Dyson Sphere Program is already rather overwhelming – this is, after all, a strategy sim about wrapping whole planets in conveyor belts so as to build cages around stars and harvest their juices – and now the absolute madfolk of Youthcat Studio are adding combat features. It’s like watching somebody upend a bucket of termites over the world’s most elaborate model trainset.
The associated Rise of the Darkfog update is out on 15th December. Youthcat have put together a nifty announcement trailer that makes cunning use of the ability to raze factories from orbit – I’m curious to know if it was actually performed in-game.
If you missed the original reveal at TGS this year, the Darkfog are an NPC faction who expand and become more aggressive in response to your progress, sending fleets of craft to swarm your production lines or batter them from deep space.
To deal with these trouble-makers, you’ll need evenly-spaced networks of turrets and energy shields for individual buildings and later, entire worlds. You can research a Supernova feature that lets you temporarily overclock all of your turrets, for those last ditch comebacks, but it sounds like the more useful option will be Auto-Rebuild, which can be upgraded to send out flights of drones to reconstruct damaged structures en masse, providing you have the materials.
It’s been interesting to follow the Rise of the Darkfog’s development. Amongst other things, there’s the question of performance: the largest, multiple-star factory networks take a proportionately greater toll on your computer, and fitting in an NPC faction with its own units and facilities obviously adds to the load.
The developers have written an extensive post about how they’ve saved resources, by tinkering with the Darkfog update logic and offloading certain tasks to the GPU, amongst other tricks. One funny consequence is that if you’re seeing performance drops, you can improve matters by tracking down the Darkfog and wrecking their stuff.
I’m not entirely clear on how going on the offensive works, but from the gameplay overview trailer below, it looks like you’ll be able to use the templating features to crash down on planets and insta-build huge fortresses that open fire immediately in all directions.
There’s more to follow. “By 2024, you will venture into space combat, building space stations and deploying fleets to combat the perilous Darkfog nests,” the developers say on Steam. One last, very important detail: if you’re more of a lover (of mass production) than a fighter, you can always toggle the Darkfog off before you start a game.
New to DSP? It was one of our favourite games of 2021 – Nate called the game a mandatory play for factory game fans. It’s also slightly discounted at the time of writing, though it was hardly expensive to begin with.
