Is there any way to pause the Dark Fog?

[Maltheus]

I'm not asking if I can restart the game and turn them off completely. I'm not asking for a strategy to defeat them. I just want them to give it a rest for five minutes, so I can focus on building.

I know there's a way to use metadata to buy them off for a bit, but I don't think that work universe-wide, only for that system.

[phillip_lynx]

Not that I know, but if you build an automated defence, then you can build a while, while the attacks are automatically be defended.

[Helen Carnate]

Fly up to the communicator and pay them off. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk3nktRoy2k Near the end at the 20 min mark it explains it here.

You can change the difficulty so they are dummies and don't attack. I believe that setting is for the entire game not just the system. The truce just stops their current attack and resets the threats to 0 I believe and once you are a threat again they will attack.

[Dragonmaster]

Honestly at default settings the fog gives plenty of time wasting. I restarted my save after 15 hours as they were still just level 1 at default settings and there’s a bunch of levels for them

[Maltheus]

I paid a visit to the communicator, but all of my previous metadata would have only bought me an hour of truce. My problem was that I only had a single assembler for missile sets, because they weren't much of a threat early on. But then they scaled up so quickly, that I no longer had time to build a decent missile factory. I was doing nothing but putting out fires. Once I finally got that online, it got a lot less hectic.

One odd thing is that I put a small outpost, at a neutron star, to collect uniform, expecting it to be taken down immediately. But it never went down. I got sick of the constant attack warnings though and finally took it down myself, 20+ hours later, but it was undamaged and had the same amount of ammo in it. Makes me wonder if the dark fog simulation gets messed up, if the planet is far enough away, or goes unvisited long enough.

[Kackstift]

the fog alone on default grow really slow.. only with a agressive playstyle the fog will attack faster and harder as well

[Handbanana]

Its interesting because you can spend hours working on builds and trying to get production lines set up and they will just attack you ever 5 minutes. Specially when you start doing multiple planets. Its rather annoying and tedious. The actual attack itself isn't even a threat but its something you have to deal with generally.

I feel like the attacks should probably be more powerful and less frequent. There should also be more techs to delay and slow them down. For examples shields should prevent them from landing. Like they have to burn through the shield giving you more time to respond. Or ways to set cruisers to patrol certain planets to stop them from landing there.

[Blake]

This is why combat and base building don't mix.

[Handbanana]

Originally posted by Blake:

This is why combat and base building don't mix.

It mixes well with factorio but there needs to be better solutions for being away from your base. When you start warping around it becomes quite annoying to deal with.

[Dragonmaster]

Originally posted by Handbanana:

Originally posted by Blake:

This is why combat and base building don't mix.

It mixes well with factorio but there needs to be better solutions for being away from your base. When you start warping around it becomes quite annoying to deal with.

I’ve not had any issues with attacks warping around. I use a polar missile turret ring at each pole with a signal tower at the pole. When I want to kill relay ships (not the relays) to stop them from even setting up a relay I turn on the missile turrets high orbit. No relay had deployed and it makes very very little threat with the hive.

And when I’m home for a bit I’ll turn off highorbit setting so I can get more geothermal holes

[Maltheus]

Originally posted by Dragonmaster:

Originally posted by Handbanana:

It mixes well with factorio but there needs to be better solutions for being away from your base. When you start warping around it becomes quite annoying to deal with.

I’ve not had any issues with attacks warping around. I use a polar missile turret ring at each pole with a signal tower at the pole. When I want to kill relay ships (not the relays) to stop them from even setting up a relay I turn on the missile turrets high orbit. No relay had deployed and it makes very very little threat with the hive.

And when I’m home for a bit I’ll turn off highorbit setting so I can get more geothermal holes

This is the second time I've heard that you can attack relay stations, before they establish a connection to your planet, without increasing the hive threat. Can you explain that better? Do I need to cover the planet in missile turrets for that to work? Or is it just like it is with ground enemies, and I only need signal towers everywhere (and turrets can be concentrated in one spot)? I've been hesitant to attack anything in orbit, because it seems to dramatically increase the hive threat.

I also very much agree with handbanana, in that shields should prevent the relays from deploying. It's so difficult and expensive to actually cover a planet in shields, that there should be some additional benefit from it.

[Handbanana]

Originally posted by Maltheus:

Originally posted by Dragonmaster:

I’ve not had any issues with attacks warping around. I use a polar missile turret ring at each pole with a signal tower at the pole. When I want to kill relay ships (not the relays) to stop them from even setting up a relay I turn on the missile turrets high orbit. No relay had deployed and it makes very very little threat with the hive.

And when I’m home for a bit I’ll turn off highorbit setting so I can get more geothermal holes

This is the second time I've heard that you can attack relay stations, before they establish a connection to your planet, without increasing the hive threat. Can you explain that better? Do I need to cover the planet in missile turrets for that to work? Or is it just like it is with ground enemies, and I only need signal towers everywhere (and turrets can be concentrated in one spot)? I've been hesitant to attack anything in orbit, because it seems to dramatically increase the hive threat.

I also very much agree with handbanana, in that shields should prevent the relays from deploying. It's so difficult and expensive to actually cover a planet in shields, that there should be some additional benefit from it.

Missile turrets have a limited coverage on upper air targets. I don't know what it is exactly and it doesn't say anywhere but if you have sufficient numbers of missile turrets they can shoot down incoming relays. You don't actually need signal towers at all. As far as i can tell shooting them down when they are coming in doesn't increase threat at all. This might be a bug.

[Omniconda]

missles towers hit space by default, so will fire at incoming relays if they cross near them. with enough missles you can shoot them down before they land. - there is an achievement for it - killing them in space is little threat, killing them in the upper air, default off to missles tho toggleable is high threat