Hi,
i was looking for years for a successor of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbattle. There was Europa which was available for a few years but then went down.
Xbattle also allows movement of troops from one cell to another one a checkedboard-like landscape. Instead of asteroids some of the cells had a city of a defined size on them that could produce new troops if occupied. One key difference was that due to the fact that each cell had a defined set of directions sending troops in one of those directions was a mere click. The other difference was that the marching line would remain and as long as new troops would grow or come from somewhere else the line would continue to let the troops flow.
To compensate these differences in Dyson one could imagine to simply click on the surface of an occupied asteroid in the direction of the next asteroid and a supply line would become visible that would continously pump seedlings to the neighborouging asteroid.
What i also really miss in Dyson is to compete against humans across the Internet. This is much more fun then playing against droids that are either overly aggressive or lame.
But compared to other real-time strategy games which require a steep leaning curve Dyson brings a lot of fun very quickly similar to xbattle.
Perhaps some of you know xbattle or have a linux box around on which this is typically easy to install and run on. I would be interested in comparing those two games with each other.
Regards, Marcus
