When I play 4X games, my favorite parts are when I'm exploring the region around me and, when I discover another faction, trying to get the best territory near the border. Eventually, though, somebody starts shooting, I have to make a serious military, and my interest starts to wane. In DW2, though, it's possible to arrange it so that's unlikely to happen.

It all begins with the startup options.

{Note: I say 'factions' while the game says 'race.' I know it's a 4X tradition, but it really doesn't work for me in this game. Your empire will have several species and immigration happens all the time, even between empires. 'Faction' makes way more sense to me.}

Galaxy Shape & Size: No worries here, pick whatever you want.

Galaxy Settings:

• Expansion: I suggest keeping this at the default pre-warp setting so you start in just one system. Don't rob yourself of the fun of initial exploration! This setting and Starting seem to be the same, as near as I can tell. Note that this expansion level (and the tech level coming next) are the defaults for everyone. You can set your own expansion/tech level lower or higher later on.
  
• Tech Level: It's probably best to pick the pre-warp option until you know what you're doing. There will be little to do in the first minutes of the game other than exploring the rocks in orbit around your homeworld, if there are any. When you start, immediately research the starting warp technology and crank the game speed up to at least 4x. Tech level 0 will give you that warp technology immediately, but having every possible weapon technology will have implications on the game's automatic ship design, which you'll want to use until you get a handle on how the game works. Beyond tech level 0, you'll start taking away important research decisions, so I don't recommend those unless you know the game well already.
  
• Galaxy Aggression: Peaceful, right? Weellll... so far, I haven't used that. I simply pick the more peaceful factions, as you'll see below. You could use this setting to keep the more belligerent factions from being quite so nasty, but those factions also tend to have bigger bonuses to their fighting ability. Putting the galaxy on peaceful and then dropping the Boskara out there is like challenging a sumo wrestler to a sprint. Still, it could be good to keep a muzzle on the more moderate factions - especially when you're just learning the game.
  
• Hostile Races Near Player: Heck no! Put it at normal.

Threats: Nooooo! Don't hurt us!! Well, OK, maybe some.

• Pirates: We're going to make a lot of unpopulated space, so there will be a lot of room for pirates. I play at Few, and I bet you'll still have plenty at Very Few. You can get rid of them entirely (except for a few that are important to some factions' stories), but I find them useful.
  
• Pirate Strength: Normal is just fine!
  
• Pirate Proximity: Again, normal is fine.
  
• Pirate Respawn: They probably aren't going to be dying using this play style, so whichever.
  
• Space Creatures: This is a big one! At normal level, you're going to need a military just to keep shooting these things out of your skies. At 'few' it will just be a few fleets - and none at all for the early parts of the game. At 'none' you have no real need for a military at all until the Hive starts waking up (unless there are special places where certain enemies always must be). Be aware that creatures aren't all bad! They drop special resources that can be great for a colony, and other folks in the galaxy will like you more for your efforts.

Colonization: I've always just left these at the default and everything has been fine. The number of independent colonies will be important as the competition between factions to woo them will be a major part of this type of game.

Your Race: Just because a faction is war-like doesn't mean you have to play them war-like, but it does tend to me a lot of the faction's bonuses will be wasted on your puny military. Thus, the more peaceful factions are going to be your best choices unless you are looking for an extra challenge. If you are looking for me to decide for you: Ackdarians are good. They've got good research, lots of fighters (which are good against monsters), and can build ships faster.

A note on the planets the factions colonize: many of the planet types are a lot more common than others. Continental planets are pretty rare, while most stars have desert and/or ice planets somewhere. However, those common planets are mostly very low quality, while most continental planets are high quality. I've never heard officially, but I think it's a safe bet that the colonization opportunities are going to be roughly the same for all the factions. They certainly aren't wildly different.

Oh, and while you are looking at the starting factions, think about who you want to fight. They will likely be the runners-up to the factions you wanted to play as.

Your Empire/Government: This is important, but not as important as you might think. It determines a whole host of bonuses and penalties as well as a few starting technologies. The starting techs are the most important part. This is because you can switch governments pretty easily in this game. However, doing so does not grant you the starting technologies or make government-specific techs available. So, if you switch to a monarchy, you won't get a palace or even a way to research it, but you will get the bonuses and penalties and you will be able to designate a flagship.

Note that you can change your flag, but the color used for your empire is fixed.

Starting Situation:

• Home System: This is a good way to boost/gimp yourself when you are trying to balance things out.
  
• Critical Resources: I would keep that ensured unless you're staring at tech level 1 or greater.
  
• Expansion & Tech Level: This is your own tech level and expansion, in case you want to make things easier or harder on yourself. It overrides the default you set above.

Other Empires: Who will your competitors be? This is a big key to making a more peaceful game: turn off the randomness and set up the enemies yourself, picking the less hostile options. I also reduce the number of empires a lot. Three or four is plenty for me. You can add more if you want to put more weight on diplomacy, less if you absolutely adore exploration.

Unfortunately, the stats on the factions are all three screens back! ARG! Here are the least aggressive factions, with the ones in DLCs in italics:

• Quameno
  
• Ikkuro
  
• Ackdarians
  
• Teekan
  
• Zenox
  
• Atuk

Haakonish are a little bit aggressive, but not too bad. Wekkarus just showed up and I don't have the DLC, so I'm not sure where they are at. (There's a screenshot showing the Atuk's aggression level.)

Victory Conditions & Events: There's not much on this screen that's relevant to this guide except for the general Story Events. The "Major Threats" button controls the Hive. This is a mid-game threat that will give your military something to do. (I presume the planet killers are part of the Shakturi DLC, which I don't own.) If you don't want that threat around, you can turn them off here.

Yeah, I know - the universe is out there beckoning, and you just went through multiple pages of options to get the thing started up. This won't take all that long.

So, click your flag icon in the upper left then go to the Policy settings (or just press P on the keyboard) and you'll get the automations for your game. You'll notice very quickly that there are a LOT of them! If you see the game doing something weird, check here to see if there's some automation turned on that's doing it.

For this play style, set troop recruitment, fleet formation, and fleet ship management to manual under the first 'Advisors and Automation' section. The AI will over-spend pretty badly if you leave them on. (The options also appear under Troops and under Fleets.)

If you started at tech level 0, the AI will throw all sorts of weapons all over the place in its ship and station designs. The choice of what weapons get used where is in the Weapons and Component Focuses section. You'll want to focus your research on one type of short ranged weapon and one type of long ranged weapon. Make sure the options in this section match up to your choices! If you research lots of plasma torpedo tech but leave this section on missiles, the ships the AI builds will keep using missiles! (If you did the pre-warp technology, simply don't research the technologies you don't want to use.)

Also, you'll want to turn area weapons flat-out OFF. They will be useful in certain situations where you are up against enemy fighters, but that won't be in the early game. That, or you need to start hand-designing all of your stations as soon as you want to build them, because otherwise the game will load them up with pointless area of effect weapons.

At some point, you should read through all the available options. They will probably change as the game keeps playing on.

And now you're in your galaxy, looking to explore!

If you started at pre-warp tech levels, you can explore your home world's orbit and maybe a moon (or a gas giant if you start on a moon). Zzzzzzzzzz. Start researching that first warp technology and increase the game speed to 8x.

The main way to explore planets is the survey. This sends down a bunch of folks to the planet to have a look around. When it finishes, the exploration level will go up to 10 and anything with a 10 difficulty or less will be discovered. If you survey again, it will go up a little more. Repeated surveys will top out at 15. When you get your tech level up to Planetary Exploration, the initial survey will put you at 15 and repeated surveys will top out at 25.

The other way you can explore is with exploration scanners. They don't do nearly as good of a job, but they've got a big advantage in that they scan everything in range, plus they do it quicker. This makes them ideal for scanning asteroids. You'll need to research the exploration scanners at tech level 1 to do this.

(Quick Tip: your exploration scanners can find out the basics about a planet faster than the survey option. However, the scanners can scan a rock in orbit around a planet even faster, and the scan still affects everything in range - including the planet! If you fly your exploration ship between the asteroid belt around a planet and the planet itself and then do your scan, you'll get several rocks plus the planet itself scanned in just a few seconds!)

Note that you will be given the options to keep exploring and surveying the planet. If you do exploration, though, that isn't what will happen. Your ship will actually start do surveys, even though it says it's doing exploration. If you zoom in, you'll see the little survey ships going down to the planet. (A ship that doesn't have survey modules will just revert to 'no mission.') This bug is actually useful once you know it's there, but it can really confuse new players.

Automated exploration ships will do very thorough exploration. They will explore every planet, asteroid, and sun (unless there's a monster present) to the maximum their equipment allows. I normally use a few exploration ships on manual control to do the initial scans of the most promising planets, then let the automated exploration ships grind through the rest. To help keep them sorted, I rename the automated explorers to put "A" or "An" in front of their names. Then I can just scroll to the bottom of the exploration ship list and see all the explorers I manually control easily.

There is also an auto-scout option for exploration ships. This sends the ship out to unexplored systems. When it gets there, it flies to the sun, then goes to another unexplored system. I'm not sure why the scout bothers to fly to the sun, but the practical upshot is that the scout will quickly get a look at all the star systems in range. If there's an independent colony, a monster, a pirate, or another faction, then the scout can find it, assuming it has a good proximity scanner. It also means that you can look at the system and see what types of planets (continental, desert, ice, volcanic...) are there. If you are looking for ocean worlds, for instance, you can find them pretty fast with the scout and then send proper exploration ships to survey/scan the planets.

Exploration ships aren't the only way to explore, though! If you have colonists on a planet, they will explore it. Stations orbiting a planet will also (slowly) explore the planet.

Long range scanners do a sort of exploration, too. They don't reveal anything about planets, but they do tell you where those planets are. When an unexplored system is in long range scan range, it looks like this:

If you've got an exploration ship selected, you can send it to explore a specific planet/moon by right clicking at the center of one of those fuzzy dots instead of giving it a general 'explore the system' order.

Long range scanners also reveal ships. If you see a bunch of white circles headed for an unexplored star, then you can bet that somebody is living there and trading with the independent traders. You can find abandoned ships and stations with LR scanners, too!

Job #1 is getting the materials you need to build and power ships that gather materials. If you run out of, say, steel, then you won't be able to build a mining station to gather more steel. Independent traders might eventually show up and sell some to you, but you're basically boned.

The game starts you out with quite a few materials, so there's not much to worry about in the early minutes of the game. As long as you use that time to make a few basic mines, you should be fine. You'll want polymers, silicon, and the stuff you find in rocks. You'll also want caslon, the fuel source you'll be using to get around.

If you go to the resources tab, the first subtab shows you all the resources you know about, how much you are gaining/losing per second, and how many sources of it that you're mining. If you click on one of these, it will put circles around places that you can find that resource. You can also go to the subtab that lists new mining locations to see a nice list of suggested places to mine.

When you see a % by a resource, that's an indication of how easy it is for your miners to get the stuff out of the planet/asteroid.

Mining engines come in big and small sizes. The small kind is not used much. It's used automatically in fuel tankers so that they can mine fuel themselves if there's no other sources around. You might be able to cram one on to an exploration ship to let it explore without any worries about fuel, but I haven't tried it.

The large size is used by all mining ships and stations. It mines faster and can also mine in a radius when mining asteroids! Unfortunately, mining stations can mine either the planet or asteroids in a radius. Mining a planet with asteroids doesn't give you access to both.

When it comes to the actual stations, small mining stations are cheaper, but they only hold about half as much and can't defend themselves very well. For stations near civilization that either get frequent visits from trading vessels or are mining low % locations, that may be just fine. Larger mining stations are better able to defend themselves and can store up a lot more between freighter visits.

The way materials move around tends to be a sort of hub system. Supplies first go to the closest colony. Once that colony has all it needs, freighters move the excess back to your capital planet. If a colony or station is running short on some supply, a freighter will take that material from the capital planet to the place of need. It isn't always the most efficient pattern, but it works quite well - unless your capital is clear out on the edge of your empire. If you start on the edge of a galaxy (or just get hemmed in by nebula), you'll eventually want to move your capital closer to the center. This will help with corruption, too, which gets worse the further away the capital is.

Minerals and gasses aren't the only things out there to exploit, of course. Locations with research bonuses should be high on your list for sending a construction ship out to build a research station. Not only do these provide a bonus to researching particular technologies, but they also help with your overall research. You can see a list of station locations to build in the Research tab's 'New Research Locations' subtab.
There are also tourist stations to build. These don't make a lot of money, so I don't worry about them much. I mostly use them when a construction ship or colony hasn't got anything else to do. You can see a list of the untapped tourism locations under the Citizens tab.

Here, there be monsters. And here. And over there. And a few dozen around that planet over yonder!

At first, they'll have no trouble wrecking your stations. They aren't all that aggressive, though, so you might be able to put a station down that's far from them with no trouble - at least for several years. If they do attack, they move in slowly enough that you could get a fleet out there to defend the station before it's destroyed. As time goes on and your researched weapons improve, monsters will get easier to kill. Fighters can confuse them, and stand-off weapons will start hurting them before the monsters can get their own weapon in range.

When a monster is destroyed, try to pick up the remains. Whatever colony you repair at will use the stuff to improve the colony! Other ships can pick up the remains automatically, but the main carcass vanishes fairly fast.

When the monsters start to become easy, they start becoming more of a thing to harvest than to fear. Don't feel too bad about harvesting them. They... uhhh... don't feel pain like we do. <ahem>

Be aware that they do travel and breed. The ones hanging around that black hole may wander on over to your neighboring colony after a while!

Note: the new command queueing system is really handy for picking up all those little bits! Tell the ship to pick up one bit, then just shift-click on each of the individual bits. It will vacuum all of them up! If your ship isn't already close, start with the bit furthest away so it doesn't have to travel to the others.

Also, your ships DO have a maximum carry amount. If you try to pick up a carcass with a ship that is already at its max, the carcass will immediately vanish and you won't get additional stuff.

Pirates aren't bad as long as you don't misunderstand them! Well, a few of them are pretty bad, but most of them are good boys! Just give them a few scraps of meat and they'll scout around the galaxy for you.

When you meet most pirates, they offer you "protection" for a nominal fee. Fine. Cough it up. It's a lot cheaper than building fleets and having mining stations raided. If they don't seem interested, quickly pop into the diplomacy window and offer them a gift to make them happier.

Rarely, even that won't work - probably after initial communications go VERY badly. You could always re-load and hope for a better initial coms roll, but sometimes there are other options. One is simple avoidance. Whenever they start trying to attack a ship, run away. If they try to raid a station, select the station and hit the red X to scuttle it BEFORE it starts shooting back. No goods go to help the pirates and there's no damage to your reputation! If you can do that until the game lets you send a gift again, you could get them on your side. If that doesn't work out, you'll just have to kill them. (Don't worry, they don't feel pain like we do. It hurts them a LOT worse!)

Assuming you're not forced into pirate slaughter, the pirates will start offering you information. This is mostly pretty good stuff! The star system information they give is like exploring every object in the system. Just to level 2 - but that's enough to know what most of the asteroids have, maybe a fuel source, and even how habitable the planets are. They also offer information about ruins, independent colonies, and other factions. Those are expensive, but sometimes worth it. (And hey, if that independent colony is on the other side of the galaxy, remember: they're pirates. Re-load from before you paid them. You know they would do it to you!)

Something I found out the hard way: if they ask for help against The Hive, agree to it! Apparently, they think of themselves as guardians against that ancient evil as a way to help them sleep at nights. Yeah - as if. But, if you say you won't help, you'll get a -20 to relations with every pirate faction, and that penalty won't go away. Having several pirate factions suddenly get angry with you while Hive ships are waking up is BAD. (It doesn't seem to happen immediately, either. A re-load will lose a lot.)

Colonizing planets with your faction is pretty straightforward, really. You find planets with a rating of 20+ and drop a colony ship on them. After that, the population will slowly grow due to normal population growth and because other people (or cats or spiders or whatever) will migrate there in search of more space and lower taxes.

The normal growth rate is pretty slow. You might want to make a second colony ship, a B Ark, to follow the hearty initial colonization population with some management consultants, hairdressers, telephone sanitizers, and other people that keep all the doers and thinkers organized and handsome. Unlike the initial colony ship, a ship that just transfers population around does not get taken apart and used as building material - you can take it back, get more population, and either bring even more people to the established colony or go and colonize a new planet with the ship. (And, if you change your mind and end up colonizing a planet with the management consultants and advertising executives, well, how bad could it be?)

This type of colonization is important, but it isn't really the best way to expand. Taking over independent colonies is much more effective! First of all, they typically start out with a higher population. They probably have been trading with independent traders, too, so they'll have some goods on hand. Best of all, once their population gets over 500 million, they can be loaded onto colony ships and colonize worlds that are suitable to them!

So, if you're playing as the Ackdarians, you're probably having trouble finding many ocean worlds. If you can get some Haakonish to join, though, they can colonize the higher quality marshy worlds. The Zenox can colonize icy tundra planets. Orions... err.... Securians can colonize desert savannas. The more varieties you can convince to join, the more planets you're going to be able to pick from!

Colonizing independents peacefully is pretty easy to do. Basically: pay them! Signing trade agreements helps, too. When they become friendly with you, they'll ask you to colonize them. So, you say yes, send over a colony ship, and you're done, right? Yeah...not quite. You see, the friendliness that comes from gifts fades pretty quickly. As that friendliness goes down, so do the chances that your colonizers will be welcomed. It takes some time to build a colony ship and get it out to a distant world. By the time it gets there, colonization may be too late.

Another strange thing about this type of colonization is that you want FEW people on the ship! Unless you can put folks on the ship that will like living on the new planet, keep the number down! Just start loading citizens and immediately cancel once they start to show up. It turns out that all you need to incorporate an independent world into your empire are a few people to tell them when the official holidays are (not as easy as it sounds on a planet with wildly different rotation rates!) and where to mail the tax money. Unfortunately, they do scavenge the colony ship to build some architecturally acceptable government buildings.

The way I like to do this is to build the cheapest colony ship I can, give it just a few colonizers, then park it next to the independent world. It sits there until I can get the colonization chance up to 100%. Then I order the colonization, and it happens in under a minute! Note that agreeing to a trade treaty gives a permanent bonus and a temporary bonus, so putting off the trade agreement until you are just about to colonize can also help your chances.

As you X-COM veterans know, 97% is not 100%. If your colonization attempt doesn't work out, you do get to keep your colonization ship, but you'll need to go back and get some more colonists.

When you ask a ship to go a long distance, you'll notice two rings. A yellow dashed ring indicates how far a ship can go in a straight line before running out of fuel. An orange dashed ring indicates how far the ship can go in a single jump. See this screenshot for example:
Normally, the yellow rings are outside of the orange rings, but the ship in this screenshot is nearly out of fuel.

That yellow circle assumes you are going in a straight line under full hyperdrive power the entire time, too, so it will shrink if your ship isn't already going that speed. But the yellow fuel limit isn't a brick wall in space. If your ship runs out of fuel, it doesn't stop dead, it just moves a lot slower. If you run out of fuel just before arriving, it won't hurt too bad.

If you ask a ship to go further than the maximum warp distance (the dashed orange ring), then it will do so with multiple hops, like so:
Those multiple hops always go through star systems, but there's really no reason for them to do so. You can direct the ships end their jump out in deep space, then continue on to the destination.

The computer's plotted paths will also avoid nebula:
You can certainly do better than that by plotting your own path!

As with most things in the game, the AI does a passable job of designing ships and stations, but you can do better. Explorers won't be able to field weapons that would even hurt a small gravilix, at least in the early game, so why include them? It's quite possible to put two colony modules on a small colony ship, too, and start a colony off with a population of 60M instead of just 30M - though it will probably cost you some range and speed.

While the ship design system is great, controlling what upgrades to what is pretty confusing. You need to set the ship to only upgrade from certain types of ships and... well, to be blunt, I gave up on the whole upgrade thing. I just manually upgrade some types of ships and not others.

For instance, I like to have two types of colony ships. One has extra colonization modules, one has the minimum number of colonization modules. The first is great for colonizing new planets and trucking large populations from one planet to another. The second I use to bring in independent colonies. To do that, I upgrade the stock colony ship that the game provides to have two colony modules, no weapons, no defenses, fewer crew, possibly less fuel, and possibly a bit underpowered, then save it. That sets the colony ships to manual upgrade. Next, I use the copy to make a whole new type of colony ship. This one only has a single colony module but has more fuel and is definitely fully powered but still no weapons or defenses. That is saved under a different name.

Now, when I want to build a colony ship, I have two options. The earliest one made will have the option to "upgrade" to the latest version made, but I just ignore that. If I do want to upgrade a colony ship for some reason, the upgrade option is always to the newest version, so I just make a new version of the colony ship that I want to upgrade to.

The actual designing of ships is a pretty complex subject. I'll let other guide authors cover that. (Maybe they'll have better ideas on dealing with upgrade paths, too!)

Queueing

The ability to give ships multiple commands was recently added to the game. If you want a ship to do multiple things, just keep telling it to do more and more, but with the shift key held down.

For instance, say you just savagely murdered an almost innocent gravalix and you want to take the parts home for a bar-b-que. The main carcass is easy, just select a ship and right click on the carcass. However, there are little bits strewn around, too. If you select a ship, hold down the shift key, and start right clicking each little bit then the ship will start picking up the scraps! If you miss, the ship will move to that location, but that's fine, just keep clicking around. Holding down the right mouse button will show you all the options you can queue up.

V2 Upgrades
Some technology upgrades will have "v2" or "v3" after them, indicating new versions of the same technology item. If you research one of these, everything with an older version of the technology will instantly upgrade! For instance, Advanced Nuclear Fission gives you the fission reactor. Nuclear Supercharging will give you the fission reactor v2. When you research Supercharging, all your ships using fission reactors immediately get the upgrade without having to do anything. Any old ships/stations using the old space reactors, however, were not automatically upgraded. They've got to have the old space reactor yanked out and a fission reactor put in to get the added benifit.

Why can't I build a mining station?
If you find yourself with plenty of cash but you can't start a mining colony, check your private economy. Money for those comes from the private economy, not the government. If they just paid you to upgrade lots of their ships, you may have all their cash! They should get the money back pretty quickly.

Where did Help go!?
Sometimes the table of contents for the help will scroll weird. If all the entries vanish, just use the mouse wheel where the table of contents should be, and it will show up again. You ARE using the help section, right??

How did you make your interface colors different??
There are a few color options in the game's main settings!

I'm trying to save up to buy something big, but my cash on hand keeps dropping!
Yeah, that's the automation buying things for you. When I first started playing, it would buy entire fleets of ships I didn't want because I had a fleet automation set to fully automate. Even if you don't have that on, ships and stations get upgraded, too, which costs money. If you go through the automation list again, you'll probably find what is doing it.

If you need to increase your cash, you can go into the empire budget and increase the % saved for your personal use. You'll need to turn the automation for it off, or the percentage will just revert back.

Hey wait! How do you actually WIN peacefully!?
Just get bigger and bigger, better and better. Get control of resources the other empires need. Ally yourself with everyone of importance and you'll win. Oh, and don't give away the home world.

Most importantly, I would strongly suggest YOU decide when you have won or lost. When an empire satisfies the victory conditions, the game pops up the victory conditions window to show who won. Then it continues along as if nothing happened. No fanfare, no achievement, no ice cream. So, why strive for the game's goals? Strive for what you want! Biggest blob of color, biggest population, happiest empire, a billion population on every type of planet with a solid ground, whatever you want. Or just follow your nose until you get bored.