Dyson Sphere Program Review (Twister)
Overall, it is a good game but it can be greater with the following improvement:
1) FPS in med/late game. I got a significant FPS drop once I started building the sphere on a blue giant. The current option to make the game continue playable is to turn off the display of the sphere both in game and in the design mode. Even with such scarification, the FPS can still barely reach 20 and would drop further in combat. While the issue is mostly with the huge number of elements involved in sphere itself, the current implementation in the game was not good enough telling the GPU what need to be rendered and what doesn't. I played in a system with 64 stars and just managed to build the Dyson sphere on 10 systems before hitting significant FPS issues.
2) Combat system improvement. Dark fog hives only attacks the first planet in which the player landed on in the system. It never try to attack a planet that is more vulnerable such as orbital collector in gas giants or a planet with less defense.
3) Planet size. Nearly all planets are of the same size, which is rather unrealistic. It would be much more interesting if there are size variation in the planet which would also affect the gravity and thus affecting the mobility of the mecha (just multiplying by a factor depending on the size and the density of the planet would be great enough).
4) Expert mode which allows the players to freely select the starting system and change the difficulty of the game. It is understandable that some system may not have silicon and titanium at all and starting in such system is basically hell. It would be interesting if the player start around a black hole and face the multiple dark fog hives from the very beginning.
5) Orbital building other than the gas giant collector for say solar energy, space defense, interplanetary station that can only be accessed via drones, etc. These buildings does not take up ground space but is also susceptible to hive space force attacks.
6) Asteroid and asteroid mining facilities which allows for mining of special minerals that is needed for some special recipes in med-late game.
7) Special technology that allows for building certain buildings such as advanced mining machines on water planets without foundation. This can allow a player to preserve the environment of a water planet as much as possible through coupling with the use of orbital facilities mentioned in 5.