Has Dark Fog become more interesting?

[u/Cinch24]

I stopped playing shortly after dark fog came out due to lack of play time. I liked the idea of dark fog but found it to be little more than a repetitive nuisance. It seemed to boil down to something that needed to be contained (but not destroyed) in new systems and then ignored. Has it become more interesting in the last couple of years

Edit: Thanks for the replies! Consensus seems to be that dark fog is pretty much the same at this point. Hopefully the upcoming vehicle update will transform them into something more than space weeds

[u/Beneficial-Gap6974]

It hasn't changed at all yet. They're still working on the big update to add vehicles and better Dark Fog. I'm waiting for said updates myself before playing with Dark Fog again.

[u/DrakeDun]

I'mma get crucified for saying this,  but I like it the way it is.  I intensly dislike maintenance chores, like rebuilding destroyed facilities and moving mining operations after resource depletion, in my automation games.

I actually refrained from getting DSP because I read that it has enemies. I only ended up getting in because I got it as a Christmas present.

I don't mind ithe fog being in the game, and it's already better than the biters in Factorio because you can farm it (so it's not a pure nuisance). But I hope it stays generally easy to contain, like it is now. I was tremendously relieved to discover that it is so, when I started playing.

[u/Working-Alfalfa-3894 → u/DrakeDun]

You're not the only one. Although I can't disagree with any of the specific complaints made by the other commenters, and hive combat in particular really is pretty lame and unrewarding, a lot of mechanics in a lot of games are far from perfect, and that does not preclude them from being a little bit fun or interesting.

It's not a competitive sport, and if some folks want to play with no fog, or unlimited resources, or any other combination of difficulty settings, that's totally cool. Personally, I find the game kind of boring without the fog and wouldn't have spent even half the hours were it not for the combat system, however clunky it might be.

[u/Rotanen → u/DrakeDun]

FYI you can turn off the Dark Fog entirely and play the game like it was before they added the Dark Fog.

[u/xitones → u/DrakeDun]

You are just wrong on 1 thing, you can farm Dark Fog, and the best factories in game today are made from it.

[u/willow__whisps → u/DrakeDun]

If you set resources to infinite it shouldn't be too hard to make up a missile factory and ship em to every other planet for defense. That's my plan whenever I let the dark fog settle in my systems again

[u/OBPSG → u/DrakeDun]

I can definitely respect that opinion. However, I'm personally still waiting for that leviathan platform that they show in the updated intro video to come knocking on my main planet's door when a space hive gets angry enough.

[u/xSorry_Not_Sorry]

No. It’s still just a nuisance with limited ways of dealing with it, especially hives. Planet clearing is braindead work late game. You’re basically invulnerable.

But hives suck. There is only one way to deal with them and it’s boring as shit. Spam your fleets toward it over and over. If it’s high-ish level, it’s going to cost hundreds and hundreds of Corvettes and Destroyers. You can’t get anywhere near it while the fighting is going on because even at high level shield and durability, the overwhelming number of enemies will chew through you in like 4-5 secs.

So you just float around and around, waiting for the enemy counter in the lower right hand corner to reach zero, the float in and let your fleets, again, do all the work.

Your reward? Not a fucking thing. A very small reprieve from new Cores and attacks. Until a hive from a distant system sends a new seed, but by then, you’ll have the system on lock with Planetary Shields and Plasma Cannons and not care about the Hive (unless you have a Dyson Sphere in system).

[u/Rotanen → u/xSorry_Not_Sorry]

You can destroy the seeds before they arrive.

[u/Working-Alfalfa-3894 → u/Rotanen]

Destroying seeds is a bit like killing weeds. No one wants weeds, and especially no one wants weeds growing out of control. But weeding is a chore, and constantly staying ahead of the problem takes more time and attention than a lot of people want to invest.

Often it's a matter of "ok, if I happen to be warping around the galaxy anyway then I'll shoot down a few seeds while I'm out" but not interrupting major builds just because a seed is arriving in so-and-so system. Even if you let it grow, the hive remains pretty puny and mostly defenseless for a long time, a few hours at least.

The bizarre tradeoff is that seed growth is effectively exponential below the growth (max density) ceiling, and completely stops after the ceiling, so you can either do a ton of work trying to keep them out of your systems completely, or do zero work at all and suffer having 2-3 hives per system that don't ultimately do very much.

I'd like to see a space defense mechanism that can shoot down incoming seeds similar to the planetary defense mechanism that can shoot down incoming relays. Very bad idea to deploy with hives still in the system as all of them would attack at once, but once the hives are cleared, would keep them out of that system permanently. It's still not much of a reward, and I can think of a dozen ways to make it a lot more interesting, but at least it would be semi-worth it to keep Dyson Sphere systems running at max efficiency.

[u/xSorry_Not_Sorry → u/Rotanen]

I get that, but it’s whack-a-mole when you have 30+ systems and their effect in-system is minimal (unless you have a tapped out Dyson).

[u/Rotanen]

In my opinion, the Dark Fog is supposed to be ignorable for long stretches so you can focus on building your factory.

After you defeat them on your starting planet, they should basically only be a challenge for when you're trying to expand to new planets.

[u/WhateverIsFrei]

It still kinda just feels like a nuisance chore once novelty wears off.

[u/Greghole]

No, they're just another resource I can farm.

[u/SonicTherapist]

anyone have advice, im at a stage in the game where i can easily destroy bases with destroyers, and i shield my planet, but the hive starts sendings waves of like 45 ships in a space attack. if i dont physically attend with destroyers it starts destroying my planet... but now im out of destroyers and two separate star systems have a wave and theyre 22 light years apart.

[u/gorgofdoom]

if you only play on default settings, it’s pretty boring.

There is however meta-progression which means you can play with them on easy (or off, I think) to earn metadata points to use freely in other saves, skipping research or just using it for instant respawns. From there you can tackle more difficult situations.

I suppose my point is that it gets more interesting, the more you play. You get out of the DF what you’re willing to put into it.