Hello everyone and thank you for your interest in Distant Worlds 2! One of the principles of Distant Worlds 2 from the start has been to add more [b]“guided automation”[/b] to find a better middle ground for players between full manual play and fully automated play. Ship Design and Research are two of the key areas where we heard a great deal of feedback from players who wanted more guided automation. In Ship Design, players have the option to fully automate this area, design all of their ships manually, or mix things up by assigning some ship roles to manual design and keeping others automated. The fully automated and mix and match players wanted more influence over how those automated designs looked and we agreed that this would be a good thing. In order to fully achieve this goal, we also needed a way to better guide research (when it is automated) because the ships and bases that you can design depend in large part on the research you have done in terms of what components are available to you. It made sense to connect the two systems in order to achieve the desired end result. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/39688059/20357a27b87cb9ca2652cbc6b803a51097c99a65.png[/img] We added an entirely new section to the Empire Polices to accomplish this goal and you can see a screenshot of that section above. There are tooltips in the game to help explain the choices, but I will summarize how the system works here. For close-in weapons and stand-off weapons, you can choose a weapon category to prefer for research prioritization and ship design. The automation will then focus your weapon research in those weapon categories and use those weapons in its automated designs. When a faction has a faction-unique component within these categories, it will be further preferred and weighted for research and design. For example, you can see in the Mortalen ship below, that it has Blasters and Torpedoes as the preferences state, but in the choice of which Torpedo to use, the automation has researched and included the Mortalen-unique Pulse Torpedo. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/39688059/801a8e94dfe2d68ed06fc6b54058a046b2859a8e.png[/img] There are other categories where the player can also choose the priority of a particular weapon type, which ship role should be the smallest to try to fit those weapon types in its designs and even state that he does not want that type of weapon used at all to free up space for other priorities. For example, see the screenshot below of the choices for Ion Weapons. These three options give you maximum flexibility – if you don’t want Ion weapons on your ships at all, or you do want them but only on your Battleships, or you want lots of Ion weapons on all of your ships, you can achieve that through these automation policies. The same flexibility now applies to Intercept Weapons (Point Defense and Fighter weapons), Area Weapons and Bombard weapons. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/39688059/41404583e06ebb2111a81b37df41b4cee47ca176.png[/img] Near the bottom of this new policy section are a few sections that are not about weapons. The first deals with Fighters and as with the above lets you pick how much you would like to prioritize Fighter Bays on your designs and which should be the smallest ship role with Starfighters. The rest give you some choices on Reactors, Shields, Hyperdrives and Engines. In each of these component areas, the research tree offers you different paths. For example, you can see below the choices for Hyperdrives – you can choose to focus on Energy Efficiency, Jump Initiation Time or Speed. In the game, these are represented by the Kaldos, Calista-Dal and Equinox hyperdrive branches. Once you’ve picked one of these preferences, it will guide your automated research and design to focus on those components without manual involvement. [img]{STEAM_CLAN_IMAGE}/39688059/7e979a0fbde27614ca3d5dfc903ffb5ec752c16f.png[/img] We plan to build on this system further in the future, adding additional preferences for Fighter designs and Civilian ship and base designs, as well as other requests the community may have. We hope this feature review helps you understand how to use these new policies and that they make your time in Distant Worlds 2 more enjoyable!