The grandest factory sim ever made is getting an interplanetary combat system this December

rockpapershotgun.com:

Dyson Sphere Program is already rather overwhelming - this is, after all, a strategy sim about wrapping whole planets in conveyor belts so as to build cages around stars and harvest their juices - and now the absolute madfolk of Youthcat Studio are adding combat features. It's like watching somebody upend a bucket of termites over the world's most elaborate model trainset.

The associated Rise of the Dark Fog update is out on 15th December. Youthcat have put together a nifty announcement trailer that makes cunning use of the ability to raze factories from orbit - I'm curious to know if it was actually performed in-game.

If you missed the original reveal at TGS this year, the Dark Fog are an NPC faction with their own bases, who expand and become more aggressive in response to your progress, sending fleets of craft to swarm your production lines or batter them from deep space.

To deal with these trouble-makers, you'll need evenly-plotted networks of turrets and energy shields for individual buildings and later, entire worlds. You can research a Supernova feature that lets you temporarily overclock all of your turrets, for those last ditch comebacks, but it sounds like the more useful option will be Auto-Rebuild, which can be upgraded to send out flights of drones to reconstruct damaged structures en masse, providing you have the materials.

It's been interesting to follow Rise of the Dark Fog's development. Amongst other things, there's the question of performance: the largest, multiple-star factory networks take a proportionately greater toll on your computer, and fitting in an NPC faction with its own units and facilities obviously adds to the load.

The developers have written an extensive post about how they've