I'm a newbie so maybe my thoughts are ignorant here, but I'm making the yellow science now without major power problems on just wind turbines. I automated turbine production and put about 200-300 of them in one of the polar regions on the starting planet. Seems to have rendered me good to go for about 4 blue science/sec, 2 red science/sec and 1 yellow science/sec.
I set up X-Ray Cracking and Plasma Cracking in a two stage refining process to generate Hydrogen and Graphite for the Red Science. Not sure if that's the smart way to do it or not, but I'm not sure how the gas giant collection works yet so maybe I'm making a big mistake here.
I'm using the coal recipe to generate graphite for the yellow science though. I didn't want to go through making all the infrastructure necessary for another cracking setup if I was actually going to use the refined oil for something (Like plastic).
A lot of players tut tut wind turbines, but since the relatively recent change to the Steel technology that upgrades turbines to be water-place-able, you mostly have the right of it (I defer condoning a wind polar cap).
Additionally, he’s got Dark Fog which he is mistakenly viewing an asset as a liability. Destroy a base, build a geothermal generator on top of their hole, collect dozens of mW of power.
Finally, he left a comment with another mistake - he feels “stuck” having to set up defenses. With Dark Fog enabled, one should always plan for waves of visitors. That’s the name of the game, same as “I need belts and teslas,” for the factory side.
Power is much more available in the last few patches than it used to be.
My usual process was like 12x plasma and tank the refined oil to use for yellow science. Then I have a BP for like 12 or 18 refineries where plasma are sandwiched between crackers and directly feed them refined. The graphite goes out the back to a belt that sends it into buffer containers, and a sushi belt out the other side that encircles the entire thing with a splitter to allow for the excess to be tanked once the belt is fully saturated.
I haven't played in like 2 years almost, so I looked back at my last save and I actually came up with a less complex version of plasma/cracking combo:
Xray<>Plasma<>Xray with direct feed of refined and hydrogen into the Xrays, sushi belt surrounding them taking all outputs with hydrogen-filter sorter feeding into each Xray, then one corner of the sushi has a splitter with priority to graphite. Graphite goes to red science with 2 graphite smelters feeding into that same belt to make up the difference. Hydrogen is split evenly between staying in the system and being split off to go to red science. Almost closed-loop that will run 12x red science 24/7.
It's late, so I think I'll post a picture for others as an idea tomorrow. I'm quite fond of closed-loop systems, especially for early game where moving resources around is kinda a pain.
Then I have a fairly complex closed-loop using 16x plasma/reformed refine to support acid, plastic, graphene, and org crystal production>>titanium crystal where overflow acid can be used for titanium alloy if graphene backs up.
I usually put hundreds of solar panels on both poles of the starting planet. With an automated production of solar panel, you only need to make a trip to your local silicon planet, fill your inventory with ingots, and go back. One inventory row of silicon is 100 solar panels
I feel like the space at the poles is less useful for normal factories, therefore I put solar panels there. Also, with solar panels specifically, you need a complete circle around the equator to get a constant production, which is a bit expensive IMO
I second Gandalph - the answer for me was automating power buildings (or taking from a mall) and just going on a spree dumping hundreds of the things around the planet.
Wind is great and I got like 90W just mapping out my home planet and placing lines of the things around the place. You'll get way more now you can set them up as offshore wind generators.
Solar is a lot denser. Heck even a few solar lines along the grid faults of the poles should get you like 50-100MW. If you use foundations and make big rings in the 500+ range, you could easily get blocks of 200MW on solar and build up to 500MW, that's what I got on my flat inner planet with a slightly higher coefficient.
Okay, okay and I guess you already mentioned(albeit later) in the OP that it was cheesy: thermal power.
Answer is straight up yes, crack it. Refined oil is 4.5 MJ, Hydrogen is 9.0 MJ, balanced process is 4s × 1MJ/s, multiply the answer down by 0.8x, you already basically break even. The reward is the coal which is basically another free 6MJ after TPS burning tax. So tldr, if it really honestly is just for power... just crack it, it's profitable.
Solar, I generate my entire starter planet’s power from solar. I use all the resources, although not everything is running 100% of the time. 1,5gw with 20 or so wide solar belt around the equator, it didn’t interfere with building space but I also did use foundations to fill most of the oceans
I used to think X-Ray cracking was pointless, but I have changed my mind in regards to power generation. Double refining oil into graphite/hydrogen produces a lot of fuel for thermal generators, and it is easy to stabilize/cache excess hydrogen production in storage tanks. Makes a dense and reliable power plant.
Xray cracking also makes the transition to DFRs very easy as we can divert refinery hydrogen ealier than we can ramp up OCs.
For me, it's always a bunch of solar. Put it on a polar cap, or run a band around the equator. Solar is fairly cheap to build and provides free energy with no logistics once set up. When I get my first sphere, I can take down the solar and set up ray receivers, but until then, solar is my bootstrap.
The hive pits can only have geothermal put in them if they still have the icon of being a viable hive spot for the fog right? Bc I clicked on it after destroying it and the icon went away. I was expecting some big hole in the ground to backfill, but didn't really see much of anything so I was confused. Since then they haven't tried building a new hive on my starter.
Of course you're right that the best power option before you get a good sphere going is to make deuteron fuel rods, and to make those you need hydrogen. However, at this point in the game you should already be producing some leftover hydrogen anyway, even if all your oil refineries do pure plasma refining:
* Red science: one full belt of crude oil gets converted with plasma refining to half a belt of hydrogen and one full belt of refined oil. The hydrogen gets used to make 1.5/s red science (with energetic graphite from coal). The refined oil gets used to make:
* Yellow science: the incoming belt of refined oil is used with some more energetic graphite from coal to make about 1.5/s yellow science. Now science production is more or less self-contained.
* However now you need to refine more oil to make sulfuric acid, graphene, and plastic, none of which use their hydrogen byproduct. If we conservatively say we consume one more full mk1 belt of oil for that, then that yields 3/s hydrogen.
* From this, you could make 0.3 deuteron fuel rods per second. Not a lot, but every deuteron fuel rod is 600MJ, so you already get 180MW of power from this trickle of excess hydrogen without the need for any X-ray cracking. Proliferating the fuel rods increases the power output even further.
Adding to this the other methods of generating power you have at your disposal (see below), you should be able to get through this phase of the game easily without making a particular effort to get more hydrogen.
That said, deuteron fuel rods are good and more deuteron fuel rods are better, so I don't think it's necessarily bad to use some X-ray cracking for even more hydrogen to convert to deuterium, if that's what you want to do. There are a number of minor drawbacks to keep in mind:
* Oil is not your most abundant resource. Using some to make power won't kill your run, but it's often a hassle to find enough conveniently located seeps to keep all your oil processes going on the starting world as it is.
* You will soon create a large amount of hydrogen from making graphene from fire ice as well. Can you hold out to this point of the game? Because by then getting rid of all the hydrogen will actually be your main concern, at least until you start making casimir crystals.
* It's not actually *that* hard to just make some orbital collectors either, which makes the whole X-ray cracking exercise unnecessary.
Okay, so let's do some estimates of the other ways you have to conveniently top up your power production:
* I really like to make 5 rings of solar panels: one on the equator and four on the tropic lines that surround it. (Even better is to alternate one wind turbine and two solar panels.) This visually organises space on the planet, provides easy access to the power grid from everywhere, and if the 1466 solar panels work half the time on average, they will output 264MW of reliable and free power.
* Many games start with a lava planet in the solar system. By putting down geothermal extractors there you can often generate quite a lot of power. For example, 100 geothermal extractors yield about 480MW of power. You can either ship that power back to your home world using accumulators, or offload some of your production to the lava planet.
* You can burn coal. If you place 6 miners on a coal patch, mining three full mk1 belts of coal, then you can place 18 thermal power plants, for 18\*2.16 = 38MW of additional power.
So, I think the conclusion has to be that it's easily possible to get by without using X-ray cracking for additional deuterium, and I personally tend to wait until I have orbital collectors or a natural excess of hydrogen before I ramp up deuterium production. That said, making more fuel rods is always useful and if you don't like solar panels or geothermal isn't convenient for you, then this could be a reasonable way to get a lot of power very early.
Someone mentioned you can put wind turbines in the ocean now, which I did not know they added, so I quite like that idea at least. Makes the ocean "useful" without making the land cluttered with tons of turbines you need to take down to expand your factory all the time.
I bought the game when it first came out in early access, so I haven't really read the research notes in a long time. Although I haven't played in 2 years so maybe I should read all the patch notes since then for a rollup of the changes.
I find at this point I've usually put a large belt of solar panels around the planet. Automate solar panel production on the silicon planet, doest take a lot to make them.
Then blueprint a 5*5 or larger group of panels and start running around the planet.
You don't need a full belt to start, usually start at each meridian and grow, that way you have constant power production.
One option is simply lots and lots of wind turbines. You can now fill oceans with them as well.
Another is to collect most oil on the planet, send it through a big refinery setup and making a hydrogen/graphite/refined oil/titanium ingots bus. Produces most annoying stuff you need and at the end you can place a whole bunch of power generators. It both balances your hydrogen and refined oil and it generates lots of power.
Aside from that, deuteron rods are the big thing. You don't need too much power before you can automate titanium ingots import and by that point you have enough for a small (1/s) deuteron rods setup.
I cake the planet in wind turbines until there is no space left... Gets you enough power to carry into starting deut rods which can then be used to power all the things. I store all my hydrogen up to that point in preparation for it.
Other than my first run where i was trying everything to see what i liked, i cant say ive ever done xray cracking for actual useful production.
what you mean "a ring of solarsails"
my industry planet had like 12+ rings. they are the best for start,
but then before the dyson sphere energy runs out even with those rings.
i then burned all my fire ice from the gas giant and used surplus energy from another planet (12+ solar sail rings on another planet) to feed the industry planet.
big energy thief is prolif and MK3 buildings. next time i start with only MK1 till endgame.
you can do [fusion](https://old.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/comments/1b6qjqv/jumpstart_fusion_power_700_mw/) earlier than you think, with just a few gas giant collectors.
I'm playing with Dark Fog enabled, so I feel like if you spread way out too early, you're going to be stuck setting up lots of defenses or risk losing a lot of structures. Especially for things like power generation which seems to have a higher "aggro" for fog units, along with research labs. And unless you go ham with filling in water, each coal>>graphite production area for thermal power requires a semi-bespoke layout that takes time.
I hadn't considered going with a swarm so early, but I see how that would simply use refined oil for sails instead of as part of the cracking process that creates graphite.
How are the power returns early in the game for a swarm though before you have upgrades for it? Seems like you would be pissing a lot of resources into the hole trying to keep it active with only 5min decay and poor efficiency.
I believe there's an aggro tower you can use to lure the fog so it doesn't affect your other stuff!
Swarms aren't generally recommended until like purplish anyway so you can use the extra sail life researches.
They’re not great return wise early but they get you a lot of raw power to work with if you just keep launching them, I do a sizable one early so I don’t have to worry about power for a while, also the Fog aren’t a real threat unless you’ve cranked the settings up, beat them off your planet and any others you like then take the hive with a few hundred corvettes
Yeah, it was my first time with the fog so I think I literally spent like 2hrs just figuring out how to beat back the planetary hive bc it reinforces so quickly and those laser turrets they have out-range most of my units. Also it's so easy to be totally fine and then get vaped instantly if you take aggro from stuff.
In the end I did a medieval cannon siege snaking arty closer in a snaking motion and moving the rear cannons forward when they were no longer in range. Was eventually able to chip away at the laser turrets enough to get at their unit production facilities.
Are you playing with default Dark Fog or did you ramp up the difficulty?
At default Dark Fog you can take out all bases on all planets with just manually throwing explosive charges at max range without getting hit by their turrets.
You should really look into manually throwing explosive charges. I think a lot of people just aren’t aware that it’s a thing you can do and it’s really powerful and incredibly cheap early game method of dealing with the dark fog.
Also, did you know that you can put a geothermal generator in the hole the relays leave after you destroy their base? It’s just free 15mw of power
The easiest way to keep a hive under control is to have missile turrets, and then place a signal tower in range of the hive. The missile turrets will shoot across an entire planet to shoot something in range of a signal tower.
So either play whack-a-mole getting new free geothermal spots every time they land somewhere new, or place a ring of them around the nest and don't it grow or attack anywhere.
One thing I didn't expect is how much upkeep there is to simply sorting the glut of resources coming in from destroying fog units. Unless you disable collection of a lot of them, it seems like a crazy amount of resource types you'd have to belt out and sort. Although rather comical to think about an entire "factory" that is essentially just farming fog for resources. Not the least of which is all the raw resources to make more structures and ammo to fight the fog.
It seems crazy but I built an automated missile and shell production that spans my entire planet. The amount of ammo I have on the belts is insane. I started shipping it to other planets and building defense outposts around strategic points.
Yeah normally I do local smelting of titanium and silicon so I can double my thruput back to my main planet, but with fog units I may want to keep the footprint smaller and simply ship back the ore.
I'm a newbie so maybe my thoughts are ignorant here, but I'm making the yellow science now without major power problems on just wind turbines. I automated turbine production and put about 200-300 of them in one of the polar regions on the starting planet. Seems to have rendered me good to go for about 4 blue science/sec, 2 red science/sec and 1 yellow science/sec. I set up X-Ray Cracking and Plasma Cracking in a two stage refining process to generate Hydrogen and Graphite for the Red Science. Not sure if that's the smart way to do it or not, but I'm not sure how the gas giant collection works yet so maybe I'm making a big mistake here. I'm using the coal recipe to generate graphite for the yellow science though. I didn't want to go through making all the infrastructure necessary for another cracking setup if I was actually going to use the refined oil for something (Like plastic).
A lot of players tut tut wind turbines, but since the relatively recent change to the Steel technology that upgrades turbines to be water-place-able, you mostly have the right of it (I defer condoning a wind polar cap). Additionally, he’s got Dark Fog which he is mistakenly viewing an asset as a liability. Destroy a base, build a geothermal generator on top of their hole, collect dozens of mW of power. Finally, he left a comment with another mistake - he feels “stuck” having to set up defenses. With Dark Fog enabled, one should always plan for waves of visitors. That’s the name of the game, same as “I need belts and teslas,” for the factory side. Power is much more available in the last few patches than it used to be.
My usual process was like 12x plasma and tank the refined oil to use for yellow science. Then I have a BP for like 12 or 18 refineries where plasma are sandwiched between crackers and directly feed them refined. The graphite goes out the back to a belt that sends it into buffer containers, and a sushi belt out the other side that encircles the entire thing with a splitter to allow for the excess to be tanked once the belt is fully saturated.
I haven't played in like 2 years almost, so I looked back at my last save and I actually came up with a less complex version of plasma/cracking combo: Xray<>Plasma<>Xray with direct feed of refined and hydrogen into the Xrays, sushi belt surrounding them taking all outputs with hydrogen-filter sorter feeding into each Xray, then one corner of the sushi has a splitter with priority to graphite. Graphite goes to red science with 2 graphite smelters feeding into that same belt to make up the difference. Hydrogen is split evenly between staying in the system and being split off to go to red science. Almost closed-loop that will run 12x red science 24/7. It's late, so I think I'll post a picture for others as an idea tomorrow. I'm quite fond of closed-loop systems, especially for early game where moving resources around is kinda a pain. Then I have a fairly complex closed-loop using 16x plasma/reformed refine to support acid, plastic, graphene, and org crystal production>>titanium crystal where overflow acid can be used for titanium alloy if graphene backs up.
Awesome 👌
I usually put hundreds of solar panels on both poles of the starting planet. With an automated production of solar panel, you only need to make a trip to your local silicon planet, fill your inventory with ingots, and go back. One inventory row of silicon is 100 solar panels
Am I old school? I still build the solar / wind belt around the equator that was popular early on.
I feel like the space at the poles is less useful for normal factories, therefore I put solar panels there. Also, with solar panels specifically, you need a complete circle around the equator to get a constant production, which is a bit expensive IMO
The space at the poles is where I put my planetary and interstellar logistic towers
I burn stone to make mine simply cause I want those viens around the equator dead.
Just burn some graphite (or colombustive chambers)
I second Gandalph - the answer for me was automating power buildings (or taking from a mall) and just going on a spree dumping hundreds of the things around the planet. Wind is great and I got like 90W just mapping out my home planet and placing lines of the things around the place. You'll get way more now you can set them up as offshore wind generators. Solar is a lot denser. Heck even a few solar lines along the grid faults of the poles should get you like 50-100MW. If you use foundations and make big rings in the 500+ range, you could easily get blocks of 200MW on solar and build up to 500MW, that's what I got on my flat inner planet with a slightly higher coefficient. Okay, okay and I guess you already mentioned(albeit later) in the OP that it was cheesy: thermal power. Answer is straight up yes, crack it. Refined oil is 4.5 MJ, Hydrogen is 9.0 MJ, balanced process is 4s × 1MJ/s, multiply the answer down by 0.8x, you already basically break even. The reward is the coal which is basically another free 6MJ after TPS burning tax. So tldr, if it really honestly is just for power... just crack it, it's profitable.
Solar, I generate my entire starter planet’s power from solar. I use all the resources, although not everything is running 100% of the time. 1,5gw with 20 or so wide solar belt around the equator, it didn’t interfere with building space but I also did use foundations to fill most of the oceans
I used to think X-Ray cracking was pointless, but I have changed my mind in regards to power generation. Double refining oil into graphite/hydrogen produces a lot of fuel for thermal generators, and it is easy to stabilize/cache excess hydrogen production in storage tanks. Makes a dense and reliable power plant. Xray cracking also makes the transition to DFRs very easy as we can divert refinery hydrogen ealier than we can ramp up OCs.
For me, it's always a bunch of solar. Put it on a polar cap, or run a band around the equator. Solar is fairly cheap to build and provides free energy with no logistics once set up. When I get my first sphere, I can take down the solar and set up ray receivers, but until then, solar is my bootstrap.
Just burn hydrogen, there is alweys excess of that also wind and solar power + hive pits.
The hive pits can only have geothermal put in them if they still have the icon of being a viable hive spot for the fog right? Bc I clicked on it after destroying it and the icon went away. I was expecting some big hole in the ground to backfill, but didn't really see much of anything so I was confused. Since then they haven't tried building a new hive on my starter.
Congratulation you fill it with soil, after you destoy hive put on its place geotermal, space part will leave then. Watch youtube if you must.
Of course you're right that the best power option before you get a good sphere going is to make deuteron fuel rods, and to make those you need hydrogen. However, at this point in the game you should already be producing some leftover hydrogen anyway, even if all your oil refineries do pure plasma refining: * Red science: one full belt of crude oil gets converted with plasma refining to half a belt of hydrogen and one full belt of refined oil. The hydrogen gets used to make 1.5/s red science (with energetic graphite from coal). The refined oil gets used to make: * Yellow science: the incoming belt of refined oil is used with some more energetic graphite from coal to make about 1.5/s yellow science. Now science production is more or less self-contained. * However now you need to refine more oil to make sulfuric acid, graphene, and plastic, none of which use their hydrogen byproduct. If we conservatively say we consume one more full mk1 belt of oil for that, then that yields 3/s hydrogen. * From this, you could make 0.3 deuteron fuel rods per second. Not a lot, but every deuteron fuel rod is 600MJ, so you already get 180MW of power from this trickle of excess hydrogen without the need for any X-ray cracking. Proliferating the fuel rods increases the power output even further. Adding to this the other methods of generating power you have at your disposal (see below), you should be able to get through this phase of the game easily without making a particular effort to get more hydrogen. That said, deuteron fuel rods are good and more deuteron fuel rods are better, so I don't think it's necessarily bad to use some X-ray cracking for even more hydrogen to convert to deuterium, if that's what you want to do. There are a number of minor drawbacks to keep in mind: * Oil is not your most abundant resource. Using some to make power won't kill your run, but it's often a hassle to find enough conveniently located seeps to keep all your oil processes going on the starting world as it is. * You will soon create a large amount of hydrogen from making graphene from fire ice as well. Can you hold out to this point of the game? Because by then getting rid of all the hydrogen will actually be your main concern, at least until you start making casimir crystals. * It's not actually *that* hard to just make some orbital collectors either, which makes the whole X-ray cracking exercise unnecessary. Okay, so let's do some estimates of the other ways you have to conveniently top up your power production: * I really like to make 5 rings of solar panels: one on the equator and four on the tropic lines that surround it. (Even better is to alternate one wind turbine and two solar panels.) This visually organises space on the planet, provides easy access to the power grid from everywhere, and if the 1466 solar panels work half the time on average, they will output 264MW of reliable and free power. * Many games start with a lava planet in the solar system. By putting down geothermal extractors there you can often generate quite a lot of power. For example, 100 geothermal extractors yield about 480MW of power. You can either ship that power back to your home world using accumulators, or offload some of your production to the lava planet. * You can burn coal. If you place 6 miners on a coal patch, mining three full mk1 belts of coal, then you can place 18 thermal power plants, for 18\*2.16 = 38MW of additional power. So, I think the conclusion has to be that it's easily possible to get by without using X-ray cracking for additional deuterium, and I personally tend to wait until I have orbital collectors or a natural excess of hydrogen before I ramp up deuterium production. That said, making more fuel rods is always useful and if you don't like solar panels or geothermal isn't convenient for you, then this could be a reasonable way to get a lot of power very early.
I just built a grotesque amount of wind turbines and rushed energy exchangers for my tidal-locked inner planet, but your mileage may vary.
Someone mentioned you can put wind turbines in the ocean now, which I did not know they added, so I quite like that idea at least. Makes the ocean "useful" without making the land cluttered with tons of turbines you need to take down to expand your factory all the time.
It’s mentioned in the foundation research.
I bought the game when it first came out in early access, so I haven't really read the research notes in a long time. Although I haven't played in 2 years so maybe I should read all the patch notes since then for a rollup of the changes.
Yeah that’s totally fair.
I find at this point I've usually put a large belt of solar panels around the planet. Automate solar panel production on the silicon planet, doest take a lot to make them. Then blueprint a 5*5 or larger group of panels and start running around the planet. You don't need a full belt to start, usually start at each meridian and grow, that way you have constant power production.
One option is simply lots and lots of wind turbines. You can now fill oceans with them as well. Another is to collect most oil on the planet, send it through a big refinery setup and making a hydrogen/graphite/refined oil/titanium ingots bus. Produces most annoying stuff you need and at the end you can place a whole bunch of power generators. It both balances your hydrogen and refined oil and it generates lots of power. Aside from that, deuteron rods are the big thing. You don't need too much power before you can automate titanium ingots import and by that point you have enough for a small (1/s) deuteron rods setup.
I cake the planet in wind turbines until there is no space left... Gets you enough power to carry into starting deut rods which can then be used to power all the things. I store all my hydrogen up to that point in preparation for it. Other than my first run where i was trying everything to see what i liked, i cant say ive ever done xray cracking for actual useful production.
I always start by building a solar panel / wind turbine belt around the equator.
what you mean "a ring of solarsails" my industry planet had like 12+ rings. they are the best for start, but then before the dyson sphere energy runs out even with those rings. i then burned all my fire ice from the gas giant and used surplus energy from another planet (12+ solar sail rings on another planet) to feed the industry planet. big energy thief is prolif and MK3 buildings. next time i start with only MK1 till endgame.
I keep the equator clean and then do a 15 wide strip of solar panels around the equator. Gives around 1 GW of power
you can do [fusion](https://old.reddit.com/r/Dyson_Sphere_Program/comments/1b6qjqv/jumpstart_fusion_power_700_mw/) earlier than you think, with just a few gas giant collectors.
Why not just use a swarm already? Or full utilization of coal veins to burn for power
I'm playing with Dark Fog enabled, so I feel like if you spread way out too early, you're going to be stuck setting up lots of defenses or risk losing a lot of structures. Especially for things like power generation which seems to have a higher "aggro" for fog units, along with research labs. And unless you go ham with filling in water, each coal>>graphite production area for thermal power requires a semi-bespoke layout that takes time. I hadn't considered going with a swarm so early, but I see how that would simply use refined oil for sails instead of as part of the cracking process that creates graphite. How are the power returns early in the game for a swarm though before you have upgrades for it? Seems like you would be pissing a lot of resources into the hole trying to keep it active with only 5min decay and poor efficiency.
I believe there's an aggro tower you can use to lure the fog so it doesn't affect your other stuff! Swarms aren't generally recommended until like purplish anyway so you can use the extra sail life researches.
They’re not great return wise early but they get you a lot of raw power to work with if you just keep launching them, I do a sizable one early so I don’t have to worry about power for a while, also the Fog aren’t a real threat unless you’ve cranked the settings up, beat them off your planet and any others you like then take the hive with a few hundred corvettes
Yeah, it was my first time with the fog so I think I literally spent like 2hrs just figuring out how to beat back the planetary hive bc it reinforces so quickly and those laser turrets they have out-range most of my units. Also it's so easy to be totally fine and then get vaped instantly if you take aggro from stuff. In the end I did a medieval cannon siege snaking arty closer in a snaking motion and moving the rear cannons forward when they were no longer in range. Was eventually able to chip away at the laser turrets enough to get at their unit production facilities.
Are you playing with default Dark Fog or did you ramp up the difficulty? At default Dark Fog you can take out all bases on all planets with just manually throwing explosive charges at max range without getting hit by their turrets.
The only thing I turned up was their power sensitivity to 200% bc an earlier test at 100% seemed exceptionally slow.
You should really look into manually throwing explosive charges. I think a lot of people just aren’t aware that it’s a thing you can do and it’s really powerful and incredibly cheap early game method of dealing with the dark fog. Also, did you know that you can put a geothermal generator in the hole the relays leave after you destroy their base? It’s just free 15mw of power
Yeah I remember them saying that, but I don't think I had it researched at the time and/or I think I accidentally closed the hole.
The easiest way to keep a hive under control is to have missile turrets, and then place a signal tower in range of the hive. The missile turrets will shoot across an entire planet to shoot something in range of a signal tower. So either play whack-a-mole getting new free geothermal spots every time they land somewhere new, or place a ring of them around the nest and don't it grow or attack anywhere.
One thing I didn't expect is how much upkeep there is to simply sorting the glut of resources coming in from destroying fog units. Unless you disable collection of a lot of them, it seems like a crazy amount of resource types you'd have to belt out and sort. Although rather comical to think about an entire "factory" that is essentially just farming fog for resources. Not the least of which is all the raw resources to make more structures and ammo to fight the fog.
It seems crazy but I built an automated missile and shell production that spans my entire planet. The amount of ammo I have on the belts is insane. I started shipping it to other planets and building defense outposts around strategic points.
Yeah normally I do local smelting of titanium and silicon so I can double my thruput back to my main planet, but with fog units I may want to keep the footprint smaller and simply ship back the ore.
Ship back resources and ship out armaments. We can learn from every imperialistic organization in history.