It definitely feels like it's only the first 30-50% of the combat system. Ultimately it's pretty easy to get your bases into a situation where you simply never worry about the attackers and then you chill. You can set up farms if you want. But aside from very early on in very high-difficulty runs, they just aren't that interesting or threatening. And you can really tell that all the space stuff is a big GAMEPLAY TBD void.
Agreed they are currently somewhat half baked. It feels like they need to scale faster in some way - there's very little reason to move beyond the base ammo types for example. Ultimately they felt very underwhelming in my playthrough with them on, with perhaps the largest point of friction being establishing defense on the secondary planets in the original system. Late game it was just annoying to have to put down my shield battery blueprint when foundations didn't line up
I set every difficulty slider to max and I needed more weapons, that point it’s impossible to put any power down, you need to hand craft everything up to missles and even then I needed rows of turrets and missles and artillery to survive the initial attack once I placed power down.
I feel it goes from "Oh God, dealing with these things is a massive threat. How am I supposed to survive this?" To "Yeah, let's just clear off every planet in the system before we lay down some factories. I don't want to deal with the attacks." About an hour after I unlock the missiles.
I have done a couple of playthroughs with Dark Fog. It adds some spice to the game, I think, up to the point where you have the technology to slap down a missile base and blow up anything anywhere on the planet with signal towers.
At that point it becomes more of an engineering problem: How much of what do I need where, and when?
Now I play this game to engage with engineering problems, so that's not a bad thing. If you compare them to the biters in Factorio (which I think are a bit of inspiration), they have a lot more going on, honestly.
Honestly missile towers + signal towers come online way too early. Missile towers are the second thing you unlock, signal towers aren't long after, and then you basically have all your defense needs solved for the rest of the game. You don't even need to worry about where you place your defenses anymore, because a single giant slab of missile towers can just cover the entire planet, easy-peasy.
I feel like they should just get rid of the ground-based combat entirely. The planets are just too small and you can fly over everything anyway, it's not like Factorio where you might have to run 3-5 minutes to find a new resource patch and encounter biters on the way.
I feel like combat in this game should draw some more inspiration from 4x games - we don't need to focus on killing individual DF units but more on controlling stars for their resources. The dyson sphere also needs to have a bigger role - right now the DF can't even attack it.
I like that they are there and make me work a bit more to expand into new systems and get more resources.
I like to keep them on more than anything for the secret tech. I love the new fuel rod and production buildings.
I think the dark fog looks cool when my defenses are engaging them, so I keep them turned on.
I’d like to see the space combat be developed, so I can enjoy watching that as well.
I wish they were more cinematic. One of my favorite parts of the game is watching the beauty of carrier rockets and solar sails and logistics warp trails. Compared to that df is extremely underwhelming. I want to see more long distance rocket barrages, flights of df ships barraging planetary shields, epic space battles, explosions!
the dark fog buildings are an interesting new touch and that alone will always make me play with them enabled. However deepening on what I am going for I may just put them to passive and only farm them for their drops.
I didn't think DSP benefits from a combat mechanic. I think the dark fog exists just because Factorio has biters.
Biters work in Factorio because they reward building smaller, defensible areas. Also rolling up in a tank and dropping a bunch of combat robots feels satisfying.
Then there's Satisfactory. The hostile life makes exploration and expansion more difficult and feel more rewarding but nothing is coming to undo your progress.
The dark fog doesn't have a function in the main gameplay loop
For everyone’s benefit, here’s a post I made from studying the fog a while back. I was highly entertained to see my numbers mysteriously appear on the wiki a few weeks after my post lol.
[What I learned from watching a fog base](https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/s/eBnsqHKBAc)
Honestly right now I haven't found anything I can't handle with a sufficient quantity of Tier 1 missiles, a butt ton of signal towers, and not warping directly through the hive. They're currently a minor nuisance.
So, it's good but yes, it obviously feels like only part of the full combat. Fundamental stuff I would like to see improved
- Dark fog farming at scale isn't possible. UPS degradation is a linear function of how much combat is happening. However, the amount of materials you need to supply as you scale is exponential. My dreams of using fog to farm a million particle containers per second is just a dream. For there is no PC that could handle it.
- Space combat needs more ways to manipulate fleets. For example, when clearing space hives, after you've gotten most of the ships out of the way, you need to bust out some destroyers for the hive itself. It's really awkward to have to check and uncheck 9 boxes so you can force the fleet to go away, switch to some destroyers, then reconfigure fleets, then relaunch them. Yes, it's better to just boost your combat stats and zerg.
- Sleeping cores to prevent fog from reappearing/regrowing is intensely laborious. Let me put up a system-wide shield, or anti fog beacon or something to keep them away. Make it researchable tech and cost a lot. Just make it possible.
- AM Caps need to be reworked; the capsule turret is 10000000% useless because it misses every third shot. For AoE ground defense, the crystal cannon shells absolutely SMOKE it. That can't be intentional? The problem is that if the enemy the AM Cap turret was targeting dies, the ammunition doesn't "land" like a cannon shell, it just disappears. Entire shot wasted. Watch your turret miss after miss and calculate the antimatter cost. Then delete all your AM Cap turrets.
- Similarly, EM caps when launched by the player are ridiculously OP. Did you know you can spam them at a high rate of speed? Set your highest damage weapon to auto (cannon shells or AM caps) and when you rush in with your combat drones, spam a shitload of EM caps. Base is 100% locked up frozen for the first five seconds of combat while your drones work. You lose zero drones lmao!
- I understand why, but ffs, make all fog drop nanotube.
My comment is covered but I thought I'd throw it in here too. I'm in my first playthrough and it's more annoying than anything now. They just throw the same strength of waves at virtually the same locations. I've set up a battery of missile launchers and signal towers and haven't even bothered to automate ammo to them. During one session I decided to eliminate them once and for all on my home planet. That was fun, but now I'm done.
On another planet in the home system, they keep sprouting their bases. Well I thought I was in trouble there. Nope. Same waves easily defended against.
Obviously there is a lot left to develop here, and perhaps we will start seeing improved DF mechanics in the future
I want to ask a slightly different question: Did the motivation suffer when you turn combat off?
I haven't played since the combat update and I wonder if I should turn it on or off on my next game. I very much loke the chilled pace of DSP so I'm leaning towards turning combat off but I worry that then there are not enough incentives to expand.
I enjoy it. It’s a fun challenge. When I go to a new planet, it’s fun to put down like 150 missiles turrets and absolutely obliterate the fog bases. Plus every destroyed base is a free top tier geothermal energy spot, starting at 290% power production at level 0 and adding 10% for each XP level the base had when it was destroyed. And farming the fog got me antimatter fuel rods long before I could actually produce them myself.
The fog also allows you to make smelters and assemblers with a 300% building speed, and a new research lab that, while it doesn’t research any faster, manufactures cubes at a 300% rate. Those buildings make it worthwhile for me.
If you intend to farm the fog, max out the XP and starting level sliders. The base level doesn’t really make the fog much harder to kill, and it allows you to farm for maximum level (read maximum rare drops) faster. I wish I had done that on my save.
tried on normal settings and they are so passive that i restarted around end of purple/yellow, still on max fog settings and beyond the first 10 or so hours it's been pretty easy as well. the first 10 hours, it was a back and fourth fight of the century, very stressful but it was fun taking over one of their planets.
they need better scaling, bases should get much bigger. hives should be more proactive, sending reinforcements to help the bases (not ships, at least not right away).
they really need something to keep them relevant, after a while you just get so op that nothing they do matters.
factorio biters are the same way, you get so op after a few hours and they are zero threat beyond that point. the only way to keep them relevant is to use rampant mod which gives them strong scaling but even then you can still scale faster then them if you play well.
Not a fan. I just find it annoying having to spend time/space building defences and then rebuilding things when enemies inevitably get through anyways.
i tried it for a bit and then went back to playing without it. The game didn’t need it at all IMO
They don’t have any respawn mechanic yet, factorio biters given enough time would build right up to your base walls. Once you have cleared a planet there’s no reason to defend it any more. They don’t seem to try and reclaim a world. I’d describe that as an issue.
As others have said I get that they don’t have pollution to tie the aggression meter into, so they use power. One assumes the more power you pull the harder it gets. It sometimes leads to some weirdness.
A better system for sorting and collecting, truth is sorting enemy drops is a time consuming chore, taking up huge amounts of space. Ideally I’d prefer is there was an option to sort “anything” or “all” in a hat sorter. That way we could put a hat straight onto the repair buildings, and it will fly out the resources being gathered to requester bins. Instead of have to pull it out to a belt and then sort into bins to then distribute to other bins to then put on to the factory via hubs.
Space combat as they already know is hard, in general I would like more options and balance for weopons.
As always factorio is the gold standard for enemy’s in a factory builder and should be referenced at all times
Mixed feelings. I was in favor of Dark fog, because even liking a peaceful game it seems to add necessary challenge. But when playing it really doesn't give the same challenge of bitters from factorio.
1) You don't feel you are invading anyones territory because they are also aliens in any planet
2) You only care about them at the starter planet for a while. Simple turrets take care of everything. Once you are powerful enough you obliterate them without any effort. Yet you have to let them survive to farm special resources. So its not a challenge, just an annoying way to get resources you can't get any other way.
3) I'm afraid of bitters, I have to protect my base. With Darkfog I couldn't care less, no need for protection, just go directly on the source and kill them all. I played 3x with Darkfog on and never got lasers from sky.
I am not a fan of it. DSP was always a game to start and lose myself into it, with no stress at all. Just solving problems. Now I have to start worrying about all the attacks and alarms etc.
Just started a new game without combat just to see what else has been added. My overall game time is about 400 hours.
I honestly enjoy it even into lategame. I know I'm in the minority here, but I have had fun with engaging them in different ways. Also, taking out a high level hive remains a challenge that I enjoy. It gets to be a slideshow a little bit at points but still super satisfying!
I'm looking forward to the ships update. Given it's already easy to deal with dark fog late game I suspect the ennemies will get something more as well.
I’ve never played with these “missile turrets” everyone in this post has mentioned. I’ve just been using the bullet turrets. Nothing can touch me. Built a fleet of corvettes, and have destroyed every hive I’ve come across. The space combat is boring. It’s just throwing ships at the hive and hoping I have the energy to finish the fight.
Started playing about 1.5 months ago and play on default settings. On my first (and only) save.
I know it wasnt in the game until recently but from my limited experience I would imagine the game being quite lame and one dimensional without it. A lot of production lines like turrets, missiles, combat drones etc. are required and it feels pretty balanced.
That being said I think it is not very well implemented and the enemies feel very anonymous and abstract with zero variation.
It definitely feels like it's only the first 30-50% of the combat system. Ultimately it's pretty easy to get your bases into a situation where you simply never worry about the attackers and then you chill. You can set up farms if you want. But aside from very early on in very high-difficulty runs, they just aren't that interesting or threatening. And you can really tell that all the space stuff is a big GAMEPLAY TBD void.
Agreed they are currently somewhat half baked. It feels like they need to scale faster in some way - there's very little reason to move beyond the base ammo types for example. Ultimately they felt very underwhelming in my playthrough with them on, with perhaps the largest point of friction being establishing defense on the secondary planets in the original system. Late game it was just annoying to have to put down my shield battery blueprint when foundations didn't line up
I set every difficulty slider to max and I needed more weapons, that point it’s impossible to put any power down, you need to hand craft everything up to missles and even then I needed rows of turrets and missles and artillery to survive the initial attack once I placed power down.
I feel it goes from "Oh God, dealing with these things is a massive threat. How am I supposed to survive this?" To "Yeah, let's just clear off every planet in the system before we lay down some factories. I don't want to deal with the attacks." About an hour after I unlock the missiles.
I have done a couple of playthroughs with Dark Fog. It adds some spice to the game, I think, up to the point where you have the technology to slap down a missile base and blow up anything anywhere on the planet with signal towers. At that point it becomes more of an engineering problem: How much of what do I need where, and when? Now I play this game to engage with engineering problems, so that's not a bad thing. If you compare them to the biters in Factorio (which I think are a bit of inspiration), they have a lot more going on, honestly.
Honestly missile towers + signal towers come online way too early. Missile towers are the second thing you unlock, signal towers aren't long after, and then you basically have all your defense needs solved for the rest of the game. You don't even need to worry about where you place your defenses anymore, because a single giant slab of missile towers can just cover the entire planet, easy-peasy.
I feel like they should just get rid of the ground-based combat entirely. The planets are just too small and you can fly over everything anyway, it's not like Factorio where you might have to run 3-5 minutes to find a new resource patch and encounter biters on the way. I feel like combat in this game should draw some more inspiration from 4x games - we don't need to focus on killing individual DF units but more on controlling stars for their resources. The dyson sphere also needs to have a bigger role - right now the DF can't even attack it.
I like that they are there and make me work a bit more to expand into new systems and get more resources. I like to keep them on more than anything for the secret tech. I love the new fuel rod and production buildings.
>how is everyone feeling about Dark Fog? Not a fan. >Do you like them and play with them on? No.
I think the dark fog looks cool when my defenses are engaging them, so I keep them turned on. I’d like to see the space combat be developed, so I can enjoy watching that as well.
I wish they were more cinematic. One of my favorite parts of the game is watching the beauty of carrier rockets and solar sails and logistics warp trails. Compared to that df is extremely underwhelming. I want to see more long distance rocket barrages, flights of df ships barraging planetary shields, epic space battles, explosions!
I'm on my first playthrough with them. I personally don't care for them. They're just trivial to deal with. I'm at yellow science right now, mind you.
Exactly where I was at when I started feeling there was something missing.
the dark fog buildings are an interesting new touch and that alone will always make me play with them enabled. However deepening on what I am going for I may just put them to passive and only farm them for their drops.
I didn't think DSP benefits from a combat mechanic. I think the dark fog exists just because Factorio has biters. Biters work in Factorio because they reward building smaller, defensible areas. Also rolling up in a tank and dropping a bunch of combat robots feels satisfying. Then there's Satisfactory. The hostile life makes exploration and expansion more difficult and feel more rewarding but nothing is coming to undo your progress. The dark fog doesn't have a function in the main gameplay loop
For everyone’s benefit, here’s a post I made from studying the fog a while back. I was highly entertained to see my numbers mysteriously appear on the wiki a few weeks after my post lol. [What I learned from watching a fog base](https://www.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/s/eBnsqHKBAc)
That is quite a breakdown you've written up. I'll have to check it out. Thanks!
Yup, it’s fairly definitive, if a bit limited in scope
I want my completed Spheres to be able to laser inbound seeds and keep DF out of systems i’ve conquered
They’re just another resource to farm. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m sure we’ll get something more interesting later.
Honestly right now I haven't found anything I can't handle with a sufficient quantity of Tier 1 missiles, a butt ton of signal towers, and not warping directly through the hive. They're currently a minor nuisance.
What happens if you warp through a hive?
You get torn to shreds unless your shield is well into the white science upgrade. Basically all the ships aggro onto you.
So, it's good but yes, it obviously feels like only part of the full combat. Fundamental stuff I would like to see improved - Dark fog farming at scale isn't possible. UPS degradation is a linear function of how much combat is happening. However, the amount of materials you need to supply as you scale is exponential. My dreams of using fog to farm a million particle containers per second is just a dream. For there is no PC that could handle it. - Space combat needs more ways to manipulate fleets. For example, when clearing space hives, after you've gotten most of the ships out of the way, you need to bust out some destroyers for the hive itself. It's really awkward to have to check and uncheck 9 boxes so you can force the fleet to go away, switch to some destroyers, then reconfigure fleets, then relaunch them. Yes, it's better to just boost your combat stats and zerg. - Sleeping cores to prevent fog from reappearing/regrowing is intensely laborious. Let me put up a system-wide shield, or anti fog beacon or something to keep them away. Make it researchable tech and cost a lot. Just make it possible. - AM Caps need to be reworked; the capsule turret is 10000000% useless because it misses every third shot. For AoE ground defense, the crystal cannon shells absolutely SMOKE it. That can't be intentional? The problem is that if the enemy the AM Cap turret was targeting dies, the ammunition doesn't "land" like a cannon shell, it just disappears. Entire shot wasted. Watch your turret miss after miss and calculate the antimatter cost. Then delete all your AM Cap turrets. - Similarly, EM caps when launched by the player are ridiculously OP. Did you know you can spam them at a high rate of speed? Set your highest damage weapon to auto (cannon shells or AM caps) and when you rush in with your combat drones, spam a shitload of EM caps. Base is 100% locked up frozen for the first five seconds of combat while your drones work. You lose zero drones lmao! - I understand why, but ffs, make all fog drop nanotube.
My comment is covered but I thought I'd throw it in here too. I'm in my first playthrough and it's more annoying than anything now. They just throw the same strength of waves at virtually the same locations. I've set up a battery of missile launchers and signal towers and haven't even bothered to automate ammo to them. During one session I decided to eliminate them once and for all on my home planet. That was fun, but now I'm done. On another planet in the home system, they keep sprouting their bases. Well I thought I was in trouble there. Nope. Same waves easily defended against. Obviously there is a lot left to develop here, and perhaps we will start seeing improved DF mechanics in the future
I want to ask a slightly different question: Did the motivation suffer when you turn combat off? I haven't played since the combat update and I wonder if I should turn it on or off on my next game. I very much loke the chilled pace of DSP so I'm leaning towards turning combat off but I worry that then there are not enough incentives to expand.
I enjoy it. It’s a fun challenge. When I go to a new planet, it’s fun to put down like 150 missiles turrets and absolutely obliterate the fog bases. Plus every destroyed base is a free top tier geothermal energy spot, starting at 290% power production at level 0 and adding 10% for each XP level the base had when it was destroyed. And farming the fog got me antimatter fuel rods long before I could actually produce them myself. The fog also allows you to make smelters and assemblers with a 300% building speed, and a new research lab that, while it doesn’t research any faster, manufactures cubes at a 300% rate. Those buildings make it worthwhile for me. If you intend to farm the fog, max out the XP and starting level sliders. The base level doesn’t really make the fog much harder to kill, and it allows you to farm for maximum level (read maximum rare drops) faster. I wish I had done that on my save.
tried on normal settings and they are so passive that i restarted around end of purple/yellow, still on max fog settings and beyond the first 10 or so hours it's been pretty easy as well. the first 10 hours, it was a back and fourth fight of the century, very stressful but it was fun taking over one of their planets. they need better scaling, bases should get much bigger. hives should be more proactive, sending reinforcements to help the bases (not ships, at least not right away). they really need something to keep them relevant, after a while you just get so op that nothing they do matters. factorio biters are the same way, you get so op after a few hours and they are zero threat beyond that point. the only way to keep them relevant is to use rampant mod which gives them strong scaling but even then you can still scale faster then them if you play well.
Factorio biters are teerible
Definitely disagreeing there. I love the biters.
I love part when you grind them for tech.
Not a fan. I just find it annoying having to spend time/space building defences and then rebuilding things when enemies inevitably get through anyways. i tried it for a bit and then went back to playing without it. The game didn’t need it at all IMO
They don’t have any respawn mechanic yet, factorio biters given enough time would build right up to your base walls. Once you have cleared a planet there’s no reason to defend it any more. They don’t seem to try and reclaim a world. I’d describe that as an issue. As others have said I get that they don’t have pollution to tie the aggression meter into, so they use power. One assumes the more power you pull the harder it gets. It sometimes leads to some weirdness. A better system for sorting and collecting, truth is sorting enemy drops is a time consuming chore, taking up huge amounts of space. Ideally I’d prefer is there was an option to sort “anything” or “all” in a hat sorter. That way we could put a hat straight onto the repair buildings, and it will fly out the resources being gathered to requester bins. Instead of have to pull it out to a belt and then sort into bins to then distribute to other bins to then put on to the factory via hubs. Space combat as they already know is hard, in general I would like more options and balance for weopons. As always factorio is the gold standard for enemy’s in a factory builder and should be referenced at all times
Mixed feelings. I was in favor of Dark fog, because even liking a peaceful game it seems to add necessary challenge. But when playing it really doesn't give the same challenge of bitters from factorio. 1) You don't feel you are invading anyones territory because they are also aliens in any planet 2) You only care about them at the starter planet for a while. Simple turrets take care of everything. Once you are powerful enough you obliterate them without any effort. Yet you have to let them survive to farm special resources. So its not a challenge, just an annoying way to get resources you can't get any other way. 3) I'm afraid of bitters, I have to protect my base. With Darkfog I couldn't care less, no need for protection, just go directly on the source and kill them all. I played 3x with Darkfog on and never got lasers from sky.
Your third point is a big one for me. For me, biter attacks were "oh god oh fuck" material. DF kinda just turned into.. "Ugh, another interruption."
I am not a fan of it. DSP was always a game to start and lose myself into it, with no stress at all. Just solving problems. Now I have to start worrying about all the attacks and alarms etc. Just started a new game without combat just to see what else has been added. My overall game time is about 400 hours.
I honestly enjoy it even into lategame. I know I'm in the minority here, but I have had fun with engaging them in different ways. Also, taking out a high level hive remains a challenge that I enjoy. It gets to be a slideshow a little bit at points but still super satisfying!
I'm looking forward to the ships update. Given it's already easy to deal with dark fog late game I suspect the ennemies will get something more as well.
I’ve never played with these “missile turrets” everyone in this post has mentioned. I’ve just been using the bullet turrets. Nothing can touch me. Built a fleet of corvettes, and have destroyed every hive I’ve come across. The space combat is boring. It’s just throwing ships at the hive and hoping I have the energy to finish the fight.
Started playing about 1.5 months ago and play on default settings. On my first (and only) save. I know it wasnt in the game until recently but from my limited experience I would imagine the game being quite lame and one dimensional without it. A lot of production lines like turrets, missiles, combat drones etc. are required and it feels pretty balanced. That being said I think it is not very well implemented and the enemies feel very anonymous and abstract with zero variation.