I’ve talked a couple of times about Dyson Sphere Program on this blog, and while I’ve enjoyed my time with it immensely, I’ve never managed to actually sit down and finish a game of it. This post will be a sort of ramble on why a game so similar to Factorio just doesn’t do it for me the way Factorio does.

To start with, I’ve already talked about how I feel the game doesn’t “scale up” in the same way Factorio does. Later research goals in Factorio cost exponentially more than earlier ones, but in Dyson Sphere Program the relationship seems more additive or multiplicative than exponential. Then there’s the difficulty with blueprints, I can’t have a nice big blueprint that does everything I want anywhere I want it because since planets have to be spheres, the gridlines get broken up closer to the poles. This means a blueprint developed for the equator doesn’t work at the poles and vice versa, and means it’s not nearly as fun to make and place my blueprints for a big mega-base.

I’m also not to keen on constantly having to move between planets. In Dyson Sphere Program you have different planets that you’re collecting resources from, which should be really fun but the time it takes you to GET to those different planets is very boring. They couldn’t have realistic space travel ala Kerbal Space Program, but they also didn’t do enough to make space travel interesting in and of itself. So sitting there for a few minutes while you travel to another planet is just boring, and you HAVE to keep going back and forth because there’s no way to build things on one planet while you’re standing on another. This was something Factorio dealt with very well, running around was also boring in Factorio but once you build radars everywhere you could go into your map and change things anywhere that you had radar coverage without ever having to move your character. It was fun, it worked, and Dyson Sphere Program should have incorporated it so I don’t have to trek back and forth between planets just to make minor changes.

The lack of enemies is another thing I think I’ve talked about but it bears repeating because in Factorio the enemies actually did a lot for the game. Their attacks kept you on your toes, pushing back their bases gave you something to do while waiting for research, and it was a very fun structural problem to try to figure out how you were going to make everything you wanted to make while still protecting it. Factorio gives you an infinite canvas to build on, but gives you constraints in that you must protect everything from the enemies. That’s more interesting to me than an infinite canvas with no constraints.

Constantly needing to refuel your character (a robot), as well as needing to physically be in the places you want to build, work together to make me not enjoy the endgame. I don’t like running around making sure I have enough fuel or am standing near a charging station, and I don’t like building a giant conveyor belt across a tundra planet if it means I have to march across the planet myself to make sure it gets built. Having the bots build actually makes building long belts go a lot more slowly in this game than it did in Factorio where at least you could build a belt at your running speed.

Unclear benefits to building the actual Dyson Sphere. The Dyson Sphere in literature and science is an idea of harnessing the nearly unlimited energy of a star to do our bidding, and yet I got all the way to the final Research cube and never found myself with the kind of unsolvable power troubles that seemed to require a Dyson Sphere. I built one for kicks (it’s also unclear where you’re supposed to build the launchers but whatever), but I feel like I’d have been just as well or better served building more and more solar grids across the surface of the planet. Land was super plentiful and why should I spent more to build solar grids in space when I could just build solar grids on the ground. The efficiency gains (if there even were any) weren’t worth it and the energy gains for running your planet-wide base weren’t so great that I felt I needed it.

So overall Dyson Sphere Program is still a very fun game, and it’s a somewhat unique way to combine Factorio with space travel. But I’m feeling less and less confident in recommending it to others considering I can’t even bring myself to finish it.