Distant Worlds 2: Quameno and Gizureans DLC Review

Gizurean

The Gizureans are a fast-growing, aggressive race with a semi-hive mind and could be considered evil due to their penchant for war and eating people, but not devious like Boskara or deceptive like Dhayut. They’re very upfront about the fact that they’re going to eat you as they have a lot of mouths to feed. They prefer deserts and other dry planets. The Gizurean populace doesn’t mind being at war, are good at boarding and ground combat and have cheap ship and troop maintenance. They can reverse engineer and repair things exceptionally well but are otherwise terrible at research and diplomacy. Their increased generals and admirals are balanced out by fewer spies, diplomats and scientists.

Unique Modifiers

CodeForce have doubled down on more impactful unique modifiers in this DLC and they radically change the playstyle of the Gizureans, whose modifiers focus on three main areas – research, tribal conflict, and population management.

Gizurean research is unique in the game and a very interesting change of pace. They are very slow at researching technologies but are excellent at reverse engineering technologies from other races’ ships and planets. This leads to a very different way to research and may not result in what the player wanted, but they will have to make do with what they’ve found made available to them in their conquests. Being slow at research, Gizureans have two main alternate ways to research technology. The first is substantially increased return from salvaging or retiring enemy ships and the second is by scouring conquered worlds.

In addition to that technology (and resource) bonus, scouring worlds also grants an empire-wide population growth bonus, and worlds can become “breeding worlds” when using the exterminate option on colonies with alien races, providing another substantial population growth bonus. When combined with their racial and government bonuses to population growth, Gizureans can expand very fast, great for players who prefer to play wide rather than tall.

Perhaps due to this high population, Gizureans are a violent, tribal society and this impacts how they fight enemies and can result in rivalries between your leaders, resulting in one becoming stronger – and the other dying. Life is cheap in Gizurean society – this goes for their warriors too, with the Swarm Command modifier giving bonuses based on number of ships in a fleet so using more expendable ships is rewarded, and the large 30% maintenance reduction reinforces this even more.

Ships

Gizurean ships are aggressively oriented with primarily forward-facing weapons and heavy use of their unique hive hangars – including on the smallest ship of any hangar capable craft in the game, the frigate, surpassing the previous top dog here the Ackdarians who had Destroyers with two hangars.

There are 6/7/8 hangars respectively for the Light, Standard and Heavy carriers at the high end and 0/1/2/2 respectively for the Escort, Frigate, Destroyer, and Cruiser at the low end. Battleships and Battlecruisers range from 2 to 3 and will likely provide the durable brawling capability should the Gizurean player feel the need.

An almost required tactic for Gizureans is to disable ships and focus on boarding actions to capture them to gain their technologies. There are a few ways to go about this, but adding troop transports with multiple boarding pods to your fleets can work very well to capture enemy ships, something I’ve never tried to do with another race. Ion weapons can be useful here, and it’s important to bring down enemy shields rather than bypass them so the boarding parties can do their job.

Swarm Targeting sensors are a fun extra mechanic that you don’t need to make use of, but you’re definitely rewarded for doing so. Sadly fighter craft don’t count for it, but many cheap frigates (each carrying their own fighter craft) does work very well for it. It opens up interesting options of swarms of light escort carriers to patrol your space, each accompanied by a troop transport that tries to capture any pirates found.

Quameno

“The galaxy’s greatest introverts,” Quameno have a particular way they like things to be done, when things are different it quickly gets outside their comfort zone making them unhappy and less efficient” (We’ve all been there…). They just want to be left alone to play video games research and solve puzzles and mysteries. They are peaceful and research-oriented, cautious and dependable and like to live in mangroves, swamps and oceans. Alongside their fast research, they produce a lot of scientists but fewer admirals and generals and are not that great with diplomacy, trade and espionage – Dhayut starting near Quameno will likely benefit greatly from Quameno research bonuses!

Unique Modifiers

Playing heavily into their introverted nature, the Quameno are highly disincentivized from diplomacy. Not only is their racial victory tied to having the least diplomatic agreements with other races (excluding pirates) but they get a large penalty for 2 years whenever they sign a new treaty. On top of not enjoying other factions, they don’t particularly like aliens and their strange ways inside their own faction either and will suffer penalties until they’re integrated into normal, upstanding Quameno ways.

A new feature to Distant Worlds 2 is the Ancient Vaults, a feature the Quameno are tied heavily to but heavy spoilers so it would be best to discover that yourself!

The most research-focused race in the game, the Quameno race and unique government type both speed up research substantially. In addition to this, they have unique faction modifiers associated with research that make it a core part of the focus for the Quameno player. Similar to Gizureans (in a polar opposite kind of way) Quameno can lose leaders, just not on infighting – they can be “spent” (I like to think of it as retiring after a job well done…) on crash research to immediately complete it, or to prevent a critical failure.

Quameno get access to two unique technologies – the Novacore Reactor and Bubble Shields, both of which are very useful and tailor in a large way how Quameno ships will play in combat and general use.

Ships

The distinctive Quameno ships differ from the Gizureans in being less aggressively forward-facing, having a lot more side and rear-facing weapon mounts. They are average in hangar capability but their unique modules give them substantial power generation and excellent shielding capability thanks to the high damage reduction of their shields, making them amazing against enemies like the Gizureans who focus on many small ships and fighter craft that deal lots of small damage hits.