Let's Colonize Space in Distant Worlds

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Distant Worlds is a p. impressive-looking space 4x game of truly epic proportions. I've just completed the tutorial, so I'm still a noob at this game, but it looks awesome and I feel like doing an LP of it.



Now, because I'm still a noob and learning to play, we're not going to make the galaxy too big. Actually, even a "Dwarf" map is rather large compared to other games (GalCiv2, MoO2, that Civ4 space mod), so that's going to be enough for us.
We'll make ourselves an expanding galaxy, which means that other empires will be moderately advanced. We'll also have plentiful alien life forms cause independent pre-space-empire cultures can be useful to trade with, or colonize their planets and assimilate their people into our culture.
We'll also have fast research speed and a normal amount of pirates and space creatures (they're like the space eels and amoebae of MoO2).
Now, on to the creation of our mighty empire!



Now, for races there's a large selection, but because I'm a racist there are only about three races that interest me: humans (that's us), Kiadian (humans with huge brains, think Psilons only that they're humanoid) and Securan. We're gonna take Securans because they're hot space chicks who love culture and food. Also because they have tits.



Now, there are some more starting options to pick. The name of our Empire shall be Codexia and I've chosen the flag that looks most like a swastika. I've also colored it like the Third Reich flag. Our galaxy starting location can be either the inner core, outer core, inner rim or outer rim. I've picked the outer core, which is pretty central and has a good amount of star systems around it. The red circle on the map shows the area where your solar system might be located.
We can also choose how far our empire is developed, both in size and technology. I've chosen a small Empire consisting of one planet for our Codexia, so we can start from the beginning and grow more and more powerful as we colonize new worlds. I'll give us a little head-start in technology, though, and set it to advanced. I'll also make our star system be totally awesome.
Now, on to the other Empires!

I won't provide a screenshot here cause there's not much to see. You can create other empires just like we've just created our own Codexia, picking their race, technological advancement and government type, but we'll just let the computer randomly generate some Empires. Since this is a small map, I've chosen to have 7 Empires competing with me. I've also checked "allow independent alien colonies to form new empires", which probably means that the pre-imperial aliens we can find on some planets have the chance to found their own empires later on. Neat!
Now on to victory conditions. I think they're pretty straightforward and don't need much explaining, so I'll just provide a screenshot:



Basically, we'll win if we own 40% of all colonies, or if 40% of the galaxy's population lives in our Empire. These goals sound like they're doable, but not too easy to attain.

That's it, now we're going to finally start the game and create a Galaxy for us to colonize with sexy blue alien chicks! Creating the galaxy takes a while because it's large (yeah, even though we picked the smallest available map size). After a while, the game starts and we see this screen:



Behold our mighty and powerful Empire of Codexia! It has... uhm, yeah, one planet. But that's okay because we want to start from the beginning, anyways. Building an Empire from the ground up is more fun than starting out huge already, in my opinion. But before we start building our Empire, let's take a look at the galaxy map:



Every dot on that map is a star system, except for the pink ones. They're nebulas. The star with the red circle around it is our home system. The one with a blue circle around it belongs to another Empire (as you explore the galaxy, you will find other Empires - this one is close enough to us so we already know about them from the start).

Now, looking at this, it's really kinda small, so we'll scrap that game and start over on a slightly larger map. This time, I'll pick a "Small" map with 400 stars (four times the amount that we have now) to make the whole affair a bit more exciting. But don't worry, we won't have to create our Empire from scratch again - the game remembers the options of your previous game and leaves the options sliders at the places you set them last time. So we'll just increase map size a little and maybe add one more Empire, so we'll have 8 other empires to trade and wage war with.



Doesn't that look much better? It sure does!

That's it for now, dear citizens of Codexia!
In our next update, we'll check out our solar system, try to mine for resources on different planets and try building a colony ship and colonizing another planet in our own solar system.

This is our home planet! It's called Narsillean 5, because it's the fifth planet in the solar system of Narsillean. We want to know what's going on on that planet so we check out the colonies screen.



WHAT THE FUCK?! Who let those furries on our planet? Apparently independent alien races can exist on every planet, even your home planet, which I think is awesome. So evolution has not only created sexy space chicks on our planet, but also a bunch of furries, who luckily are in the minority. Who cares, as long as they pay taxes and work!
Yeah, just as long as they... wait, the taxes are apparently too high! Argh! Luckily that doesn't matter much since our high level of development makes the people happy.
While we're at it, let's check out the other properties of our home planet. It has a shitload of different resources, some of them being luxury goods (which contribute to happiness by high development and give us money) and some of it being gases that can be used for fuel, and some resources we can use to build. There's a shitload of resources in this game, with some, especially the more expensive luxury goods, being pretty rare.
The resources that we already have are shown on the "cargo" tab. The "resources" tab shows which resources we can harvest from our planet. There are some metals, and there's ale (yay, beer for the people!).

We can also recruit ground troops, which defend the planet from invaders and can be used to attack enemy planets. Currently we haven't even discovered any empires, so there's no potential threat we need protection from, therefore I'll disband the two troops that are currently being recruited. I'll leave the ones that are already there, though, and stop the automation of troop recruiting (you can automate almost every element in the game). I don't want many troops on that planet cause they cost upkeep.

On to the construction yard, then. Here's what we want! We can build a nice little colonizer here. The game tells me that colonization is automated, but we want to colonize the galaxy all by ourselves without the computer doing all the work, so we'll just deactivate that little feature. Building a colony ship now! Yay!

Having done that, we'll zoom out a bit and take a good look at our solar system.



Okay, FUCK, this is huge! We have, what, thirteen fucking planets in that system? And that's not even counting the moons. The planet that is full of red symbols is our home planet. Looks like we got a lot to colonize in our solar system. Well, on the not-so-life-friendly planets we'll just farm resources.



Apparently we already have a mining station there. And on some other planets, too. Hooray, that means there are resources coming in! Gas giants are pretty inhospitable, but they are a good source of valuable gases that can be used as fuel. Notice that the gas giant where our mining station is has three moons, one of them being as large as the smaller planets in our solar system.

Checking out our system, I've noticed that planets close to the sun are volcanic, while those far away are ice or barren, and those in the middle are continental (the earth-like ones). That's p. awesome because it makes sense.

Another good news is that we have one of those continental planets right besides our home planet. That means we can send our colonial ship there as soon as it's built!



I've spent most of the game in pause mode to make my decisions and look around, so I'll un-pause now (it's real-time) and wait for the colonizer to be finished. For that I'll set the game speed to maximum.

That's it for this update, next time we'll colonize the planet and try to explore another solar system.

You can group them into fleets, or you can let them do their own thing.

The ones that are constantly scurrying around are mostly transporters and mining ships, which are privately owned, therefore you cannot directly control them (which would only be unneccessary micromanagement anyways).

Grouping into fleets will be useful later when we meet other Empires and declare war on them in order to let our sexy space chicks enslave them.

Holy shit, game looks awesome.

A bit small screenshots would be good though - I have to side-scroll on my poor laptop which makes reading your text pretty difficult.

My bitchin' 1920x1080 resolution is the reason those things are so huge. I could make them into clickable thumbnails if someone told me how to.

Also, as soon as I know how to I'll purge the furries from my planet. For our pure Codexian race!
Next update coming somewhen today, where we'll build our first colony and explore a little.

Looks better than using thumbnails, and I'll be describing most of the stuff that's going on, anyways. I might use thumbnails for screens with lots of text (like when I find historical data) and smaller images for regular screens.

What program did you use to resize it?

Finally our colony-ship is finished and we can start colonizing the other planets in our system! But oh wait, what is that?



Our military advisors want us to build some defense station on our home planet? Do we need that? I don't think so. Too expensive, we'll focus on building colonies and getting some income first. And we haven't met anyone who could become dangerous, anyways, have we? Now, let's send that colony ship to... wait, what?



We have found another empire, says a popup message! I'll go into the diplomatic screen and see... two other empires? FFFFUUUU
Well, that will happen often since the other empires explore all over the place and our own exploration vessels also are set on automatic exploration, which means they'll encounter other races, inhabited planets, lost space-stations and other interesting things.

Now those two empires are scalies and therefore don't have a racial relationship bonus with us (if we find Humans or other Securans, they'll have a relationship bonus with us based on our racial similarities; racist game is awesome). But we have a good reputation, and the Muunos Mandil confederacy approves of our form of government. We're staying neutral now because I don't want to go to war yet, and they don't like us enough for a free trade agreement yet. Also, since we've chosen advanced development of the galaxy in the beginning, that means that other empires have already a few colonies while we don't. That puts us at a disadvantage, but, of course, we'll be able to out-match them later on. Those hordes of space-orksscalies will fall to mighty Codexia!



Let's just ignore those other fuckers for a while and focus on our lovely little colony that we just... well, colonized. Narsillean 4 is ours! We have 2 planets under our control now! Narsillean 4 and Narsillean 5. That colony has just begun to develop, therefore there's no happiness bonus yet. We'll have to build stuff on that planet now. First I'll train two ground troops just because. While we're at no immediate threat, we don't want our planets to be completely undefended, do we?



We gonna build a small space station and a recreation station in the orbit of that planet now. Space station lets us build spaceships, while the recreation station boosts the happiness of the population. Happiness is good. The happier they are, the more we can tax them. Low happiness can also lead to emigration, and we definitely don't want that.

While we're at it, let's send a construction ship and build a mining base at the planet's moon. It's not the most lucrative resource-source, but we'll build one there anyways. Maybe it'll boost the economy of our young colony. When we let our construction ships be automated, they're going to build mines by themselves at good places. We're gonna do just that, which means that in the course of the game, those ships fly around, even into other systems, and build mines there. That's good for us because it boosts our economy.



Hey, what's that? Our military advisors are at it again! This happens pretty often when you don't have ship construction automated, but enabled advisor hints. Advisor hints are mostly useful so we keep that feature on. Also, we'll click yes because we can afford it, and increasing our fleet is always good, not only because of the possibility of war, also because pirates can become a problem later on.



Hey, the frog-scalies want to sell us technology! We got the money, so yeah. I like technology, so I buy it. While we're at it, let's look at our research. Research is good, it gives us technology. I like technology.



Research is random. You can't tell your scientists to research just beam weapons - they'll research everything. If you build many weapon research stations, that will raise the amount of research that goes into weapons, though. You can also directly invest money into research, but that usually costs more than it's worth. It's more expensive than what the frog-scalies just offered us, for example. Let's build a research starbase at our home planet now.



They're not very expensive, so I'm going to build one of each, which will boost our research in all areas. Now we... hey, what's that?



Ancient ruins discovered! Splendid! Let's explore them! Ruins mostly give you either maps of star-systems, expensive artifacts that give you money, or, as is the case with the one we discovered now, details on the history of the galaxy:



Gasp! This is one of the really awesome parts of this game. You can discover ruins or lost space-stations that contain logs about events that previously happened in the galaxy.

And where did we discover that ruin? Somewhere far away in a different solar system! That's because our construction ships automatically visit different solar systems that have been previously explored by our exploration ships in order to build mines there. When colonizing a planet or building a mine on one, you can find such ruins.

And with this astounding discovery, we conclude this chapter of the Codexian colonization of space.

Yes. Planets orbit around the sun, moons orbit around their planets.

There will be MOAR this evening. Don't be impatient.