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I just got to artillery in my first vanilla 2.0 Deathworld Marathon game, and wow! What a great experience that was! I thoroughly enjoyed it. I had to micro-manage much of the game to stay alive to this point. I thought the level of difficulty was pretty perfect, and made for a game that was challenging, but not impossible. I felt like I was holding my breath the entire game to get to artillery. I feel like it would be a great default "hard" setting if there were such a thing.

Anybody else's thoughts on Deathworld Marathon?

I have not tried marathon, only regular deathworld and I do not understand why artillery was a gamechanger for you. Usually deathworld just add one hour of early game and have minimal impact later. If you can travel space then hard part is long over. There are plenty of ways to kill all nests in pollution cloud without artillery or you can just ignore them and burn attacking waves with flamethrower turrets.
With 2.0 marathon you will wait longer to get key techs but it is compensated by much weakened attack waves. Boring. If you really want fun then try "warp drive machine" with all recommended mods. Vanilla deathworld is a piece of cake compared to it.

Currently entering late game on a Death World play through and I enjoyed it. There were definitely some close calls in the early game. "If I don't win this fight and take this ore patch, I'm dead." Unlocking artillery did feel like a breaking point. Could finally drive everything far enough away from my Nauvis main base to get comfortable.

Now that I have legendary laser turrets everywhere backed up Tesla turrets, nothing does more than scratch the outer walls before dying. At this point it just feels like normal, sadly. But it does feel rewarding to have made it this far.

So what's Marathon?