The new forums will be named Coin Return (based on the most recent vote)! You can check on the status and timeline of the transition to the new forums here.
The Guiding Principles and New Rules document is now in effect.
[Terra Invicta] 30% off for Gamescom, come and shoot space in the face
Mr Ray
Sarcasm sphereRegistered User regular
Sarcasm sphereRegistered User regular
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=musvPt93VKYhttps://store.steampowered.com/app/1176470/Terra_Invicta/
https://www.gog.com/en/game/terra_invicta
An extraterrestrial probe is detected approaching Earth. Unknown to humanity, an alien force has arrived in the far reaches of the icy Kuiper Belt and has begun mining a dwarf planet to prepare for an invasion.
With Earth’s nations unable to unite to address the alien arrival, transnational groups of like-minded political, military and scientific leaders develop covert channels to coordinate a response. With the aliens' motives uncertain, factions emerge, driven by hope, fear or greed.
You will control one of these factions.
- The Resistance works to form an alliance of nations to mount a coordinated defense
- Humanity First vows to exterminate the aliens alongside any who sympathize with them
- The Servants worship the aliens and believe they will solve all the troubles of the world
- The Protectorate advocates negotiated surrender as the only means to avoid annihilation
- The Academy hopes the alien arrival heralds the opportunity to form an interstellar alliance
- The Initiative seeks to profit from the chaos and destruction
- Project Exodus plans to build a massive starship and flee the Solar System
Gameplay
From the creators of Long War, Terra Invicta bridges the gap between civilization on Earth and the vast interstellar empires of other space strategy games. Gain command over Earth's nations...
... and take humanity’s first steps in colonizing our Solar System...
where over 300 asteroids, moons and planets in constant motion create an ever-changing strategic map.
You begin on Earth as the head of a shadowy organization competing with other factions for control points representing a region's military, economic and political leadership. Geopolitics is your sandbox, and you may unite or break apart nations as best serves your ends, while using those under your influence to conduct proxy wars against the other six factions.
Factions work through a council of politicians, scientists and operatives whose abilities can be enhanced by obtaining influence over organizations like intelligence agencies or powerful corporations.
Terra Invicta has a global research system that creates opportunities for both competition and cooperation. Shared scientific advancement unlocks private engineering projects. Factions can choose to focus on private projects, at the cost of weakening Earth as a whole and ceding influence over global research direction to other factions with different priorities.
The other six human factions are not your sole competition. Throughout the game, illustrated events will present you with difficult choices as you investigate growing alien activity on Earth.
You cannot remain on Earth alone, and space launch facilities are of vital strategic importance.
Your conflict with the other factions will extend to space, where you will compete to mine asteroids and construct bases on planets and moons throughout the Solar System.
Stations built deep in space can refuel your ships, while those closer to home can serve as research or construction facilities.
Spaceship design in Terra Invicta draws from the best of scientific speculation and hard science fiction. You can design your own ships, selecting from an array of weapons, drives and radiators to place on a variety of hulls.
Tactical combat is built around a realistic simulation of Newtonian physics, where momentum and maneuver in 3D space are just as important as the firepower your ships carry.
Okay, so that's all the copy + paste guff out of the way, so what is it, really?
Terra Invicta is a grand strategy game, the first standalone release by Pavonis Interactive, the development team which grew from the original mod team that created the Long War mod for XCOM 2012, and was subsequently hired by Firaxis to make the Long War 2 mod for XCOM 2. It is pretty much exactly what you would expect from a full game developed by a team of modders that wanted XCOM to be longer, harder and more complicated. Rather than taking command of an existing anti-alien taskforce, your role is to build an anti-alien taskforce out of politicians, scientists, activists, officers and operatives, along with various real-world organizations such as NASA, CERN, MI6, Delta Force, the FSB and even criminal organizations like the Italian Mafia or the Yakuza. You won't be assaulting downed UFOs with a hand-picked team of elite operatives, you'll be sending one of your councilors with the Australian SAS or French GIGN or Dutch Frogman corps attached and hoping that they can get the job done; you are the XCOM now.
In terms of actual gameplay, it feels a lot more like something like Crusader Kings, where you slowly establish your control over territories via both covert and overt methods, with the goal of eventually building a space fleet and fighting the aliens directly. Assuming of course that you're playing as The Resistance, the closest analogue to XCOM in the game. you may also want to play as one of the other factions...
- The Resistance is basically XCOM. They want the Aliens to leave Earth the hell alone and go back to where they came from.
- Humanity First is the faction of choice for those who want to PURGE THE XENOS. They don't just want the aliens to go away, they want their entire species exterminated, every single one. And anyone collaborating with them. And anyone even thinking about collaborating with them. And their pets. They are mechanically similar to the Resistance, except as an extremist Xenophobe faction they will get access to a few more "questionable" responses to events (we've detected alien activity in this forest... BURN IT DOWN!), and are in general a lot more comfortable with collateral damage and dealing out indiscriminate murder. If you're playing as one of the other factions, best not let Humanity First get hold of the nukes, because they will use them at the earliest opportunity.
- The Servants are the compulsory "bad guy" faction, although if you play through their campaign there is a little more nuance to them than that. They're lead by a former Southern Baptist Preacher, who believes that the aliens were sent by god.
- The Protectorate are the worst. Don't play Protectorate. They are the "appeasement" faction that advocates "protecting" humanity by surrendering to the aliens and doing whatever it is they want in the hopes that they will spare humanity.
- The Academy are basically the Federation from Star Trek; they want to be super best friends with the aliens, though not at the cost of actually becoming subservient to them. They want to prove to the aliens that we are equals and enter an alliance with them.
- The Initiative are Corporate douchebags of the worst kind. They want to be kings of the ashes, basically. Its telling that their ethos is described as "various exploitable beliefs". In some nations they promote alien denialism, in others they sell "cures" for Alien diseases that they made up
- Project Exodus plans to build a massive starship and flee the Solar System... which is a sensible enough goal, but in practice is kind of boring to play. You can basically just turtle up and then just fast-forward your way to victory.
All of the faction's goals are achievable on some level; a large part of the game will be investigating the alien menace, figuring out what their plans are, and how to stop/help them. As invading alien species go, they are pretty well written and have very believable motives for doing the things that they do. What are these motives exactly? You'll have to find that out for yourself...
Terra Invicta enters Early Access on Monday September 26th. The game is mostly finished, but with a few rough edges, notably balance and AI changes, space combat UI improvements, quality-of-life fixes, and a few remaining bugs. All that said, I have been beta testing the game for a while and currently have 300+ hours invested in this game, so I would have to say that it is pretty good. If I had to describe the game in a single sentence, I guess I would call it Crusader Kings meets XCOM via Kerbal Space Program; you will spend most of the early game building an XCOM style multinational council of government spooks, consolidating your hold on Earth, or part of it at least, and then use this foothold to eventually expand into space to fight the aliens on their own terms. Then you'll have to worry about things like orbital transfers and Delta/V and how to conserve precious fuel when moving your initially very inefficient spaceships around. Meanwhile you'll be contending with the other human factions along with alien infiltrators, who have their own freaky alien goals which will not be immediately apparent without some investigation and research on your part.
This game is long. The alien invasion will not be over within a single year as in the other XCOM games; this is very much a "slow burn" alien invasion where the invaders will start in the far reaches of the solar system and slowly make their way towards Earth while consolidating their resources, as well as infiltrating Earth's governments by nefarious means. A full campaign will take about 30-40 in game years. Yes, this means that you will need to consider the age of your starting councilors, as someone who is 50 years old in 2022 will probably have died of natural causes by 2050.
One of the main appeals of the game is its potential as a geopolitical dicking around simulator; you can end the Ukraine war, reverse Brexit, reform the British Commonwealth, unite the EU into a single mega-nation, conquer Taiwan as China, conquer China as Taiwan, build a bridge across the Bering strait, and various other geopolitical shenanigans.
One last note, yes, the game is early access, and you should probably all know by now everything this implies. I've been playing the beta for some time and I'm still under NDA for the next day or so, so I'm not sure what I'm allowed to say specifically, but I'm happy to answer any questions in this thread to the best of my ability.
Mr Ray on
+13
Posts
Definitely going to keep an eye out for more info.
I'm in the process of writing an "Idiot's guide", but its taking a little longer than I thought, I'll probably append the OP once I'm finished.
I know it isn't going to be, but I hope STELLARIS is next on their "next generation" list for games (after CK and Victoria). If we're being honest, it should probably be EU that's next up, but boy would a "modern" Stellaris be something else.
That said, and speaking of TI, my number one issue with the game is the issue I have with most grand strategy games - they have gone too far down the programming hole and forgot about the UI/UX requirement. Trying to assign a councilor to the UFO crash site, I was making the exact same face as Leslie Knope here:
Like this needs to be their top priority other than balancing (which I'm assuming is one of the main reasons this is releasing into EA as I thought this game was going to skip that). I'll be trying it out for sure, but just kind of put off by the UI/UX work which feels really amateur compared to everything else about the game.
I really enjoyed the early game building up your power base and sabotaging enemy factions but the mechanics of space were just bleh. Weird things like being unable to actually intercept alien ships before they reach their destination, Humanity First(and some of my own councilors) being upset with me for destroying Servant's space dock, and the combat controls being extremely obtuse.
Funny you post this, because while watching Perun playing the game I was reminded of the phrase that was used to describe Ben's game in a later episode of Parks and Rec: "punishingly intricate." (I forget if it was a reviewer talking about Cones of Dunshire or if he made a different game during the time skip that earned that review.)
Yeah, it definitely looks like it could be fun, but I'm gonna hold off for non-early access. Again, referring back to Perun playing, he's talking about all these details he's reading at a glance and I'm just kind of asking myself "okay, what's that mean, and where do you see that? Because I don't see that anywhere- and we're moving on to something else."
The game really does ease you in to things though and doesn't throw everything at you all at once.
I bounced off HOI hard, so I would rate this as a level of complexity less than that, probably on-par with Crusader Kings. That said, this is definitely not going to be for everyone; if you like big complicated Grand Strategy games that take weeks to finish, this might just be your jam. Otherwise maybe not so much.
A couple of things here. First of all yes, there have been some improvements to the combat controls, although they've acknowledged that there is still additional work to do, and is a big part of why they released to EA rather than full release on day one. Controlling a single ship is fine now, but we still desperately need the ability to select multiple ships and give them all the same order; big battles can turn into a lot of clicking.
You can't intercept ships before they reach their destination because that's not how orbital transfers in space work; you need to match orbits with the thing you're trying to intercept. Which, if you're intercepting them in the middle of a transfer, is going to mean that after the battle, you're going to be left in a weird orbit, or possibly flying out of the solar system. Earlier builds did allow you to do this, and it was not fun being told "Hey you won, but now your ships are flying off into the endless void with not enough fuel to turn around". This is something that the game should probably spell out a bit better, but generally speaking you'll want to wait until they reach their destination and THEN intercept them. The alien's ships will be much much faster than yours anyway, especially early on, so trying to do long intercepts is a losing prospect. You want your ships to already be in the same orbit when you launch the intercept, wait for them to come to you and make sure your ships are already in the same orbit waiting.
Humanity First didn't like when you blew up the Servant's space dock because blowing up any orbital is an atrocity. The station may have been controlled by the Servants, but there were innocent civilians on that station, and you murdered them, and put a bunch of debris into orbit that could cause problems later on. Atrocities cause a big hit to PR for the faction that caused them, and make them less attractive to PR campaigns later on. Atrocities are most commonly caused by nuking things, but also by nations without a nuclear program developing one, or sometimes randomly by event during a war.
In future, if you want to deal with an enemy station, its better to tech up to Space Marines and board the station. They will murder a bunch of people and probably blow up half the station in the process of taking it, but this is not an atrocity somehow, and you get to keep (what's left of) the station afterwards, even if only to decommission it.
Its only when actually sitting down to write my "Idiot's guide" that I realize how complicated this game actually is to a new player, I guess having had months of beta to get used to how everything fits together its easy to forget how overwhelming it must all be to a new player. If you're enjoying the game, I strongly encourage you to leave a positive review; gentle reminder that this is Pavonis's first full release game and the success of Terra Invicta could literally make or break their future as a game studio. There was also a bit of an early review bomb due to an issue in the French localized version of the game which caused it to crash on launch, which has now been fixed.
Still writing my "idiot's guide"... its turning into a lot more words than expected and I'm probably going to split it into a few parts at this point.
India is apparently similar; starts poorer, but can semi-easily federate with several of its neighbors and go from there.
Big Countries: (impenetrable)
I always have to grab smaller/easier countries around them to have a chance at the big ones. Each neighboring CP gives a bonus to doing stuff in other countries.
As for my china game, yea I think its mostly I just dunno what priorities I should be doing to make super awesome countries really.
I started in South America, grabbed almost all of it save Brazil. By that time my Councilors had a fair bit of experience under their belts and I was able to run a killer PR campaign in the States to drum up quite a bit of support. I got two nodes for free thanks to great PR and the others I was easily able to snag thanks to a very high support rate among the populace.
Something to keep in mind, since I didn't realize it for the longest time myself, is that when you go to take a node you can dump a bunch of money in to it to significantly up your chances. Off the top of my head I think 680 monies up'd my chance to take a US node from 11% to near 80%. This actually applies to every kind of operation your Councilors can undertake.
Those three countries in particular have very good research output, which let me take control of one of the Global research slots early which is nice, but not essential. They were my Research/Funding nations early on, later once I'd grown my CP limit considerably I was able to grab China and I made them my main research Nation instead and switched UK and Japan to focusing on Military; both good options for doing so as they both have a good starting Military tech level and have large populations that can support 3 armies each. Without spoiling too much I will just say that ground-based armies are one of those things that are not all that important until they suddenly are.
Honestly I wouldn't recommend China as an early grab at all; the AI will struggle to make any headway in China for a while as well so there's no particular rush, and it takes a bit of TLC before becoming worthwhile, in my opinion.
mid-game spoilers
Like they took China from me and they had ~60 defense score.(30 size of economy, 9 from council stats, 10 from defend, 8(?) from base difficulty, 3-5 from popular support)
Even maxing out the pay-bar to get like a +10 I had less than a 10% chance of crackdown and 0% chance of purge
Also, does anyone know if adding marines to your space stations defends them from councilors or just enemy marine assaults. It makes sense that they would defend against mutiny but it doesn't actually say that; on the other hand after adding them to all my stations I stopped losing stations to people and got a bunch of messages about failed attempts.
Also, also, super late game protectorate victory condition spoilers
For the victory condition question:
Tried doing a EU game and I don't think I like it much. I have federated north and western europe except for Spain and Portugal and it just seems like a worse US?
I also need to try and find a way to look up what to prioritize cause all my countries seem to stagnate pretty quick.
Ok, so something that isn't well documented (if at all) and really needs to be communicated to the player or just reworked completely, is that losing stations to Councilor persuade missions or losing CPs to the method in your mid-game spoiler can be mitigated by increasing your Councilor's collective Loyalty score. This can be done by another councilor with the "Inspire" mission. If you aim to max out your Councilor's loyalty scores (and get more councilors asap) you'll have less issues with this kind of thing, although to some extent its unavoidable that you're going to lose points this way.
Mid-game spoilers:
As far as I know marines only stop actual assaults my other marines, however the difficulty of taking over a hab is modified by the number of crew (as well as Council loyalty as mentioned above), and marine barracks have quite a lot of crew. I think the barracks also increases the odds that the Councilor is detained if they do fail. Personally though I find the simplest solution is just to have a battle barge full of marines standing by to take back any stations I lose.
In terms of increasing your CP cap, you'll want to get to 6 Councilors asap; a Councilor with maxed Persuasion, Command and Administration is worth a whopping 75 CP cap. I believe most of the factions also have a faction-specific tech that increases their CP cap considerably, and a lot of the "social" engineering projects have "Slightly increases CP cap" as a secondary effect, so its worth picking a few of those up. And keep an eye out for the one or two that say "Significantly increases CP cap".
For investment I mostly do unity until cohesion is at 5, welfare until inequality is less than 3, then just pump everything into economy, funding, boost, and/or mission control depending on what I want from that particular country. With a sprinkling of military spending to keep unrest down. It seems to do well
Ooof yea that would have been useful to know. I know the game is early access but they really need to do a tool-tip pass.
mid-game spoiler
Yea it seems most of my cap is from the base 100 you start with and my councilors. The techs I haven't been impressed by at all, they all seem to only add ~5 points each. Which, I mean, I took them all anyway because I was desperate for more CPs but it would be nice if they were a little higher. Don't think I've seen a tech that said significantly increases though, its all been marginal/small/slightly increases.
Theres some starting unions like the EU and eurasia (and some surronding countries) which are federations you can do unification with other members if you are the leading country (France in the EU).
For those you use the national policy option on a counciller on say France when its been long enough ingame and you hold all cps in each country to do unification.
For like making korea whole you need to own both parts and go to the relations tab and get them to ally together. Then you can make a federation with them and unify. Same with the balkan states.
Later game there are techs you can research which let you do the same with more countries, like unifying all of africa into one meganation or the same wit north america.
I guess there is a demo? Maybe I'll give that a shot before diving in.
edit: seems like the demo has been removed when they went into early access
Its definitely a game where you're going to need to watch/read a guide unless you want to restart a bunch as you learn new things; there are a lot of noob traps that while they may not wreck your game will slow you down/waste resources if you do them.
Such as? I have probally hit a bunch without knowing.
2) Not sending out probes ASAP, particularly to Mars. If you don't good mining sites on the Moon/Mars you'll be screwed come mid-game when the aliens start attacking you directly(assuming you're not a pro-alien faction anyway). If you have mining on Mars you can station a small fleet there to protect your stuff, if you are forced to rely on asteroid mining you'll never be able to afford to defend every single asteroid.
3) Early space ships. They suck, like the first 25% of the space techs should just be tossed because building them is throwing away resources. Early ships won't be able to do anything of note and building them causes the aliens to attack you faster.
4) Researching engines. Theres like 80 different engines in the game a lot of which are so similar that even if they're useful(which a lot aren't) you really don't want to research them all. Someone made a graph that had all the engines sorted by performance:
Engine spec spoilers obviously.
5) Loyalty. Its hilariously important and the game doesn't really tell you this. Also the only way to increase it(afaik) is the inspire mission so unless you get two councilors who can do that mission and throw everybody into a giant motivational ball until their loyalty is maxed out you're going to have a really bad time.
Man I hit like almost all of those lol.
I am assuming with that drive chart I want stuff thats higher and more to the right?
While make life better for the people is nice its really secondary to completing your goals. Unless you mean you aren't getting any increases in funding/boost/MC, in which case something is definitely wrong.
And mostly I use a customized abit resist setting. Its mostly the same I just get rid of the spoils pips since I want the countries long term. I tried adding more knowledge to try and get russia and china to be democratic but it doesn't really seem to do much.
So I am pretty good with space stuff but I can't seem to figure out how to get the countries to do stuff I see other people saying they do.
I dunno its just really hard for me to figure out what I think should be happening from what the game apperently is. Like 8 years of 20% investment into knowledge for at most .1 increase in democracy doesn't seem worth it.
That leaves stuff like Economy, Welfare, Knowledge, and Boost now soaking up a much larger percentage of resources. So far I've been seeing Economy go down, but it goes down reeeeeallly slowly; could probably focus on Economy entirely for a month or so and I'd better it'd offset a couple years of GDP decline.
Also. UNIFICATION. This shit is key to getting stronger and faster. Unification lets you take multiple countries and make one country, freeing up a fat chunk of Cap Points plus making a nation that's easier to defend (you can fortify the whole thing in one turn) and much harder to influence by the other factions. But the tricky part is that, at the start of the game, only nations already associated with Federations can be Unified. So if you had France, Germany, and Russia, only France and Germany can be Unified under the European Union. However, if you add Kazakhstan in there, you can Unite it with Russia. Now you have two countries instead of four and you've saved a ton of Cap Points.
What this means is, basically, focus your early attentions on Federated regions that are geographically close together. If I grab all of France, I get a bonus on getting Germany because the two are neighbors. If I have both of those, I have bonuses on every neighbor nation they touch. And every neighbor they touch can also be Unified under the EU, letting you gobble up more and more of the EU as each nation you grab can eventually be Unified to free Cap Points for another country.
Just keep in mind that Unification is blocked until the end of the first year, and that you have to hold all points in a nation for six months before it can be Unified.