Distant Worlds is a great idea, but the current implementation leaves much to be desired. Keeping an eye on this one.

User Rating: 5 | Distant Worlds PC
By deactivated-60101b0eda090 | Review Date:
Distant Worlds tries very hard to take the micromanagement out of 4x games. First off, the game is split into private and government sectors. You'll never have control of private ships or facilities so there goes half the micromanagement already. All other ships and facilities start automated so there goes the other half. The game more or less plays itself, asking you for instructions every now and then. This actually isn't terribly bad because the game is full of details that aren't well documented - like what components do that you haven't discovered yet and what you should research - so it's nice having an AI that holds your hand.

However, the AI is pretty bad at offering advice. For example, your intelligence agents will constantly be sent on suicide missions unless you take control. I checked and noticed that the missions the AI was sending my agents on had an 80% chance of success. Every few months they'd get captured, I'd be paying another 5k credits to recruit another, and I'd take a reputation hit. I started sending my agent on 96% success missions and never lost another.

At least the AI is helpful in these situations. There are many others where you get NO assistance. You'll be happily watching ships move about and suddenly you get a message that some other empire wants a trade. They're offering some piece of technology for one of my mining facilities. Is that good? I don't know. I have no idea how good that mining facility is and I can't even click around to find it because the game locks me into this window until I click "Yes" or "No" to this trade. I don't get any help regarding the technology either. What are KX705 Missiles?? They sound good, but are they worth a mining facility?

So the game offers me bad advice or no advice. Occasionally it'll offer some good advice, asking me if I want to build some new ships and suggesting what ships to build. Great. I'd queue up the ships myself if I could easily go through the ships available to me and figure out their characteristics without alt-tabbing into a spreadsheet.

Distant Worlds is a game with potential. I like the concept of a 4x full of details that the computer takes care of (that's what computers do well) while I get to make large scale choices. If the AI gets rebuilt to give good suggestions, the documentation is completed, and the interface is changed to allow me access to the documentation and the other information available to me when I need to make choices, then I think Distant Worlds will be a very good game. Until then Distant Worlds is only a good idea halfway implemented and thus gets half a score.

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