Partly, we should admit that given their basic premise of a single over-riding X->X->X->X advancement path, they admit an intrinsic flaw into their claim as "strategy" games. "Gimme more!" is hardly a leadership choice. Civilization, their most famous former representative, moved away from 4X after its second release when it began dampening endless land-grab expansionism. Later installments increasingly cut down on the other x-es like the redundant military swarm. And that's fine. One can't say the series didn't benefit from it.
But there must be some place for our beloved infinite build-up in computer games, even if it isn't very strategic. Distant Worlds grasps at that place via customizable automation to cut down on the tedium of managing a sprawling empire. Unfortunately, it still yields a lot of this:
SHUT UP !
(And if you think that's bad, the same infinite "advisor" notification spam is prompted whenever one of your ships is out of fuel and lacks a refueling order.)
(One of your many, many ships.)
One might call this a simple, minor oversight requiring only a tweak to the pop-up notification spam frequency. Given that it's triggered by multiple types of events and seems to have gone unaddressed up to patch 1.9.5.12, I'm much less inclined to forgive it. It's also symptomatic of the game's schizophrenia. Anything you automate is completely automatic; you may as well not be playing it. Anything you choose to handle yourself is a painfully obtuse chore. Context-sensitive actions are almost entirely ignored in favor of pull-down menus and nested menus.
Every so often I get a pop-up message that one of my planets started producing a new resource... which will increase my empire's tax income. OK? I guess? I mean, I didn't explore for it, I didn't purposely expand to it, I didn't choose whether or how much to exploit it and I wouldn't know whom to exterminate in order to get at it. But it happened and it's a good thing so I must be a good leader, right? There are scads of the damn things, supposedly unique resources, yet if they all boil down to gross income or can all be supplied by the same smuggling order, what is the freaking difference? Ship captains and other heroes randomly pop up at my colonies. Did I ask for them? Did I take any purposeful steps toward acquiring them? The private sector handles freight handling. All well and good, but do I at least incentivize them in some way? Though taxes at least? I can't even tell. Congratulations, you've managed to alleviate the repetitiveness and redundancy of a 4X by removing the Xs.
Where is the gameplay in this game I'm playing?
Ship combat, though slightly more controllable, is equally unsatisfying. Ships warp around instantly, winking in and out of existence at random locations, milling around indecisively and supposedly shooting at each other. At least I assume they are since they occasionally blow up. It manages to look less engaging than a simple numeric combat report. Diplomacy is rendered painfully shallow by the aforementioned irrelevance of resources. Research and ship design are only mildly more interesting.
Pity.
As with UnderRail or Wasteland 2 or other old-timey throwbacks promising to recapture the magic, I went into this wanting to like it. To be fair, I didn't entirely hate them and I don't entirely hate this one either. True, the flexibility and extent of its automation options are impressive, but that doesn't mean much in the absence of meaningful game actions to automate or micromanage. Apparently Distant Worlds boasts a thriving modding community, but it hasn't particularly inspired me to pick up any mods. I get the distinct feeling that no matter how much you tack onto it, DW:U might just be more interesting to mod than it is to actually play.
From what I've seen so far, there's nothing here which Space Empires 5 did not do better (albeit turn-based) and a full eight years earlier.
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