Key Features

• Play as a Lone Pirate and begin with a single ship and rise toward pirate infamy to become a Legendary Lone Pirate or grow into a Pirate Faction.
• Periodically jump into your ship’s new cockpit or bridge view to experience the action from a unique first-person perspective.
• Play as a fully space-based Pirate Faction with much more control over a new economy based around mining and trade, smuggling, raiding, privateering, espionage, influence and corruption and contracts of all kinds from different sources.
• Grow strong enough and you may transition from a fully space-based Pirate faction into a new Pirate Empire with its own unique government type — or remain space-based and become a Legendary Pirate Faction.
• Experience the new “Age of Shadows” starting era, where pirates must survive against increased threats from the Hive and build up as independent colonies look to become the first full space-faring empires that will challenge your dominance of the galaxy.
• Four distinct playstyles are available: the jack-of-all trades Pirate, the chaotic and aggressive Raider, the trading-focused Smuggler, or the combat and privateering-focused Mercenary.
• Complete contracts, raid planets or guard planets to fight off rival pirate factions to make sure your influence spreads unabated. Influence creates corruption and will covertly siphon off income and expand black market resource offerings for smuggling.
• Establish Hidden Pirate Bases and Pirate Fortresses to solidify your presence on key worlds. Upgrade a fortress into a Criminal Network to lay the foundation for your Pirate Empire or build the Legendary Anarchopolis.
• Undertake and compete for contracts across the galaxy that include resource deliveries, espionage missions including artifact theft and ransoming characters, and destroying assigned targets or fighting on the side of another faction.
• The powerful Shadowports act as neutral pirate-aligned hubs where pirate factions trade ships, technology, and rare equipment. They also offer contracts to support pirate efforts, especially to keep Independent worlds and planetary Empires under control and to counter the Hive.
• A new smuggling system allows contraband resources to be transported to buy and sell at premium prices.  There is risk involved, however, as smuggling operations may be discovered, which could result in the destruction of your ships and reduce your reputation with your trade partners.
• Discover expanded Independent Worlds with unique bonuses, artifacts, defenses, and which can now evolve into powerful new empires.
• Faction behavior can be customized with expanded pirate policy systems governing contracts, smuggling, influence, and fleet operations.
• As an Empire, experience new interactions and challenges with the fully developed Lone Pirates, Pirate Factions and Shadowports that now populate the galaxy.  Pirates can be opposed or hired through the new Contract system for Resources and Privateering which allows you to hire Pirates to fight your enemies for you.

 

The Galaxy lives on

I've been eyeing this game for a while for its complexity and similarity with Stellaris. I've been seeing a lot of players saying its fully automated, a lot of the building, exploration, fleet/ship management and building and it seemed like a bad thing for others and some served as a beginner introduction to have a feel to the game. But what do you guys think, what are your tips for beginners that we could look forward to or makes it more fun rather than the game playing everything for us?

Title.

What is this?

This is a dependency marker for ModLoader. It contains no code, assets, or gameplay changes and does nothing by itself. It does not install ModLoader.

Other mods can list it as a required dependency, so players see "depends on: ModLoader" and know what they need.

What can ModLoader do?

• Load DLL mods into the game
• One-button Workshop mod upload
• Load order control: the game already lets you do this in-game, but ModLoader lets you set the order before you launch

Installation

1. Download the latest release from GitHub
2. Extract .zip it anywhere you see fit (it can work from any folder on your machine)
3. Run DW2ModLauncher.exe

For DLL mod authors

It is advised that you mark your mod as dependent on this workshop item so that any user can easily find Mod Loader

Download

https://github.com/lucky-wolf/DW2-Mod-Launcher/releases

I'm asking because I'm testing to see how well my PC can perform on the most demanding settings while running at 8x. The number of civilian ships presumably indicates enough I would think.