I knew I was going to get overwhelmed trying to play Distant Worlds: Universe without automation. I just didn't expect it to happen as quickly as it did. It was the ship design that got me. I set research to "fast," as I usually do in these sorts of games, so that I might see the deeper reaches of the tech tree, and the end result was that I could not keep up with the proliferation of parts and ship classes. So I caved and set my ship designs to "auto" and once that taboo was broken, it became too easy to offload the parts of the game I didn't like to the AI.
It also didn't help that even at maximum player involvement, half the game is controlled by the AI anyway. Distant Worlds: Universe has a mechanic called the "private economy," where things like mining and trade are not directly controlled by the player, but instead by their simulated citizens, who do things like build civilian freighters, mine rare materials, and run luxury cruise ships around your colonies. It can be a bit frustrating when they hire all your construction vessels to build their mining stations or clog up your space port's build queue when you're trying to establish a new colony, but I have to admit, they do bring a sort of life to the game's world.
What they also did was rapidly expand my empire beyond my (admittedly limited) ability to easily comprehend. What I wound up doing was compromising with the game - automated ship design, fleet formation, and anti-space creature/pirate patrol; fully manual research, colonization, and taxes; and everything else handled by pop-ups that prompt me to decide on various plans suggested by the AI. For example, the game will periodically show me a message saying that my "advisors" recommend I build 10 more ships - 3 escorts, 4 destroyers, 2 cruisers, and a capital ship - and that this will cost 50,000 credits - do I approve the expenditure or not?
It's an interesting way to approach a strategy game, I'll give it that. It does genuinely make me feel like a space executive. I'm presented with a plan that someone else came up with and I have to use my broader knowledge of the strategic situation to decide whether it makes sense. I could see a really intriguing game built around that premise.
Where Distant Worlds: Universe falls short is in delivering a sense of internal politics. The plans I receive don't have any agenda behind them, they're just churned out by the same algorithm that the AI uses to make decisions for the enemy factions. You don't have to worry about things like private rivalries, hostile ideology, or the subversive incompetence of your subordinates. You just have to decide whether you can afford a particular action at a particular time.
Using my hybrid approach, I was able to effortlessly win a fast game at the lowest difficulty. The way Distant Worlds: Universe handles victory is pretty interesting too. Your score is broken down into 4 categories - economy, population, territory and a fourth "racial" category that gives you specific objectives for your particular faction. Each category is worth up to 25% of your final victory. Once you reach a certain threshold (default is 80%) you win. The cleverest part is that there's no extra victory points for exceeding your goals. The economy condition requires your private economy to be worth at least 1/3 of the whole galaxy's. If you reach that 33%, you get 25 victory points. If you happen to be at 50%, you still only get 25 victory points. If your economy tops out at 20% of the galactic total, you'd get roughly 15 victory points.
In theory, this could force you to take a balanced approach to your strategy. Especially with the racial victory conditions, which can call for just about anything in the game - I've seen spy missions, mutual defense treaties, tourism income, and building a particular wonder, to name just a few.
In practice, all three of the generic victory conditions measure the same thing - the general size of your empire. Oh, you can fiddle with tax policy to encourage population growth, or micromanage your ship designs to artificially boost your resource consumption (and thus the robustness of your private economy), but the easiest way to advance in any of the three is to conquer your neighbors. It is rare to have one of the conditions without the other two, and I'm not sure it is possible at all to have two without the other one.
I'll have to fiddle with the game setup to see if I can customize victory into something a little more interesting. Speaking of which, the setup screen in this game is amazing. It seems like a small thing to single out, but it gives you so many options. There are a variety of presets that correspond to different historical periods in the game's lore. And if you set up a custom game, you can choose all sorts of details about the game's difficulty, the overall galactic environment, and the nature of your enemies. It's a little like creating your own setting prior to starting the game.
I think my next move is going to be to try something wacky - I will be playing Distant Worlds: Universe in my sleep, literally. One of the options in the automation settings is "Rule in Absence (full)" which sounds like the game plays itself on your behalf. The very idea of this intrigues me. Why would you even bother to create something like that? Who is it for?
My plan is to turn off the victory conditions, set the difficulty and game speed to "normal" and let it run while I go to bed. Then, when I wake up, I'll check on the condition of the galaxy and see how well my AI viceroy did.
I'm sure some of you are thinking "Hey! That's just a cheap way to get out of playing Distant Worlds: Universe for another 10 hours," but that's not what's going on here. My reasons are threefold - 1st, I actually like this game, so I really have no pressing need to get out of playing it. 2nd, this sort of ridiculous experiment is exactly the sort of thing I'd do if I were playing the game purely for my own pleasure. 3rd, this is a game mode made available by the developers themselves. They gave it its own, flavorful name. None of the other automation settings has a poetic alias. "None" isn't called "Obnoxious Micromanager." They are all just blandly functional. Except this one.
So maybe I was meant to do this. Maybe I'm the target audience for full automation. Maybe they created "Rule in Absence" especially for someone in my situation.
Unlikely, I know, but we are already so far past the horizon of plausibility that I can't even be sure what's real anymore.
No comments:
Post a Comment