War Of Attrition; Simple Way To Kill Hives | MAX DIFFICULTY | #16 | Dyson Sphere Program | Lets Play 

If you press 9 during space combat, you can direct what your units do and what they attack. Should be a little flag next to the unit tag in the UI when you have control of them.

I accidentally found the best way to clear hives - when orbit of a defended planet crosses the orbit of a hive, plasma turrets just annihilate hive. But also annihilate my PCs ability to render such battle))))

0:42 Oh the lament of every factory/city builder when your builds are ever so slightly misaligned, but enough that it will require a full rebuild/replace. Love that you include these bits as a reminder that rebuilding is always a matter of when, not if.

Slow option for destroying hives: 1. Capture all planets so that the hives have no renewable material. 2. Build protection against attack from space on the desired planet. 3. Attack one of the hives, get maximum threat and attack ships. 4. When the ships are destroyed by the planetary defense, repeat the attack the required number of times. 5. Gradually, the hives will begin to waste ships in their structure, and they will run out. 6. Attacking almost bare hives and destroying them. It may be slower, but there are significantly fewer losses. As always, thanks for the video.

I am simple person - I see new video from Nilaus, I post like instantly.

The space combat is pretty close to textbook lanchester square law, which explains why it's so hard to make progress initially but the fleet melts so much faster once you've whittled down the numbers

Hey Nilaus, did you know you could press Ctrl while in combat mode to send your fleet like 0.5 AU away from you (so that you are away from combat and will not be shot by the hive fleets / défenses)?

It's awesome how this game is progressing. Space battles?? Hell yes!

Another tip for all.. mid to later game, use your space fleet to wipe out "all" the Relay Stations on planets, prior to establishing any bases on any planets. The hives will send out puny fleets to the first planet you attack, then they just wait around for a good 10 minutes, freeing up time to clear off the rest of the Relay stations. Once the the stations are gone, the planet bases can't get anymore power, so when you start clearing them, no more new units, and the power gets drained from the defences when they try to make new units.

I love the ability to CTRL+right click to set your ships at a distance ahead of you and then you can just direct them into the Hive that way.

Nilaus, you probably have the best sense of humor in Germany. This has been one of, if not my most favorite series you have done on your channel, the factorio base in a book is up there too. Keep making em, we'll keep watching. Got a friend dyson sphere and immediately followed up with your most recent Main BUS video.

The sheer amount of units and munitions flying around makes me think of Iain M. Banks Culture series space combat

The space combat is incredible. I wonder if the devs will offer larger scale offensive options for the sieging aspect of the game. Something like a planetary battery weapon or an orbital directional weapon powered by the sun or anti-matter technology..

Do you know that if you press CRTL you can set the spawnpoint of the space fleet relative to your mech?

Hahaha 0:39 really really made me chuckle. :)

Thank you for a good video!

Pocket Dimensions. Gotta love em.

That 9 HP moment. LEGEND

I hope they will add star base able to fill with (Corvettes and destroyers) and Shipyarda to build cruiser (missiles Ships), carrier for Corvettes, going back and forth fetching for more fighters is an absolute logistic nightmare

Disappointed Dad: "They're attacking something and that's good enough for me ..." *Long Pause*

Thanks

you can deploy your space fleet farther away from yourself so you don't get shot. while in combat mode in space, hold control to add what might be called a deployment plane, not sure what it is really called. your crosshair changes to show the distance from your mech to the point on the plane you are looking at. left click to set the deployment location for your space fleet. once you have the deployment set, you can slow down when you get near the hive, and rotate the mech to keep the plane in the correct spot. your ships will fly to the hive and you wont be in danger. useful at 35:00, for example

Currently I don't really feel like there's a point to directly attacking the hives. You don't get anything from doing it and by the time you can clear planets you are more than capable of handling incursions. Plus, it just ends up being this super boring gameplay loop of constantly going back and forth restocking. I would like to see the hives be less bullet spongy and more active. Even at max settings, all of the Dark Fog gameplay is on the planets. Have them launch units at your planets, set up blockades that you have to deal with, guard/provide rare resources - anything at all. Also, I think there needs to be some way to remotely destroy hives. For example, maybe something that ties into solar sails so that you can launch attack platforms or even the corvettes/destroyers into a ring to attack the hives.

@Nilaus 1. You have to attack the hive from behind, so you have to fly in the direction of the hive around its star. As the hive flies around the star with a speed of ~200-300 m/s, you can better control the speed of Icarus to keep the ideal distance to the star (using W and S and the shift key). If you see the hive as a thin disk from the side, than you are in the best postion! 2. you should not get closer than 0.5 AU, but not further than 1.0 AU, and start your attack from this distance with 3. With the strategy of 1. you willnever shooten by the stationery weapons and the distance of > 0.5 AU keeps you save from the swarm as well ! 3. Press CRTL-W (and many double-left clicks on your mouse) to send your activated fleet towards the swarm and watch the battle from a distance. 4. Watch your battery charge! Before it runs out, you must recall your fleet and return to the nearest planet to recharge your batteries! 5. Once you have destroyed the hive, another, distant hive will send a seed hive to your newly liberated system. As long as you haven't destroyed all the dark fog hives in the galaxy, a distant dark fog swarm will always send seed hives toward you.

Corvettes in Relay kill mode makes for easy clearing of a new system. Kill all relays then just back of from the attack or kill them. then go in and clean up the ground units for free power for ur new base

You can send your ships up to 2AU ahead of you if you hold Ctrl and select distance(LMB) on the grid that appears.

Man the pwrformance of this game continues to surprise me

You can use ctrl click to send the fleet to a specific position in the combat mode

You can actually deploy all the fleet by tabbing and click on " all fleet" on your right corner( not the "enable" one), and also choose where they deploy them if you click on the first button at left of "all fleet". In addition, you can also deploy your space fleet if you arrive a new planet to help kill faster the local hives, if you enable the attack on the relays, they cant launch new waves if the threat on that new planet reach the 100% and the relay is off. Oh! and likewise you can choose the mode on your drones at your mecha panel, you can select the speed of your shield recharge.

If you can get on a planet as the hive passes deploying your fleet will agro the ships toward the planet allowing the plasma cannons to rip them up.

I didn't see anyone mention my favorite attrition method that I've been using since all the hives in my save are already 29 or 30. Made a "kill box"/fog farm blueprint. It covers most of the planet with shield generators outside of a killbox with all the goodies like laser turrets etc. It also doubles for fog farming. Eventually a relay will land in this section. Restarting the game often helps force hives to send new relays out. Stand on the ground and shoot the relay a few times, it triggers the hives to attack. After you defend against the waves, repeat. Waves incrementally increase by 5 units each time. Occasionally you will have to wait for the relay to heal but you can keep doing this ever increasing the unit numbers in waves. Any starved hive can be safely depleted of lancers. Eventually it wont even matter the hive with the relay you have set in the kill box is feeding matter to it's hive. The biggest wave i recall from a single hive is around 385. Trigger a few back to back attacks I'll drain any well fed hive. This leaves the humback units and the static defenses at the hive. Generally much more manageable. Also there's a cheese method with space combat. Since the enable checkbox removes the ships immediately it will prevent damaged units from being lost. Send in an all destroy fleet. As soon as they start taking heavy damage disable and re-enable them. Putting them back right next to you and they are back to full health. Just send them back in and repeat as needed.

you can press Strg to get manual control of your space units that way you can send them forward and define targets

You survived by the skin of your teeth on that one attack run. I know you haven't gotten there yet on research, but the antimatter capsules absolutely wreck havoc on both ground bases and space hives.

If you can boost your units durability and damage with research, you can make the fight easier with fewer losses.

usually 1-6 relay stations remain. Look where red arrow ends.

It's a shame you can't turn your Dyson Sphere, into a Nicol-Dyson Beam(thank you Issac Arthur). Could just Death Star the Dark Fog across the galactic region that way.😅

Since you have a decent dyson swarm, covert the energy to critical photons for antimatter. Two major reasons: Antimatter fuel rods are far superior for this purpose. Fully proliferate, they have a 1100x fuel generation bonus. You rarely if ever decrease power. Second, the antimatter capsules are devastating. 5x the damage of a plasma capsule. Very expensive though.

The most annoying part of the expansion is that it takes a lot more energy to destroy an already unprotected hive than it does to destroy the myriad of Lancers protecting it. And sometimes, if your ships decide that the battle is over, they return to you and in a second take all the energy for repairs.

With such heavy planetary defense, could you just poke that nearly dead hive and trigger as much attacks as possible from the other hives to deplete them?

suck a grind, hope they bring out better space fighting stuff later on ( think i've seen something about it in one of the recent patch note but not 100% sure)

I wish there was a way to zoom in so we can see our ships.

Do you have ur PC specs somewhere? I also started a max dif. run but when I see this combat I think my potato PC cant run this :D

Ok, I have to disagree here, from my experience, you want destroyers only agains't static defences because most of the time they outrange the lasers (if you control them manually, don't let them attack whatever). Corvettes get recked by static defenses and burn through your energy reserves.

If I recall correctly, destroying the hives has the added benefit of making your solar sails more effective, so it's definately a good idea at this stage of the game.

Maybe messing with dark fog communicator will force hives to attack more frequently?

Same procedure as every year;)

Simple question, is it worth it proliferating our space fleet?

ahah Nilaus looks to a hive seed and says "what the hell is that lol" that was funny other hive will send a seed and rebuild the one you just killed beside that you can move the fleet to 1000 m from you and then attack

Never played so bare with me. How come you don't just stop your speed when you reach the outskirts of the hive so that you don't get into range?

isn't it possible to personally provoke the hive and kite them to a heavily fortified planet so you can defend yourself against a thousand lancers and don't even necessarily need to use your own ships?

Isnt it pointless to use lenses in your ray receivers if you are already over requesting power by so much

Where do the items from the dark fog go in the space combat?? Just disappear?😢😢

oh yeah first try to stamp it down lol.

The space combat is cool , but it feels like something is missing :( Perhaps a big ship of yourself?

Did they make a change recently? Haven't touched the game in a week, but last time I've tried flying that close to a hive I got one-shot immediately. You had to hover some 0.6-0.7 AU away and send out your ships via the CTRL interface which was super awkward, especially since you had to look towards the hive but keep the ships to the side so you'd circle it and not run into range of one-shot turrets.

If you don't proliferate green lenses, you are doing it wrong. It goes from 100% to 300% with blue proliferate and it takes a solid 5min or something to use up one green lense. Apparently you profilerate them when you create them, all g.

This seems like the most tedious thing to do in this game.

second eyy

9 durability....

NO BLITZKRIEG?!?!