Distant Worlds: Universe - 4/20 hours

I'm not entirely sure I have a handle on this game. The tutorial wasn't very informative. It showed me the basics of how to move my ships around and navigate through the menus, but it didn't go into strategy. There was no sense of how all the various mechanics hung together, or why I would want to do one thing over the other.

But maybe that's asking too much of a tutorial. The other, larger problem with Distant Worlds: Universe is that so much of it is automated. The default settings have the AI handle virtually everything, from setting tax rates to deciding your future research to colonizing planets. I played the introductory map for three hours and I could not tell you what function I had in the inner workings of my empire. I sometimes overrode the automation when I thought it wasn't prioritizing research correctly. And it always asked me to confirm or reject diplomatic actions and intelligence missions. But largely the game played itself. I wound up being the most powerful empire in the galaxy and I could not say word one about how I did it.

I suppose it's admirable that a game give its players so many powerful tools to customize the experience. I, for one, appreciated not having to manually direct my units to patrol my borders on the lookout for pirates and deadly space creatures. However, I think having all the options enabled definitely makes for a weaker game. I was barely connected to my space empire and I certainly never felt fully in control of its direction or character.

My next move will be to set up a "pre warp" game, turn off as much of the automation as I can, run the game on slow speed, and see if I can work out the logic of the simulation. Then, when I know a little bit more about the inner workings of the game, I can scale the automation back up to a level I'm comfortable with.

My gut tells me that Distant Worlds: Universe has a lot to offer, but I need to approach learning it in a systematic way. Just going by how large the automation menu was, this game has a lot of moving parts, and any one of them could be the thing that trips me up.