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[Astral]

I didn't realize they had added blueprints - need to reinstall now.

Never got too far as the prospect of having to manually put down everything was a huge turn off; setting up blueprints and iterating on them in Factorio was a lot more fun, especially considering the scale everything can get to.

[Chiefwaffles]

Trailer for the combat update “Ruse of the Dark Fog” that’ll be released at some point in 2023.

It goes pretty in depth and invokes the usual “what kind of technical gods do they employ there, how do they optimize this what the hell” feeling I get with DSP.

Gist is that the enemy is a expanding self-replicating swarm. Hostility and difficulty is affected by your progress in the game — like pollution in factorio — and aspects of the difficulty can be tweaked or the enemy removed altogether as an optional setting.

[Ygdrad]

The Dark Fog enemy/combat update is releasing in 6 hours. I've lightly poked the game here and there but have been waiting for the combat update to give it a good run.

[LoSboccacc]

so how is playing with the fog? apart the technical mystery that this game represent, I'm watching few let's play and doesn't seem to really be that much interesting compared to the base game itself. I was waiting to start a new game, and I'm considering starting with the fog disabled...

[forsaken1111]

so how is playing with the fog? apart the technical mystery that this game represent, I'm watching few let's play and doesn't seem to really be that much interesting compared to the base game itself. I was waiting to start a new game, and I'm considering starting with the fog disabled...

It's the same game as before but you have to build turrets now and other defenses. I'm not sure it adds that much to the game.

[Ozyton]

I actually just played through the game with dark fog disabled because I've never actually beaten it before. It gave me a bunch of achievements related to the enemies which is probably unintentional but I'll take it. Seeing how other people build their stuff makes me realize just how bad I am at these sorts of games. Even still they can be quite relaxing and it's always satisfying to come up with a solution to something without looking up a build for it. Even if it's garbage it's my garbage.

Apparently dark fog is very easy, at least on its default settings. Haven't heard anybody comment on turning the difficulty up. I did hear one person complaining about being instantly killed while travelling at warp speed too close to certain star systems which sounds pretty annoying.

[Malus]

I cranked the difficulty to the maximum when the update dropped to see what it was like and died to a massive wave of enemies like 10 minutes in before I had a chance to research any turrets. I suspect it's survivable if you use the NG+ data or whatever (not sure how that works, last time I played was literally at launch before any of that stuff was added). Started again with the default enemy settings and it's been a cakewalk, so there's probably some balancing to be done. Default settings feels approximately like Factorio, where the biters are a slight speedbump but not an existential threat -- if you have an assembler or two making missiles then you won't have any problems. I'd like a "Death World"-style preset where enemies are enough of a danger to require prioritizing defenses but manageable provided you're prepared.

[Chiefwaffles]

Dark Fog is interesting. It's actually a pretty cool system behind the scenes from what I can tell. The Dark Fog is essentially playing their own more-abstracted game. Their bases extract matter (and energy?) from the planet which is used for upgrading their base and is shipped back to the system's hive to upgrade it and send out heavy freighters to build more bases. Reminds me a bit of the aliens from the original X-COM UFO Defense, in a way. Luckily they don't use the same resources you do, so you don't need to worry about losing valuable resources from turtling.
They also have some kind of XP system for themselves (that you can see by mousing over their icon in the top left). Supposedly when you kill dark fog enemies that are high enough level, you can unlock special improved production buildings.


Overall I like the system. Has a lot of potential and it's cool building up a fleet and setting up defenses. It could definitely use a lot of tuning, but I like it.

Protip though: Missiles and signal towers. Missile turrets have a large range already (and are the only turret which can target both space + ground enemies), but their range is boosted by signal towers. Any enemy within the range of a signal tower anywhere on the planet can be targeted by ANY missile towers on that same planet.