DSP - Intergalactic factory game
I'm obsessed with this game.
DSP is a space factory game, with city building elements. You start up by manually mining iron ore to convert into iron ingot, before building and conquering a part of the galaxy. Your goal is to provide enough "ultimate science" - a form of energy - to maintain an ever growing metaverse where humanity lives.
Game progression is nicely made, where you start in a region of your starting planet, before conquering most or all of the starting planet, and then conquering the other planets in your starting solar system, including gaseous giants. After that, you conquer planets of other solar systems, and ultimately build one - or many - Dyson Sphere, for the giant energy and unique ressource they provide. The game guides you through different level of "science". You start by producing simple components for simple "science", more difficult components for more advanced "science", and so on, until the "ultimate science". Seeing the exponential need can be overwhelming, but it doesn't require a doctor degree, just some focus. You don't need to rebuild everything from scratch everytime here, because ressources are finite, and you will use better designs with new ressources.
The early challenge is to automate everything. Because you have to understand the production by seconds of everything, in order to efficiently build something. Unlike some other factory game, ressources here are limited. But in the late game, with huge ressource allocation to some technologies, you can have near-infinite ressources generation, with multipliers between the ressources mined, and the ressources harvested.
While the ennemies, called "dark fog", and the limited ressources give some challenges, the main difficulty, and the purpose of this game, is scaling up. How to efficiently scale up about everything. Luckily, interstellar logistic is not really tedious, so the endgame is still fun. Blueprints also help a lot at avoiding tedious tasks, since mega-factory designs late game can include 60+ assemblers with 4 inputs and 1 ouput each.
Designing Dyson Spheres has room for a lot of creativity, and you can create things other than spheres and rings.
The artistic direction is well made as well. The game is pretty and colorful, and planets are differents enough to break the monotomy. Neutron stars are amazing to see. Sound design and musics are OK, but could see some improvements.
There's a great sense of accomplishment when you automate the production of something for the first time. The more difficult, the more fullfilling. Shooting up some ennemy spaceships with the big plasma turrets you put on a planet is also cool.
While the game is already excellent, it lacks in the combat aspect, especially the space battles. Most weapons / turrets have little to no uses. It also lacks a proper form of artillery.
It is also hard to keep up with production sometimes at the late game. When you build mega factories, you have ot remember which planet produce what. The easiest for now is to use excel, but the next update is supposed to address that.
The game has a lot of potential, and while it's already fun right now it might be worth waiting for future game changing features, or until 1.0. I have high hope for space structures and space battles.
Overall excellent game for its genre. There is always something to do.
Always scale up, always produce more.