Questions about the status of the "Dark Fog"

[jztemple]

I'm about to start a new game after not playing for quite a while. So I'm wondering, are the features of the Dark Fog well enough evolved to start a game using it? I'm more of a casual player so I don't want to wildly complicate the game with the inclusion of the Dark Fog if it doesn't add that much to the gameplay.

Also, if folks do recommend including the Dark Fog in a new game, what settings for it do you recommend, especially for someone who isn't a hardcore DSP player?

Thanks for any help folks here can give!

[Frozztastic]

I'm a super casual player and I would keep them either turned off or on passive.

Passive is nice, because they don't attack you until you attack them, while still existing in the world as something more to do once you get to infinite researches.

[cswiger]

DSP with DF is quite playable and makes the later game much more interesting. It doesn't really impact the early part before you start building a Dyson sphere, although you might provoke the fog deliberately if you wanted to farm higher-level materials.

The default settings are pretty casual, but you could make the fog passive so that it only responds when you attack it.

[robfilrhijar]

At default settings they are more of a help then hindrance. You can, with a little experimenting just build up close to their base early ( just use wind turbines) and plop some gun turrets down and a battle field analysis base and they will happily just run blindly into it giving you free materials. But if you want to get started without any pressure but have them in game try making them 50% in cluster at game start, this usually means they will not even be in the starter system.

[Bobucles]

On default settings the dark fog are complete pushovers. You can manually defend most of the first waves and only need a handful of turrets for later waves. There is 1 attack per hour, maybe less, so they are a very tiny part of the game. I really can't see a completely new player having any real difficulty with them, unless they leave a planet and get an attack warning and do literally nothing about it for hours, or something like that.

Dark fog attacks will aim for whatever is the closest to them. Put your military bases around 2-4 turret ranges away, and they'll protect the planet very well. Put turrets too close and they are at risk of attracting extra enemies instead of only fighting the raid.

Feel free to crank up the settings. Most of them aren't terribly significant or are very manageable. The most dangerous settings are the starting base level, size of attack waves, and energy sensitivity for raids. A very large and loaded starting base will be nearly impossible to destroy and you'll be stuck with them for a long time. A high raid sensitivity is the real danger, instead of a raid every hour you can have raids every few minutes. Each raid causes XP growth and simply fighting the raid will cause raid growth, so it escalates in very dangerous ways.

[teron]

For ground raids they eventually do hit a unit cap of around 180 but requires the base to have leveled up a bit from level 1. Which on higher ground base levels means you want implosion cannons to deal AOE damage/knockback to their waves.

The difficulty of their waves can also very on how much the wave spreads out when it runs from their base to your defenses.

The max dark fog run I did; the waves would hit my north/south/east sides of the base. Where due to terrain/distance from the dark fog base the attacks coming from the north across the north pole tended to hit in one massive clump (140+ units at once) causing damage due to overwealming my gauss turrets. From the east it was easier since the wave would spread out so that it was more a series of smaller back to back 20 unit continues fights where my turrets had time to focus down.

Things became easier once I had implosion cannons.

Then it is just getting to a point where you have enough shield generators and missile batteries to deal with space hive attacks. Once you have that it is just nuke the relays to cut off the ground bases power, then wait for the bases battery to run to so they can't build units or use the base defenses turrets.

It gets even easier once you have corvettes, since then you can destroy relays from space to cripple the ground bases before you land.
Note that for space hive retaliation they will attack the highest power output planet. Or if you have nothing built in system, they will go to the first planet which relays you destroy.