Dark Pillar?

[dagezou]

Has anyone taken one on yet?

[Midas]

I currently am in the process of one but it's... really bad. It's pitch black outside so I can't even find an entrance, and I keep getting shot through walls from inside. It's also covered in turrets that can one-shot you, and for some reason when I die my backpack gets turned into a xeno monster and doesn't show up on my map.

[Midas]

Done. Took 3 hours and 8 and a half laser swords to do the final POI.

[gilesey]

Can't imagine doing that on every infected planet. Are they blastable using new ship weapons or admin cored.

[RabMan]

I tunneled there using the symelite drill mod, spend ages trying to find my way in without getting instagibbe by the cannons outside. The core is surrounded by glass, and you had to trigger 4 switches to take the whole tower down.

[eduardo.galb]

Hi there. They say it's a building game. But in this particular DLC, nothing you build will really help you much. Most new weapons are for base and CV. Put them on CV and they wont fire in planet.
The pillars are mostly a maze to be solved on foot. But good luck gettin inside with all those turrets firing at you.
I think you can destroy the turrets, but there's no real effective counter against them, aside from digging underground.

[The Big Brzezinski]

Originally posted by eduardo.galb:

Hi there. They say it's a building game. But in this particular DLC, nothing you build will really help you much. Most new weapons are for base and CV. Put them on CV and they wont fire in planet.
The pillars are mostly a maze to be solved on foot. But good luck gettin inside with all those turrets firing at you.
I think you can destroy the turrets, but there's no real effective counter against them, aside from digging underground.

Challenge accepted.

[Midas]

Originally posted by eduardo.galb:

Hi there. They say it's a building game. But in this particular DLC, nothing you build will really help you much. Most new weapons are for base and CV. Put them on CV and they wont fire in planet.
The pillars are mostly a maze to be solved on foot. But good luck gettin inside with all those turrets firing at you.
I think you can destroy the turrets, but there's no real effective counter against them, aside from digging underground.

The DLC scenario is pretty bad for a lot of reasons. I feel like it will be a lot more manageable in the normal full game (provided you don't start right next to infected areas, at least).

The problem with the DLC scenario is that, on top of the small galaxy size, the planets themselves are pretty bad. Not a lot of variety, only 1-3 planets per star, and no real theme or mechanics to the individual stars, so it's very hard to figure out where you need to go in order to find what you need.

Compound all that with the game's overall timer, and the spread of the semylite throughout the galaxy, and you're basically in a situation where if you take too long preparing, you'll get locked onto your planet once the dark faction spreads there. The countermeasures don't seem to work very well either, so even with dark field neutralizers, its pretty rough. Oh, and there's the food issue as well. The neutralizers don't protect your fridges, so all your food rots pretty quickly.

In a regular scenario, if you start far enough away, you'll at least have time to build up your economy, have some vessels, good resources, and good weapons, and be able to realistically attack the pillars directly with a vehicle. It would definitely cut a lot of time off the pillar attack being able to reliably take out all the turrets from an HV or SV.

[Midas]

I've now done my second dark pillar. This one I attacked with an SV to clear all the turrets so I could just land the Elysia on top and not have to dodge shots to get back and forth.

The pillars are pretty easy to disarm. Easier than a shielded low-tier POI, especially with the DLC plasma cannons.

However, I was disappointed to learn that the interior of the POI was identical to the final pillar at the end of the DLC. The massive amount of loot and huge length of it made a bit of sense for a climactic final encounter, but I guess that's how they all are, which is going to get really boring and grindy really quickly, while also trivializing loot.

[Septimus_Magnus]

There is one thing about the DLC that I discovered. When you destroy a Dark Pillar, it respawns. I have found that if I log out of the game and log back in, or if I leave the planet and return, the Dark Pillar respawns in a different place. And the new one can’t be destroyed. I sort of get the feeling that the DLC is half done. It feels like it was accidentally released before it was finished.

[The Big Brzezinski]

You have to kill the core as well. It's under a layer of dirt, so a quick hit with a drill is necessary to expose it. I typically rip out every block just to make sure anyway. There's symelite in those turrets, after all.

Challenge completed, btw.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3170568595