History VideoGame / DysonSphereProgram

* EnemyStealsYourLunch: In which energy is the food your factory needs to operate. Dark Fog space hives will siphon off a percentage of your Dyson Sphere's output based off of how many photon receivers they have. Generally the larger the hive and the more of them there are, the greater the amount of energy stolen.

** Strictly speaking, given the scale of the game's planets and buildings, all available turrets including the guns they carry are ridiculously huge, but two examples in particular still stand out among them:

** '''War Has Changed''': Complete the game without using any turrets. If you don't intend to cheese it[[note]]Setting their aggressiveness to passive then maxing all other settings, [[LoopholeAbuse which gives you 1.0 difficulty without actual danger (unless you get too close to a base/hive)]][[/note]], you'll need to exclusively rely on battle bases and combat drones.

* SuperMode: Turrets can enter a "Supernova" mode, which causes them to ''dramatically'' increase their fire rate for a short bit, but it draws ALOT of energy to do so. Supernova mode should generally only be reserved for key turrets, or on fortress worlds.
** Dark Fog production structures meanwhile can enter a Turbo Charge mode, which causes them to produce units at a greatly hastened rate, but will have its production slow to a crawl afterward. This means surviving the initial onslaught of Dark Fog units key if one is to siege their planetary bases without high tech advantages.

* ZergRush: Individual Dark Fog units aren't much of a threat, but there's never just one. Late-game battles usually involve hundreds, if not thousands of enemies bearing down on you at once.

* OneHitKill: The Dark Fog's heavy laser turrets need only one shot to kill pretty much anything, Icarus included. Fully upgrading the mecha's shield can allow it to tank a small number of shots, but once the shield is down, the next hit will be fatal. These things are the main reason you can (at present) only fight indirectly via drone spam instead of taking a more active role on the battlefield. On the flipside, the player's Plasma Turrets (both anti-ground ant anti-space) can be loaded with anti-matter capsules. These capsules are strong enough to instantly turn any Dark Fog unit into scrap metal.

* InfinityPlusOneSword: Studying Dark Fog debris can unlock a handful of production buildings that outperform anything you can research in a campaign without the cranky GreyGoo. The DF smelter works 1.5x as fast as the best standard version, the assembler is twice as fast, and the matrix lab has a whopping 3x speed modifier. The downside? You need to grind planetary bases until they reach certain level thresholds for the required debris components to drop from destroyed DF units, which on default settings can take upwards of ''20 real-time hours'' of uninterrupted fighting to accomplish (less if you happen upon bases that are of a high level from the outset, use high damaging ammo like Crystal Shells or Antimatter Capsules and/or have cranked the DF exp-gain setting up a bunch pre-game). Crafting these buildings then requires a more or less constant supply of these debris components, so [[ViolationOfCommonSense you need to keep these hostile bases alive and in working order]] if you want to mass-produce the reverse-engineered tech.

* ExperienceMeter: Interestingly, it's not the player that gets one, but the ''enemy''. Whenever the Dark Fog takes damage, its associated base/hive gains experience. You can track individual hives and bases at the top left. Whenever a hive or base levels up, its associated units and buildings get more health, armor and damage. Keep in mind that they will track overkill damage for experience, which can be bad if your goal is to just survive, but good if you want those sweet, sweet Dark Fog components for the InfinityPlusOneSword buildings.

** '''Didn't Break A Sweat!''' and '''Mission Impossible!''': Complete the game within 25 hours and 10 hours, respectively, on a x1.0 or lower resource difficulty; any higher, and/or using metadata for instant research, invalidates the achievement. Note that a normal run of the game, start to finish with no bonuses, generally takes ''at least'' 50 hours, and usually closer to ''70''. No matter what, it'll be close!

** '''War Has Changed''': Complete the game without using any turrets. You'll need to rely on battle bases and combat drones to beat this one. (Or just set the dark fog to passive, and all other settings to max)

* EvilEvolves: When the Dark Fog attacks the player, they gain experience during the fight. Once they get enough experience, they increase the health and damage of their units, the scale of their space hives, and the quality of their item drops. Each base tracks/raises experience separately however, so be careful about completely overwhelming ''every'' base you come across - to get high level Dark Fog-only drops, you'll need to let at least one (ground) base stay intact long enough to get what you need. Just bear in mind that any active space hives also learn from what happens planetside in their system, so farming a high-level ground base for too long will eventually result in [[OhCrap at least one level 30 space hive to deal with]].

* InfinityPlusOneSword: Studying Dark Fog debris can unlock a handful of production buildings that outperform anything you can research in a campaign without the cranky GreyGoo. The DF smelter works 1.5x as fast as the best standard version, the assembler is twice as fast, and the matrix lab has a whopping 3x speed modifier. The downside? You need to grind planetary bases until they reach certain level thresholds for the required debris components to drop from destroyed DF units, which on default settings can take upwards of ''20 real-time hours'' of uninterrupted fighting to accomplish (less if you happen upon bases that are of a high level from the outset, and/or have cranked the DF exp-gain setting up a bunch pre-game). Crafting these buildings then requires a more or less constant supply of these debris components, so [[ViolationOfCommonSense you need to keep these hostile bases alive and in working order]] if you want to mass-produce the reverse-engineered tech.

** Thermal Power Plants are quite useful as an automatic garbage disposal for any fuel byproducts of certain recipes. Most notoriously, hydrogen from oil and fire ice processing.

** Unipolar magnets, AKA magnetic monopoles, are a so-far hypothetic type of exotic matter that forms mind-bogglingly dense pseudo-atomic structures. A solid sphere slightly bigger than a golf ball of this stuff would concentrate so much mass in one spot that it would collapse into a black hole. In-game the stuff is found in standard ore deposits that of course don't act like this. Also, magnetic monopoles as we currently understand them are incredibly rare and thus most likely won't form mineable deposits anywhere in the universe.

* {{Antimatter}}: The final non-Dyson-shell power generator you can unlock is a tiny artificial sun that runs on antimatter fuel rods. The thing is in fact ''higher'' on the TechTree than all the tech you need to start constructing the shell, but is far far more efficient at capturing the power a full sphere can generate. On the weapon side of things, Antimatter Capsules are the final researchable ammo and are usable in Plasma Turrets, which will straight up ''obliterate'' whatever unfortunate dark fog ship that finds itself targeted.

** Dark Fog will not attack Logistic Vessels even if they sail right through the hive. Setting up reliable logistics would've be almost impossible otherwise.

* ThePowerOfTheSun: Artificial Stars are the endgame power plant, and rely on antimatter fuel cells to power themselves. While expensive to maintain, they are the most efficient power to space ratio building in the game, beating a gravity lens boosted ray receiver by just under 2.5x.

** Most resource nodes are finite but their rate of extraction is only limited by how many miner modules you can put around them. Crude Oil nodes never run out but can only accept a single extractor per node. This was then subverted in a patch that put Crude Oil nodes under diminishing returns. The node will technically never run out but after some time it will produce oil so slowly as to be impractical.
** Resources mined from gas giants (oxygen, deuterium and fire ice) are infinite but each gas giant is limited to 40 extractors that have extract each resource at a fixed rate.

** You don't actually need to build a DysonSphere to win. Technically, that comes from researching the final Research, appropriately titled "Mission Completed!", though you do at least need to create a Dyson Swarm (or Shell, if going for the No-Solar-Sail ChallengeRun) to get a specific resource needed to progress said tech.

* OneHitKill: The Dark Fog's heavy laser turrets need only one shot to kill pretty much anything, Icarus included. Fully upgrading the mecha's shield can allow it to tank a small number of shots, but once the shield is down, the next hit will be fatal. These things are the main reason you can (at present) only fight indirectly via drone spam instead of taking a more active role on the battlefield.