RPG elements) in my opinion are. Maybe they’ll include these aspects in the second expansion :)

I highly recommend Supernova to all Armada 2526 fans and to all 4x sci-fi strategy fans in general. Taking into account the level of maturity that Armada 2526 has reached with this expansion I think the game is ready to appeal also to the casual non-Sci-Fi strategy player.

You can buy Supernova at Iceberg Interactive (boxed version) . If you don’t own the original game you can also buy Armada 2526 (boxed version) from Iceberg Interactive. Alternatively you can buy Armada 2526 from GamersGate (digital download version). You can also buy Supernova at GamersGate (digital download version).

Supernova Official Trailer

You see one of my main drives in this site is to be able to talk about one of my passions: Space Strategy Games (or Sci-Fi Strategy Games if you prefer) and to get the opportunity to talk with people in the industry and get the chance to review games, play games and keep people informed about all this. And although Distant Worlds is an important 4x game, that clearly deserves a comprehensive review, I get so bored playing it that I could never find the motivation to do it. But for respect and interested of the community here it is now.

Distant Worlds Review

Distant Worlds is a highly complex game. For you to understand better how complex it is I can tell you that it feels to me more like a 4x simulator than a 4x strategy game. When playing DW you get the sense of being in control of a government, not an empire, in the terms we are all used to. This means that you don’t have all the power. And this is a serious problem.

There is a clear distinction between public and private sector in DW and you control the public sector only. It’s something like being in control of NASA, making all the exploration, spaceship design and spaceship building and then the Private folk, eventually, follow on your footsteps. Although this does not seem to be a bad idea at first it turns out that not being in full control of your empire violates a fundamental requirement on “4 Reasons Why We Like to Play Space Strategy Games“.

Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of stuff to do in DW, so much that you must choose where to focus on leaving all the rest automated. You can focus on military aspects, ship design aspects, exploration, colonization, tourism, mining, you can (try to) control everything or you can even decide not to do anything at all and just watch the game unfold in fully automated mode.

The other DW downers for me, besides not having full control of my empire, are the Graphics and the User Interface.

Graphics are seriously outdated, poor and distracting. In the planet view you sometimes have so many ships on top of each other and so many lines and circles (remember that DW map view is 2D) that is really eye bleeding to watch all that. Ship’s rendering in specific are particularly awful. Planets and galaxy graphics are not terrible but are not good either. This is what you get when you choose to mix Spaceships RTS battles (tactical aspect) with galaxy/planetary view (strategic aspect) together in a bad way:

I find this confusion of ships, this constant overlapping totally unacceptable. Many times it’s very hard to select the ship you want and you keep selecting a planet, another ship or a starbase. Terrible. Or you choose to go all the way like Sins of a Solar Empire or Star Ruler did in providing a full 3D model of your world or you stick to the two separate perspectives (tactical and strategic) to give a clean galaxy/planetary perspective to the player and a nice 2D or 3D tactical battle perspective in separate like Sword of the Stars or Armada 2526 did. Trying to mix the two without a proper 3D engine simply doesn’t work, you have to agree with me on this.

But it gets worse. The User Interface is probably the worst aspect of DW. I did not tried the latest DW patches and the Shakturi expansion (probably they may have already fixed some of the issues) but in the original version of DW the user interface was really bad. Let’s start with a screenshot.

Distant Worlds: Ship Design Screen

The user interface has way too many buttons, drop-down choices and information (that sometimes is hard to read) and so it gets too overwhelming to remember what everything does (remember the simulation aspect I introduced earlier?). Another issue is the user interface presentation itself. The interface graphics lack beauty and are very WindowIsh. Let me summarize it this way, I’ve seen business software applications that are more appealing than this game’s user interface.

But it’s not just the presentation aspect, the overwhelming and hard to read information and the buttons that make the user interface bad. The user interface does not help you get where you want and does not provide any visibility of things going on and so you easily lose track of things. This is another serious issue.

For example you send a scout somewhere, or you forget about a mining base you sent to some system or a building order you did on some planet. In DW it’s very easy to lose track of things and to move around. You are constantly clicking your way through system to system and ship to ship because the user interface does not provide a monitoring panel of some sort telling you where your ships are. (If this is fixed by now please let me know so that I can add that note to this review).

The best example I can give you of a complete and successful opposite is the Sins of a Solar Empire UI monitoring panel (see red circle in the picture below).

Sins of a Solar Empire Trinity Screenshot

As you can see in a small corner in your screen you can keep track of dozens of ships and planets at a distance of a click, in DW just forget about it. It’s click fest (where was my ship again? What was I doing? err)

Another annoying issue I had with the DW user interface is that fleet management was a mess. I created a fleet then gave an order to go somewhere. Next time I noticed the fleet was disassembled and I needed constantly to recreate the fleet again and again (I seriously hope that they have fixed this by now, let me know if that is the case).

One more annoyance. Ships need to refuel in DW, and I mean a lot. I can say that perhaps 30 to 50% of the spaceship’s decisions you have to make are based on fuel. Sending a ship somewhere is not sufficient, you have to make sure that the ship really arrives at the destination with the amount of fuel it has. And the problem is that the decision cannot be made upfront, you need to monitor the ships all the way to see if their fuel is enough to reach the destinations.

This fuel thing is another unacceptable design decision (or bad implementation) for me. When fuel is up you need to refuel the ship with specially refueling ships but first you need to remember where the ship was headed and again the UI problem of not being able to track things. How less fun can this be? I seriously hope they have fixed this annoyance by now.

Bottom Line

Distant Worlds is a nice attempt to create a huge living universe full of things going on and also a good attempt to allow the user to choose the degree of control he wants. And although I find the concept appealing in my opinion the game failed to achieved that.

DW failure is due to an unappropriated and incomplete user interface, a bad design choice to separate the powers into public and private sector (in 4x empire building games we want to feel like we manage an empire not a realistic earth like government), poor graphics, a very steep learning curve and some bad design decisions along the way. All this culminates in a dry, sterile, overwhelming, boring and ultimately not fun game to play.

Having heard so many good things about this game (mostly from people in the game forums, now I get it) I felt compelled to play DW and like it, however the result was very different from what I expected. I got very quickly frustrated playing the game which resulted in the worst negative 4x gaming experience I had to date since Master of Orion 3 (that bad).

I recommend Distant Worlds only to hard-core fans of 4x sci-fi strategy gaming, and even here not for all. If you’re a less than hardcore fan of these type of games or if you are a casual player stay away from Distant Worlds.

[* Update 29th March 2011]: This review is based on Distant Worlds “vanilla”, i.e. the released version (Mar 25, 2010). The game is much better now after the patches so take the final score below as the score that reflected the state of the game right after release. Codeforce has released many patches since then, which have improved the game significantly. So by all means try out Distant Worlds as it stands now, including the Shakturi expansion. You will get a much better product that the one released in 2010. There is no demo available unfortunately. I invite you to read the Distant Return of the Shakturi review (1st DW expansion pack). It is a complete new experience.

Distant Worlds (Buy at Matrix Games Store)	Space Sector score: 5.0* (about the score system) See Distant Worlds: Return of the Shakturi review

To know about Distant Worlds I invite you to read an article I did a year ago: “Distant Worlds – A new Real-time, 4X Space Strategy Game“.

Distant Worlds: Return of the Shakturi

In Distant Worlds: Return of the Shakturi an evil race from another galaxy called the Shakturi is unleashed and seeks destruction. Your mission, in case you accept it, is to spoil their plans (does all this sounds familiar? – Yes, its a bit like the Antarans story in Master of Orion 2).

Besides including the Shakturi race this DW expansion adds two new alien races and a completely new and comprehensive research system (reminds me of Galciv2) with new techs and options such as fighters, bombers, missiles, Ion weapons, planetary facilities and regional capitols.

Return of the Shakturi also provides some interface improvements to provide quicker access to everything in your empire:

• Action Buttons for one-click access to common tasks
• Enemy Targets list showing all known enemy threats
• Build Orders to mass-produce groups of new ships in one simple step

To play Distant Worlds: Return of the Shakturi you need the original full version of Distant Worlds. Sorry guys, Matrix Games does not provides a Distant World demo (I wonder why).

Official Trailer

Patch v1.0.3 major changes

• Extensive memory usage optimization. Large games now consume much less memory which should resolve the crashes related to Out of Memory and crashes during save/load.
• Added an AutoSave feature with a variable save interval between 10 and 60 minutes.
• Fleets now respond properly to manual control and will not automatically disband
• Added new buttons in the Fleets screen: Repair and Refuel selected fleet, Retrofit selected fleet
• Several interface and functionality improvements including how retrofitting and ship design works.

For more information on v1.0.3 patch check Matrix Games’s Distant Worlds Gets Another Major Update and the following patch v1.0.3 forum thread.

Patch v1.0.2 major changes

This new v1.0.2 update resolves all critical and a few serious issues that were discovered in the week after the release, including an issue that could cause negative cash flow in the economy as well as several different bugs that could cause crashes on some system configurations.

For more information on v1.0.2 patch check Matrix Games’s Distant Worlds Gets An Important Update.

Download the Patches

Get the Distant Worlds patch v1.0.2.

Get the Distant Worlds patch v1.0.3.

You can buy Distant Worlds from Matrix Games Store.

Distant Worlds main features are:

• 4x Real-Time Strategy
• Less Micromanagement on an Epic Scale
• Special emphasis in Exploration and Expansion
• Research, Diplomacy and Espionage
• Spaceship and Starbase Design
• Lots of feedback, information and help provided through tooltips
• Galactopedia (with additional information and help)

Check the following SpaceSector.com first impressions article “Distant Worlds – A new Real-time, 4X Space Strategy Game” for more information on Distant Worlds and also for some screenshots. Check the Distant Worlds Forums for game discussion.

You can buy Distant Worlds from Matrix Games here.

Since then Ntronium Games has released a new Armada 2526 patch (v1.02), that brought some nice new features and overall improvements to the game that undoubtedly contributed to a more finished and solid product. So the scope of this review will be to give a more in-depth overview of the points that I did not grasp in the first impressions, after many more hours of game play, and will also concentrate in providing you with information about the races, AI aspects, game setup customization, victory conditions, game balance, v1.02 enhancements, overall conclusions and game score.

Armada 2526 Scope

Armada 2526 follows on the footsteps of games like Master of Orion 2, the Space Empires series, Galactic Civilizations, Sword of the Stars, StarTrek: Birth of the Federation and many other sci-fi TBS titles. In this sense Armada 2526 provides the traditional 4x TBS space strategy gaming experience.

The Races are diverse and charismatic, but there is no central game story

Armada 2526 offers 12 races for the player to choose from. There is no race customization option so you’ll have to make your pick according to your liking since each of them has its own specific traits, victory conditions and gameplay styles. In spite having no race customization the races are sufficiently distinct, charismatic and in a sufficient number to give you more than enough options to choose from. Each race will play much different due to their distinct traits and pursuits for victory however they all share the same technology tree and are allowed to build the same buildings and most of the available spaceships.

The story in Armada 2526 is … well there is no story in fact, only a background story for each race. And although this might be ok and even pleasant to the hardcore fans of the genre, in the sense that people may come up with their own stories, this may shun the less core fans or other gamers that are novice to the genre. So the game has no intro cinematic or background story, the player is thrown into the galaxy where he is expected to start writing his own tale from that point forward.

Game setup customization is rich and flexible

When you start your game you have the option to choose to play the tutorial, play a scenario or chose to customize your own game. If it is your first game you definitely should start from the tutorial. After that you probably will choose to generate your own custom game. Customizing a game is simple and Armada 2526 does a very good job providing you with lots of options. You may choose the amount of stars of the galaxy or the way they are distributed. You can set your galaxy size, the map type (condensed or disperse), the enemy races, the number of turns you would like to play and the difficulty level.

Victory conditions variability add depth and re-playability

In Armada 2526 you win if you eliminate all your rivals or if you get the best score (victory points) when the number of turns you set at the beginning run out (you may continue to play after that point if you like to). Each race has its own traits, both negative and positive, but most importantly they have different victory conditions which leads to a different path to victory and ultimately a different style of play. This is good because at the same time that this variety of victory conditions provides more gameplay options it also increases the game re-playability value which is a rather important feature every good game should always aim for.

For example playing with the Human race you get an unrest penalty and a psychic and hyperspace research fields penalty however you get a general research bonus. Your earn victory points if your population is happy enough and if you accomplished glorious victories during your game.

If you play with  the Unn Pirates you get radically different traits and victory conditions. When playing with the Unn you get extremely low population penalty and suffer from high unrest and low-income however you get more money from loot and have biological immunity. You win with the Unn if you can get lots of money from booty and if you can achieve a decent amount own population.

The AI does the job

Generally speaking Armada’s AI plays well. Rival races really do well on wars and are good at the negotiating table however at times the races do behave a bit erratically. For example the races sometimes reject extremely favorable deals and are very reluctant to accept some types of deals (like trade offers) or some times just start doing very repetitive behaviour stating demands that the player keeps refusing over and over. During war the AI sometimes tends to create too many ships of one kind, like transports ships, colony ships or small ships.

With the intent to reduce high-micromanagement stress the game offers very nice automation options to the player. If you want you can set colony management to automatic and set the development policy you’ll d like to set up for that system from that point forward (you can change automation policy at any time). For instance you may set a system to develop the military (that will create more war ships), to develop defenses (that will create more troops, missile bases and starbases), to develop research, improve income, increase population or just use a balanced development.

So in conclusion although there are some minor deficiencies the AI in general does a very nice job and is quite coherent. For instance the AI races seldom attack you with no clear reason, and will trade favorably with you if they like you and attack and reject deals you if they don’t like you.

The Music helps setting the right atmosphere

The sound effects of Armada 2526 are not spectacular but the music is very good. Some scores are even brilliant and really help setting the mood, especially during the exploration and expansion phases were you don’t know who lies beyond and which systems you expect to find.

The User Interface is ok but fails to provide enough control

Information is control and this is probably one of the aspects where Armada 2526 fells short. But this is not saying that the User Interface is bad, far from it. The UI is successful on providing basic functionality like colony management, research management, feature rich charts, good diplomacy screens and good system overview, however the UI does have its weaknesses.

When Armada 526 was first released (v1.01) it had serious problems regarding the UI (that you can read more about it in “Armada 2526 – New 4x space strategy game – First Impressions“). There were lots of information shortcomings. For instance not knowing which fleets are stationed in a planet, not knowing enough details about each building (which are the dependencies and which are the improvements), not knowing what the diplomacy indicators meant or how they are affected (the manual was also poor explaining this). Some of this issues were solved in v1.02 current version (released in early March 2010) while others were not yet sufficiently addressed.

There are also some basic functionalities missing in Armada 2526 like a planet list screen to present the player with all explored systems details: the planets that are colonized, not colonized, its mineral abundance, presence of asteroid fields, etc. This is a key feature that is missing in my opinion since it becomes essential at some point to provide this information to the player so that he does not lose track of things, specially during the exploration and expansion phases of the game.

Another poor UI functionality is the fleets list management screen. The fleets list really provides .. well the list of ships, but does not categorizes or merges them in sufficiently meaningful ways. For example you cannot sort the fleets list by type or by colony. So what happens is that at late games, when you have dozens or hundreds of ships, you tend to lose control on them. I speak by gaming experience, I tend to forget completely about the fleets list functionality in my games and this is not a good thing.

A word about patch v1.02

As said above Ntronium Games released a new patch for Armada 2526 early March 2010. Among other fine-tune enhancements and fixes the patch provides a new automatic population transport system that alleviates the burden of having to micromanage population immigration between systems. This was a nice improvement in my opinion. It works well and relieves the player from unnecessary boring tasks of relocating population almost every other turn.

Some research and economy tweaks were also performed like an option at game start-up to set the research speed (to solve the issue of research techs running out too quickly) or an option to reduce or eliminate the bureaucracy effect completely (a found annoyance by many players).

But one of the most important features introduced by this patch was the overall improvement of information about the game mostly done via tool-tips improvement which now includes a way to see the number of ships stationed in a designated area just by pointing the mouse cursor to it, among other information additions like the amount of discount on production an asteroid mining enterprise employs or the amount of pollution a technology complex produces among many other pieces of information. For a complete list of patch features please check the Ntronium Forums v1.023 Full Changes List.

Bottom line

Armada 2526 is a very solid game, it is well designed and provides a good gaming experience to the player. However it may not be for everybody, and in fact this is in line with the actual Ntronium philosophy which in its own words “targets  the discerning minority of hardcore strategy fans, rather than the mass market”. Armada 2526 is coherent with this motto, its non-linear sandbox mechanics allows (or forces) the player to make up their own stories and reduces the amount of micromanagement generally needed to accomplish some tasks. The game also puts gameplay before graphics, which are nothing too fancy but just ok.

Another good aspect about Armada 2526 resides on the high-involvement of the player during the development process and the continuous improvement of the game by its developers. The Armada 2526 game forums are very active with vibrant game discussions. The developers are always willing to hear the player and most of the changes introduced by patch v1.02 were in fact in response to many suggestions and bugs reported by the community.

So in summary if you’re a hardcore fan of Sci-Fi TBS (in the line of Master of Orion 2, Galactic Civilizations 2 or StarTrek: Birth of the Federation) or simply a fan of 4x strategy games in general this is the right game for you to try next. If you’re a fan of strategy games in general you may also like Armada 2526, but the chances are that if you’re not into this type of games probably this is not the right title for you unless you want to start being a fan :)

You can buy Armada 2526 from Iceberg Interactive (boxed version). Alternatively you can buy Armada 2526 from GamersGate (digital download version).

Armada 2526 Buy at GamersGate	Space Sector score: 8.0 (about the score system)

Distant Worlds happens in Real-Time

Distant Worlds is a real-time strategy game. In contrast with turn-based games like Master of Orion 2, Galactic Civilizations or Armada 2526, in DW the player can be surprised at any time by new events or by enemy attacks which requires the player to make decisions on the spot in a continuous gaming experience. The player is allowed to pause the game at any time though.  Space combat and ground combat also happens in real-time.

Less Micromanagement on an Epic Scale

One of the flag features of DW is that it will provide immense size galaxies with hundreds of systems and thousands of planets. To navigate thorough all that space the game offers several tiers of zoom focus: Galaxy, Sector, System and Planetary views. To switch between these views the player may click on the different focus buttons or zoom in and out smoothly (supposedly using the mouse wheel), something similar to the Civilization 4 style of focus, for the ones that know this popular game.

The other flag feature of DW is the ability for the player to set several levels of game automation. Several areas of the game experience can be set to automatic. These include: colonization, ship building, ship design, attack enemies, treaties and tax set.

Another aspect of the game mechanics is that some tasks are automatically managed by what DW calls the “private citizens”. Some of these tasks include: mining resources, transporting cargo, migration between colonies and tourism. We’ll only fully understand what they mean when we play the game but judging from this and from the extensive use of automation options, Distant Worlds seems to put itself among the type of games that offer grand scale / high-level strategy that requires less micro-management to be done by the player.

With this respect DW mechanics seem to be more similar to games like Sins of a Solar Empire, Sword of the Stars or the original Master of Orion. Other games put more emphasis on low-level micro-management, among these games are Galactic Civilizations 2, Armada 2526 or Master of Orion 2. There is not right or wrong approach here, there simply are different types and levels of micro-management that different types of players seem to enjoy more.

Special emphasis in Exploration and Expansion

Distant Worlds promises to put more emphasis on the eXploration and eXpansion phases (see What are 4x Games: a Definition and links to Games for a definition) and less on the eXtermination phase. One proof of this is that the player must explore other systems using special exploration ships specially designed to explore new star systems.

The player must use these ships to obtain relevant info about planets like for example which resources are  available in the planet. With exploration ships the player may also investigate ancient ruins and abandoned spaceships.

Other important features

The game offers all the standard features of 4x games: diplomacy, espionage and research. It also offers spaceship design and star-base design capabilities which is always a popular feature among fans of this genre.

Where the game seems to have put a lot of effort was on game help and assistance. There are lots of tool tips available throughout the game, tutorials and even a Galactopedia with all sorts of game info and help.

Some more Screenshots (click to enlarge)

Videos

Video #1: Distant Worlds – Introduction

Video #2: Distant Worlds – Exploration

Video #3: Distant Worlds – Game Controls

Current Status

As soon as I can get my hands on Distant World I’ll make a detailed review about this interesting game so stay tuned.

There is no demo available yet. Open beta seems to be about finished but there is no official data yet announced.

In the mean time you can get more information regarding Distant Worlds from the official developer: CodeForce, the publisher: Matrix Games or in the official game forums.