Well now, I just took a moment to scan the solar system and saw that there is a mothership on it's way to Earth.
Do not be concerned, this is just a shipment of new moms to Earth for all people who need moms. Carry on with your lives. Think no more of this.
Well I hope they like my welcoming gift.
... is it hugs? Moms like hugs.
+2
MonwynApathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime.A little bit of everything, all of the time.Registered Userregular
Quick tip: New Zealand starts with a fully developed space program, good democracy, education, and cohesion values, no unrest, and like 20 research on day 1, and only costs like 10CP to hold. It's never going to be a powerhouse due to a tiny population but it's a great early pick in the initial scramble while you crack open one of the majors.
I have been wondering, those orgs that say like 3% economy or whatever, do they work on all your countries all the time or just like if you advise with them?
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
0
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Britannia rules the stars!
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I have been wondering, those orgs that say like 3% economy or whatever, do they work on all your countries all the time or just like if you advise with them?
Man, not even the mothership could stand up to just a mass of escorts with cobra missiles, although it did kill most of them. Kinda bullshit that apparently we salvaged no exotics from it.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
One suggestion I think this game needs in its full release in order to improve replayability is multiple alien factions, backstories and goals. Kinda blended together each time so you don't know what you will get and which human faction is 'right'
So the aliens could be...
Cruel or Indifferent or Tolerant towards Humans
Here for resources or Here for land or Here to flee onwards
Came in Generation Ships or Banished by More powerful rivals
Focused on Capturing Earth or Focused on Securing the other planets
And so on, with a few bonus techs and behaviors for each of the options.
So like, the most agressive aliens would be
Cruel, Here for Land, Banished by more powerful rivals, Focused on Capturing Earth
and in this case, Humanity first is helpful. We need to kill those aliens asap
Whereas you might end up with Aliens who are
Tolerant, Here for Land, Came in Generation Ships, Focused on Securing the Outer planets
who would barely care about the humans and it would only be the actions of Humanity First which set them off, if you learned this first, you'd realize that what you need to do is knock down humanity first.
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
+4
AxenMy avatar is Excalibur.Yes, the sword.Registered Userregular
Yeah I would like to see multiple potential dispositions for the aliens each game. Apart from just being an interesting strategic concern I think it would go a long way to really differentiating the human factions.
Like right now I really don't see a difference between Humanity First and the Resistance. Sure on paper one sounds more extreme than the other, but in practice the end result for both is the same; purge the xenos.
However if you had different alien agendas it could easily make things more interesting. ie: The Resistance just wants the aliens to stay out of human affairs, Earth is off limits. What the aliens do in the solar system isn't the Resistance's concern. Whereas Humanity First would want to purge the xenos filth from the solar system regardless of whether or not the aliens come in peace.
This would extend to all the other factions too. The aliens could truly be good and have come to uplift humanity and bring about an era of peace and plenty for all. Which would be good for the Servants or other pro-alien leaning factions.
Maybe the aliens are in system for resources, but are more than willing to share tech with humans to let them do all the work. That would be a plus for the Initiative.
Or if the aliens are escaping from some other threat and are more or less making a pitstop that'd be great for Project Exodus, cause if this super advanced spare faring civilization is running, humanity probably should too.
They could probably keep most if not all of the early game events and challenges too, just give it a different spin. Alien flora? It is there to clean the environment, but if I was a human and I saw alien weeds spreading I'd probably bust out the heavy flamer first and ask questions later. Even if the aliens are good and there to help humanity they may still need to do abductions and the like to get a grasp on the type of species they are dealing with and the problems humans face. Perhaps they have learned that, while distasteful, they still need to infiltrate key positions of power in order to minimize panic among a first contact species.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
That seems like it would cause the game to have way too much randomness in its difficulty. Like if you're playing the resistance and the aliens just want to mine the outer system what even would be your win condition? Taking out HF to avoid provoking the aliens? Thats way easier than fighting off an invasion.
That seems like it would cause the game to have way too much randomness in its difficulty. Like if you're playing the resistance and the aliens just want to mine the outer system what even would be your win condition? Taking out HF to avoid provoking the aliens? Thats way easier than fighting off an invasion.
It wouldn't be all that different from how the Servants currently operate. Though randomness in difficulty would be the point in my mind. Keeps things a bit fresh and forces players to adjust fire.
For the most part I think every factions' overall goals would largely remain the same. What the specific win conditions would be depending on the alien's goals I am fully confident the Devs could come up with suitable objectives.
In terms of the number of objectives I don't think they'd need to come up with that many. Regardless of the aliens specific intentions they'd fall in to one of three broad categories; hostile, benign, altruistic. Final objectives can be determined from that.
That all said, I don't see any reason why it couldn't be an option a player can pick at the start of a new game if they would rather deal with a known alien agenda.
A Capellan's favorite sheath for any blade is your back.
I have been wondering, those orgs that say like 3% economy or whatever, do they work on all your countries all the time or just like if you advise with them?
They're always active.
Ah thanks. That might be why I had so many issues with my countries growing since I barely used any orgs with those bonuses up til this game.
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Yeah I would like to see multiple potential dispositions for the aliens each game. Apart from just being an interesting strategic concern I think it would go a long way to really differentiating the human factions.
The way the game is structured, there's a huge potential amount of variation possible in faction gameplay alone. Along with the alien variation you mention, I think it would be great to play as the alien invasion force. You come in with a prepared fleet, all your tech unlocked, but very limited resources. The only research is social and biological and oriented towards controlling/defeating Earth. So you know how small ships show up early on? That early phase for the aliens could be feeling out how/where they can influence human groups and get the most out of infiltration.
Another fun spin on the aliens could be having two alien races in the system at the same time and they're clearly enemies. Then you have to figure out to support one of them or neither of them or play both against each other. Or how about a mode type where the humans are the intruders in the system, but it's just an alien colony right now (that would need a whole new "alien system" map, though). Or a mode where humans and aliens show up in an empty system at the same time and have to fight to colonize it. There's really a mountain of different ways the game could be set up without changing the gameplay code that much.
But holy crap do they need to smooth out the gameplay and interface first. Even just disentangling the nightmare pile of how the tech trees is set up would be a big step. And add graphs! I know that's a bizarre thing to ask for in a game, but they would help so much in understanding the cause/effect of manipulating investment points. Also, I should absolutely not have to keep re-investigating enemy agents to get basic shit like their name and affiliation; I know for a fact that the Resistance has at least one pen and sheet of paper where they can write that shit down so I don't have to investigate the enemy agent stack blindly to find a particular enemy agent.
That seems like it would cause the game to have way too much randomness in its difficulty. Like if you're playing the resistance and the aliens just want to mine the outer system what even would be your win condition? Taking out HF to avoid provoking the aliens? Thats way easier than fighting off an invasion.
It wouldn't be all that different from how the Servants currently operate. Though randomness in difficulty would be the point in my mind. Keeps things a bit fresh and forces players to adjust fire.
For the most part I think every factions' overall goals would largely remain the same. What the specific win conditions would be depending on the alien's goals I am fully confident the Devs could come up with suitable objectives.
In terms of the number of objectives I don't think they'd need to come up with that many. Regardless of the aliens specific intentions they'd fall in to one of three broad categories; hostile, benign, altruistic. Final objectives can be determined from that.
That all said, I don't see any reason why it couldn't be an option a player can pick at the start of a new game if they would rather deal with a known alien agenda.
Effectively the way you would create conflict etc would be that the humans don't know what the aliens want, and the aliens don't understand humans, and the aliens are always going to err towards being a bit 'colonial invadery'. IE, even the friendly ones don't bother to explain to humans why they are doing what they are doing until the humans have certain techs and so on. So there's always going to be a clash between HF and the aliens, and always going to be a desire to keep the servants down if you are the resistance. Because you don't know what the aliens are planning to do, and maybe by the time you do HF has killed 20 of their 'friendship cruisers' and now they are PISSED.
Do the AI factions cheat? Was looking around the world at 2038 and saw the US at almost 7 mil strength compared to my 5.5 in India where I'd been running it at 100 percent for years.
Sonelan on
[SIGPIC][/SIGPIC]
0
AegisFear My DanceOvershot Toronto, Landed in OttawaRegistered Userregular
Sometimes your commercial spaceflight research spits out an org with 0.25 boost, and sometimes it spits out an org with 1.25 boost and a space mining bonus. That sure is some variance.
This game has got some deep hooks in me now.
If there was one thing I'd change, it'd be wishing they'd let you pick your two starting advisors. There's no way you're going to expect me to start with two advisors who have no persuasion or administration between them. I'm just going to restart until I get serviceable advisors because the early game is just too important.
Sometimes your commercial spaceflight research spits out an org with 0.25 boost, and sometimes it spits out an org with 1.25 boost and a space mining bonus. That sure is some variance.
This game has got some deep hooks in me now.
If there was one thing I'd change, it'd be wishing they'd let you pick your two starting advisors. There's no way you're going to expect me to start with two advisors who have no persuasion or administration between them. I'm just going to restart until I get serviceable advisors because the early game is just too important.
I've seen that it's also crucial to get Advise on two agents, as low Loyalty in the mid- and late-game is just serving up high-powered agents to the aliens on a platter and the only way to get Loyalty to a useful level is repeated Advise missions.
Anyway, after several restarts, I think I'm finally heading towards the mid-game in a reasonable way and I've gotta say that this early game needs to speed the fuck up. The early game is very very repetitive and good 3-4 times longer than it has any need to be; the vast vast bulk of the time is spent just growing up your resource production, leveling agents, and slooooowly taking more bites of the map and consolidating them. I see nothing being lost from the early phase being 3-5 hours, tops, and right now it easily runs 3-4 times that long.
Sometimes your commercial spaceflight research spits out an org with 0.25 boost, and sometimes it spits out an org with 1.25 boost and a space mining bonus. That sure is some variance.
This game has got some deep hooks in me now.
If there was one thing I'd change, it'd be wishing they'd let you pick your two starting advisors. There's no way you're going to expect me to start with two advisors who have no persuasion or administration between them. I'm just going to restart until I get serviceable advisors because the early game is just too important.
I've seen that it's also crucial to get Advise on two agents, as low Loyalty in the mid- and late-game is just serving up high-powered agents to the aliens on a platter and the only way to get Loyalty to a useful level is repeated Advise missions.
I think you mean Inspire.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
Do the AI factions cheat? Was looking around the world at 2038 and saw the US at almost 7 mil strength compared to my 5.5 in India where I'd been running it at 100 percent for years.
As far as I know the AI doesn't cheat but its hard to say what happened without more info. The most likely culprit is if India has a resting unrest of above 0 then some of your military spending goes toward lowering unrest rather than improving your military, the lower the government score the more is diverted to reducing unrest. Another is what the US has been putting IP into, you say India has been at 100% military for years but obviously if the US has been running 50% military since the start of the game(and the AI loves to invest in the USA's military) thats a lot more overall than India doing 100% for 4 years. The last I can think of is that whoever controls the US has more boosts to military funding than you do and as far as I know there is no way to actually check what investment bonuses other factions have.
There are a lot of counter intuitive things in the game in terms of economies. It seems that investing in anything other than military and funding is pretty much a trap. The AI doesn’t do it and they still have tones of research and better armies.
"That is cool" - Abraham Lincoln
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited October 2022
Fuuuuuck this interface and the way it just outright keeps secrets from you. I've had UK and Ireland for years now and I fucking could not get them to meet conditions for unification in the EU. I couldn't even get the game to tell me why I couldn't unify them. And I couldn't unify them with each other (story of Britain, right?).
Turns out that because Ireland and the UK are already in the United Kingdom federation, they can't join a different federation. So first you have to split them up and THEN individually add them to the EU federation and THEN wait for the cooldown to unify into the EU.
Ugh, I could've been gunning for the Eurasian union literally hours ago.
That... doesn't sound correct. The UK isn't a Federation, until you research "Restored Commonwealth" at least; it doesn't start the game as one. Its a Nation with four regions, one of which (Belfast) is claimed by Ireland, and another (Glasgow) which is claimed by Scotland, which doesn't exist at game start.
If you control the executive of the UK, you can cede Belfast to Ireland, since they have a claim, or cede Glasgow to Scotland, which will create Scotland as a "new" independent nation. You can also cede either of them to the EU, as the EU also has claims on both. If you want to merge all of them into the EU together, you would do so via France by first putting the UK back into the EU, and then waiting long enough that unification is allowed, usually a year.
The thing is, unlike most of the other European nations, the UK doesn't start off in the EU. So first you have to wait until the diplomatic cooldown has expired and they're allowed to rejoin, then have France / the EU invite them to join the EU Federation, then wait a year, then have the EU invite them to unify. Its definitely not the most friendly UI in the world, but it should be telling you why you can't do the thing you want to do.
There are a lot of counter intuitive things in the game in terms of economies. It seems that investing in anything other than military and funding is pretty much a trap. The AI doesn’t do it and they still have tones of research and better armies.
The other priorities definitely aren't traps, but they can certainly be counter intuitive. I'd say mission control is probably the most valuable of them all. Sure, you can replace it with operations centers, but most nations would be hard pressed to even pay the cash maintenance cost of an operations center with 25 IP in funding, never mind all the other costs of running operations centers. Knowledge would be a good second, because the mid to late game is all about getting enormous amounts of research points to get tech parity with the aliens, and economy comes in there too because GDP per capita is part of the formula for research points.
Boost has its value in the early game but falls off quickly, welfare is important for getting inequality down to control cohesion and unrest, and money from funding (or spoils, if you don't plan to keep the country) is always useful. Unity is the only one I rarely use and even if sometimes gets a few points if I'm struggling to get a nation stuck at 0 resting cohesion out of a death spiral, but it can also be useful if you have a bunch of nations and not enough councilor actions to support them all. So they all have their use in the proper time and place.
Due to how IP and the priorities are handled, the larger the population the better a country is at Economy, Welfare, Knowledge, Unity, and military. Meanwhile, smaller countries do better at Boost, Mission Control, and build army, navy, nuclear weapons, and space defenses. Funding and spoils work pretty similar regardless of size. Basically, if something provide the same discrete item (like .2 boost production or an army) it's more efficient in a smaller nation, if something provides a change to a nation-wide statistic (like knowledge being 200 IP for +1 education and democracy) it's more efficient in larger nations. Something that provides a discrete item of varying size (namely funding and spoils) tends to be about the same regardless of nation size.
So something of a meta strategy right now is to build as much mission control as you can in a bunch of small nations and then unify them, keeping the MC, and then start working on knowledge and economic development to increase your RP output. Meanwhile you probably want one or two countries to focus on military for your faction, building a decent number of armies/navies and going heavy on miltech. Miltech is outrageously expensive, at like 800 IP per point of miltech without any bonuses, so it's really impractical to try to get a bunch of nations up to high tech armies.
One of my starting agents looks like Marco Inaros's sister. Are we 100% sure she isn't on the humanity first faction guys?
Also they have seemed to steamroller Europe with only the UK being contested there. The first alien fleet has arrived and done dick-all as far as I can tell aside from crash, which I presume means I just don't have the right stuff to find them yet.
That last patch made the game perform 100% better on my system. From "almost unplayable" to "ok, this is fine"
I have NZ and Russia, 3/4 Mexico now. Oddly the only one that's been contested is Mexico?
I do hope they enable turning off the UI bounce soon. It's very annoying finding an enemy agent only for the map to scroll away from them.when you pick an agent to do a mission against them.
Phoenix-D on
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
That... doesn't sound correct. The UK isn't a Federation, until you research "Restored Commonwealth" at least; it doesn't start the game as one. Its a Nation with four regions, one of which (Belfast) is claimed by Ireland, and another (Glasgow) which is claimed by Scotland, which doesn't exist at game start.
If you control the executive of the UK, you can cede Belfast to Ireland, since they have a claim, or cede Glasgow to Scotland, which will create Scotland as a "new" independent nation. You can also cede either of them to the EU, as the EU also has claims on both. If you want to merge all of them into the EU together, you would do so via France by first putting the UK back into the EU, and then waiting long enough that unification is allowed, usually a year.
The thing is, unlike most of the other European nations, the UK doesn't start off in the EU. So first you have to wait until the diplomatic cooldown has expired and they're allowed to rejoin, then have France / the EU invite them to join the EU Federation, then wait a year, then have the EU invite them to unify. Its definitely not the most friendly UI in the world, but it should be telling you why you can't do the thing you want to do.
I didn't have Ireland or England before the initial cooldown lifted so some other stuff happened, but they 100% were in the United Kingdom federation when I finally got them. I dunno if the AI put them there or what, but the point is mostly that it was maddening that the game was clear as mud as to why I couldn't invite them into the EU. I was over and through all the various info panels and all I needed was some little note saying nations can't hop from one Federation to another and have to leave the current Federation, do the cooldown, and then enter another Federation to even start the cooldown for Unification.
Anyway, UI-wise, I would really really like it if they would stop the fucking turn processing to tell me the result of every mission as it happens. Just let the turn process through and give me the damn results at the end; I can't change missions mid-turn anyway, so it does me no good at all to have every turn end interrupted multiple times by every agent reporting in.
That... doesn't sound correct. The UK isn't a Federation, until you research "Restored Commonwealth" at least; it doesn't start the game as one. Its a Nation with four regions, one of which (Belfast) is claimed by Ireland, and another (Glasgow) which is claimed by Scotland, which doesn't exist at game start.
If you control the executive of the UK, you can cede Belfast to Ireland, since they have a claim, or cede Glasgow to Scotland, which will create Scotland as a "new" independent nation. You can also cede either of them to the EU, as the EU also has claims on both. If you want to merge all of them into the EU together, you would do so via France by first putting the UK back into the EU, and then waiting long enough that unification is allowed, usually a year.
The thing is, unlike most of the other European nations, the UK doesn't start off in the EU. So first you have to wait until the diplomatic cooldown has expired and they're allowed to rejoin, then have France / the EU invite them to join the EU Federation, then wait a year, then have the EU invite them to unify. Its definitely not the most friendly UI in the world, but it should be telling you why you can't do the thing you want to do.
I didn't have Ireland or England before the initial cooldown lifted so some other stuff happened, but they 100% were in the United Kingdom federation when I finally got them. I dunno if the AI put them there or what, but the point is mostly that it was maddening that the game was clear as mud as to why I couldn't invite them into the EU. I was over and through all the various info panels and all I needed was some little note saying nations can't hop from one Federation to another and have to leave the current Federation, do the cooldown, and then enter another Federation to even start the cooldown for Unification.
Anyway, UI-wise, I would really really like it if they would stop the fucking turn processing to tell me the result of every mission as it happens. Just let the turn process through and give me the damn results at the end; I can't change missions mid-turn anyway, so it does me no good at all to have every turn end interrupted multiple times by every agent reporting in.
Honestly, the whole national policies being tied to research and only explicitly defined country groupings being allowed at all should just be removed entirely. Like most of the ridiculous tech tree, It's complexity for complexity's sake. You should simply be able to federate/unify/split anybody with anybody. You can leave the adjacency bonuses in, but if I want Poland to federate with Australia, I should be allowed to do that.
And the game definitely has an identity crisis between real time and turn based. I agree that if they are doing a hard 2 week cadence with the missions like a turn based game, then the rest of the game should also follow that turn based approach instead of this constant stream of interruptions. I don't need to be stopped and told that a defend mission was complete one day into a turn when there is nothing I can do about it, regardless of the outcome, for another 2 weeks anyway.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
+2
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited October 2022
Alright, I'm burnt out on this.
It just takes so. Fucking. Long. To do anything. Any. Fucking. Thing. Hours every night for most of a week plus the weekend and I have zero fucking clue how I stand and how I'm progressing, but I do know that it takes hours to progress through a year, the drives I can access are dogshit, and a mediocre interplanetary drive is probably 10-15 hours away. 10 or 15 hours of click. Wait. Click. Wait. Click. Wait. Is it normal to have this shitload of invasive alien fauna? Am I supposed to be wasting 40-60% of my agent's time fighting to keep the list of alien fauna back? It's going to take me how fucking long to send a troop ship out to Mars? Am I doomed to failure from something I did ten hours ago? Doomed to failure ten hours from now and I just don't know it yet?
The game overall needs a speed boost desperately. There is just zero fucking benefit to how long all this shit takes and how slowly everything scales or improves, it's really not that strategically complicated enough to justify spending 60+ hours on a single game when 98% of what you'll be doing is tremendously repetitive. Maybe 20 hours would be okay, with 25-30 at the top end and that's if you go ridiculous on researching extra tech. Making stuff take a long subjective time is fine but c'mon, there are definite reasonable limits to how long any of this shit should take.
Like many games of the genre, it really doesn't seem to do much to justify not just being a turn based game.
Yeah, the time it takes to play could probably be cut in half just by committing to making it fully turn-based. Whatever advantage you might get by being able to stop the turn and build something is extremely negligible, may as well just make it so the player can only act on their turn. And turn off the constant damned agent action notifications; you could literally take the actions of every agent and stick it on one single easy-to-read window at the start of the next turn. Same goes for political changes and actions, just turn those into tiles and queue them up on a separate screen at the start of the next turn. While we're at it, give me some damned numbers as to what has changed and why with the territories I have. Even if the game code needs to process that two weeks to keep from choking, whatever, just let the player use that time to manage outposts and ships and whatnot.
But right now, holy shit is the game set up to pointlessly grind away a lot of your time without telling you what's going on.
They definitely need to let us skip a lot of these notifications which are constantly interrupting the flow of the game. I'm glad that you succeeded your "Defend Interests" mission, but even if I cared about that, there's no response I can meaningfully take until the next mission phase anyway, so just shut up and get back to work. And I will never give a shit what my turned councilors are doing; you're just there so that I can hunt down and murder your former friends whenever I feel the need to. And I definitely don't care that Humanity First just overthrew <Insert tiny African nation here>, let me know if its one of mine, otherwise STFU.
*edit*
I think I've figured out what really bothers me about the basic task-assignment process of Terra Inviticta; if I want to put a Councilor in charge of advising a country, and just leave them there "on auto" without any interaction, I still have to assign them the task, wait for them to do it once, and only then can I say "Do this forever, don't bother me again". There's no option to just say "Do this forever", you have to let them do it once, and then have your gameplay interrupted yet again just so that you can tell it "Yeah, okay, keep doing that and stop bothering me". Which seems like a minor thing, but you're going to be doing that a lot. This game is extremely click-heavy, and is in desperate need of a click-ectomy.
Like many games of the genre, it really doesn't seem to do much to justify not just being a turn based game.
Yeah, the time it takes to play could probably be cut in half just by committing to making it fully turn-based. Whatever advantage you might get by being able to stop the turn and build something is extremely negligible, may as well just make it so the player can only act on their turn. And turn off the constant damned agent action notifications; you could literally take the actions of every agent and stick it on one single easy-to-read window at the start of the next turn. Same goes for political changes and actions, just turn those into tiles and queue them up on a separate screen at the start of the next turn. While we're at it, give me some damned numbers as to what has changed and why with the territories I have. Even if the game code needs to process that two weeks to keep from choking, whatever, just let the player use that time to manage outposts and ships and whatnot.
But right now, holy shit is the game set up to pointlessly grind away a lot of your time without telling you what's going on.
It would be pretty funny if the game got a really popular mod called "Short War" that streamlines the gameplay.
I'm really early on in the game but so far I'm enjoying it. I have no idea how I'm doing or what's really happening, but so far that seems rather thematic. I do have a few questions though.
1. How concerned should I be about my countries' economies? Even with >20% investment in economy and nothing in spoils my poorer countries seem to be at best rubberbanding between growth and shrinkage, and my most developed nation Japan seems to have gone steadily down for as long as I've controlled it despite my best efforts.
2. Does it seem like a viable strategy to develop the poorer regions of the world? I really like the idea of unifying Africa or SE Asia and turning it into an economical powerhouse, but I don't know how possible that is.
3. Even the most liberal policies seem to have very little effect on democracy. Are there faster ways to drive it upward? I couped one of own countries for the tutorial hoping that it'd become more democratic, but it only drove its democracy score from 1 to 0 and has only grown to 0.2 in the multiple years following.
4. How dire do the consequences seem to be for not fulfilling the demands for spoils? Is it mainly expressed as unrest or as hidden modifiers?
Like many games of the genre, it really doesn't seem to do much to justify not just being a turn based game.
Yeah, the time it takes to play could probably be cut in half just by committing to making it fully turn-based. Whatever advantage you might get by being able to stop the turn and build something is extremely negligible, may as well just make it so the player can only act on their turn. And turn off the constant damned agent action notifications; you could literally take the actions of every agent and stick it on one single easy-to-read window at the start of the next turn. Same goes for political changes and actions, just turn those into tiles and queue them up on a separate screen at the start of the next turn. While we're at it, give me some damned numbers as to what has changed and why with the territories I have. Even if the game code needs to process that two weeks to keep from choking, whatever, just let the player use that time to manage outposts and ships and whatnot.
But right now, holy shit is the game set up to pointlessly grind away a lot of your time without telling you what's going on.
It would be pretty funny if the game got a really popular mod called "Short War" that streamlines the gameplay.
I'm really early on in the game but so far I'm enjoying it. I have no idea how I'm doing or what's really happening, but so far that seems rather thematic. I do have a few questions though.
1. How concerned should I be about my countries' economies? Even with >20% investment in economy and nothing in spoils my poorer countries seem to be at best rubberbanding between growth and shrinkage, and my most developed nation Japan seems to have gone steadily down for as long as I've controlled it despite my best efforts.
2. Does it seem like a viable strategy to develop the poorer regions of the world? I really like the idea of unifying Africa or SE Asia and turning it into an economical powerhouse, but I don't know how possible that is.
3. Even the most liberal policies seem to have very little effect on democracy. Are there faster ways to drive it upward? I couped one of own countries for the tutorial hoping that it'd become more democratic, but it only drove its democracy score from 1 to 0 and has only grown to 0.2 in the multiple years following.
4. How dire do the consequences seem to be for not fulfilling the demands for spoils? Is it mainly expressed as unrest or as hidden modifiers?
1: Not at all, until you get various techs to improve economic efficiency and counteract climate change putting IP into economy is mostly a waste outside of the biggest countries.
2: Very, but not at the start. You need the aforementioned economy techs as well as some of the unity techs to turn those areas around effectively. Once you learn the game you can generally start this around mid 2030s.
3: The only thing that raises democracy is investing in knowledge and its a slow process. Coups are really bad for democracy.
4: Its really only a bonus to other people coup-ing the nation, don't spoil countries you have an interest in long term.
Like many games of the genre, it really doesn't seem to do much to justify not just being a turn based game.
Yeah, the time it takes to play could probably be cut in half just by committing to making it fully turn-based. Whatever advantage you might get by being able to stop the turn and build something is extremely negligible, may as well just make it so the player can only act on their turn. And turn off the constant damned agent action notifications; you could literally take the actions of every agent and stick it on one single easy-to-read window at the start of the next turn. Same goes for political changes and actions, just turn those into tiles and queue them up on a separate screen at the start of the next turn. While we're at it, give me some damned numbers as to what has changed and why with the territories I have. Even if the game code needs to process that two weeks to keep from choking, whatever, just let the player use that time to manage outposts and ships and whatnot.
But right now, holy shit is the game set up to pointlessly grind away a lot of your time without telling you what's going on.
It would be pretty funny if the game got a really popular mod called "Short War" that streamlines the gameplay.
I'm really early on in the game but so far I'm enjoying it. I have no idea how I'm doing or what's really happening, but so far that seems rather thematic. I do have a few questions though.
1. How concerned should I be about my countries' economies? Even with >20% investment in economy and nothing in spoils my poorer countries seem to be at best rubberbanding between growth and shrinkage, and my most developed nation Japan seems to have gone steadily down for as long as I've controlled it despite my best efforts.
2. Does it seem like a viable strategy to develop the poorer regions of the world? I really like the idea of unifying Africa or SE Asia and turning it into an economical powerhouse, but I don't know how possible that is.
3. Even the most liberal policies seem to have very little effect on democracy. Are there faster ways to drive it upward? I couped one of own countries for the tutorial hoping that it'd become more democratic, but it only drove its democracy score from 1 to 0 and has only grown to 0.2 in the multiple years following.
4. How dire do the consequences seem to be for not fulfilling the demands for spoils? Is it mainly expressed as unrest or as hidden modifiers?
Nearly every mechanic in the game has some kind of check against snowballing, if you pump one "thing" (and this can be anything from earth resources, space resources, investments, etc.) too high without improving other stuff you're going to get a new problem that will have to be solved.
1. Economy will grow your GDP and the per capita GDP of your pops. This will help to make all your future investments stronger, but it takes a long time. You also need to lower inequality with Welfare to prevent unrest from not running spoils, and some military to prevent unrest from growing your nation. Every point of Unrest over 2 drops your economy investment by 10% so that may be what's causing the rubberbanding. Knowledge is also important for improving democracy and research. I think with a low democracy score (China) you can kind of brute force research through sheer number of citizens and authoritarian policies but it's probably not as efficient.
2. I'm still pretty early and experimenting but I think the trick with unifying these nations is to build them up individually (so you can invest in Boost and MC while they are small and it's more efficient to build those up), then tune your orgs and techs to really juice the bonuses to economy and welfare. Once you can crank up the GDP and get inequality down to a reasonable level then you can start working on turning investment to knowledge/democracy and by then the super-nation techs should be available and you'll have a billion or so pops making decent income, a large bank of boost and MC and decent research. Conversely you can go full autocrat, which would give a very resistant to takeover power base and more Money through Spoils (and once you get max cohesion you can start to lower Spoils and invest back into growing the country) but this will reduce science and I think your main power base being the science engine is the way to go.
3. Democracy score increases with Knowledge, you'll need to pump it (and Economy) with high investment for a long time for it to grow.
4. Not fulfilling the Spoils demand increases threat of coups (it gives you a malus to your resistance). I think you can fairly safely ignore it in the early game (like, pre-Mars colonization) because most factions are building their own power base instead of expanding into their rivals, but if you're noticing a lot of activity in a region, like your public support suddenly tanking then someone may be angling to throw a coup. I'm only guessing here but I think it's a sliding scale, so if your oligarchs are demanding 30% investment in Spoils and you only give them 10% then you're negating 1/3 of the penalty. This is entirely conjecture though so use that advice at your own risk.
Thanks a lot for the replies! I've seen a lot of references to building up Boost in smaller nations and it seems like fast development of a space industry base can be a powerful way to get an early game advantage. I suppose then that I might want to look for nations with a relatively high amount of development points (or whatever the top value in the development window is called) compared to their control point cost? Preferably ones that are either already in a union I can take control of or in a region that makes future union possible.
Thanks a lot for the replies! I've seen a lot of references to building up Boost in smaller nations and it seems like fast development of a space industry base can be a powerful way to get an early game advantage. I suppose then that I might want to look for nations with a relatively high amount of development points (or whatever the top value in the development window is called) compared to their control point cost? Preferably ones that are either already in a union I can take control of or in a region that makes future union possible.
The points you spend in countries are called Investment Points and a countries Control Point cost is directly equal to the amount of Investment Points it has multiplied by the amount of uh, Control Point Nodes it has; the different sections of government that you take over separately. I'm not sure if they have a specific name, iirc the game just refers to both as Control Points, its not the clearest. So a nation with 5 IP and only the executive node will cost 5 CP to hold while a nation with 10 IP and 2 nodes will cost 10 CP per node, 20 in total. The amount of nodes a country has is directly related to how many IP it has and will gain/lose nodes as its IP goes up or down.
Boost itself is very valuable at the start of the game but its value falls off quite steeply as you establish space industry, once you've built satellites at each of the inner planets its really only useful if the Aliens blow up everything around a given planet. So while you definitely want to grab a nation with boost/the potential to build boost early you don't necessarily need to worry about keeping it long term, its perfectly viable to grab some place early, pump a bunch of IP into boost, and then abandon the country around the mid 2030s once your space assets get going. This is particularly the case if you are planning on taking territory out of Europe, the USA, India, or China at the start since few other places start with a space program pre-built.
The aliens tried to land an army on Earth only to get blown out of orbit. It's interesting because I've seen the advice to stay under 90 MC and I watched PotatoMcWhiskey's series where he just got wrecked by the aliens after pissing them off to much, but I basically went to total war against the aliens in like the late 20s and have been able to kill everything they try to send to Earth with Cobra missiles. Do my aliens just suck?
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While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
The aliens tried to land an army on Earth only to get blown out of orbit. It's interesting because I've seen the advice to stay under 90 MC and I watched PotatoMcWhiskey's series where he just got wrecked by the aliens after pissing them off to much, but I basically went to total war against the aliens in like the late 20s and have been able to kill everything they try to send to Earth with Cobra missiles. Do my aliens just suck?
I think one of the recent updates increased the aliens' fuck you threshold.
Just remember that half the people you meet are below average intelligence.
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Do not be concerned, this is just a shipment of new moms to Earth for all people who need moms. Carry on with your lives. Think no more of this.
Well I hope they like my welcoming gift.
... is it hugs? Moms like hugs.
They're always active.
So the aliens could be...
Cruel or Indifferent or Tolerant towards Humans
Here for resources or Here for land or Here to flee onwards
Came in Generation Ships or Banished by More powerful rivals
Focused on Capturing Earth or Focused on Securing the other planets
And so on, with a few bonus techs and behaviors for each of the options.
So like, the most agressive aliens would be
Cruel, Here for Land, Banished by more powerful rivals, Focused on Capturing Earth
and in this case, Humanity first is helpful. We need to kill those aliens asap
Whereas you might end up with Aliens who are
Tolerant, Here for Land, Came in Generation Ships, Focused on Securing the Outer planets
who would barely care about the humans and it would only be the actions of Humanity First which set them off, if you learned this first, you'd realize that what you need to do is knock down humanity first.
Like right now I really don't see a difference between Humanity First and the Resistance. Sure on paper one sounds more extreme than the other, but in practice the end result for both is the same; purge the xenos.
However if you had different alien agendas it could easily make things more interesting. ie: The Resistance just wants the aliens to stay out of human affairs, Earth is off limits. What the aliens do in the solar system isn't the Resistance's concern. Whereas Humanity First would want to purge the xenos filth from the solar system regardless of whether or not the aliens come in peace.
This would extend to all the other factions too. The aliens could truly be good and have come to uplift humanity and bring about an era of peace and plenty for all. Which would be good for the Servants or other pro-alien leaning factions.
Maybe the aliens are in system for resources, but are more than willing to share tech with humans to let them do all the work. That would be a plus for the Initiative.
Or if the aliens are escaping from some other threat and are more or less making a pitstop that'd be great for Project Exodus, cause if this super advanced spare faring civilization is running, humanity probably should too.
They could probably keep most if not all of the early game events and challenges too, just give it a different spin. Alien flora? It is there to clean the environment, but if I was a human and I saw alien weeds spreading I'd probably bust out the heavy flamer first and ask questions later. Even if the aliens are good and there to help humanity they may still need to do abductions and the like to get a grasp on the type of species they are dealing with and the problems humans face. Perhaps they have learned that, while distasteful, they still need to infiltrate key positions of power in order to minimize panic among a first contact species.
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It wouldn't be all that different from how the Servants currently operate. Though randomness in difficulty would be the point in my mind. Keeps things a bit fresh and forces players to adjust fire.
For the most part I think every factions' overall goals would largely remain the same. What the specific win conditions would be depending on the alien's goals I am fully confident the Devs could come up with suitable objectives.
In terms of the number of objectives I don't think they'd need to come up with that many. Regardless of the aliens specific intentions they'd fall in to one of three broad categories; hostile, benign, altruistic. Final objectives can be determined from that.
That all said, I don't see any reason why it couldn't be an option a player can pick at the start of a new game if they would rather deal with a known alien agenda.
The way the game is structured, there's a huge potential amount of variation possible in faction gameplay alone. Along with the alien variation you mention, I think it would be great to play as the alien invasion force. You come in with a prepared fleet, all your tech unlocked, but very limited resources. The only research is social and biological and oriented towards controlling/defeating Earth. So you know how small ships show up early on? That early phase for the aliens could be feeling out how/where they can influence human groups and get the most out of infiltration.
Another fun spin on the aliens could be having two alien races in the system at the same time and they're clearly enemies. Then you have to figure out to support one of them or neither of them or play both against each other. Or how about a mode type where the humans are the intruders in the system, but it's just an alien colony right now (that would need a whole new "alien system" map, though). Or a mode where humans and aliens show up in an empty system at the same time and have to fight to colonize it. There's really a mountain of different ways the game could be set up without changing the gameplay code that much.
But holy crap do they need to smooth out the gameplay and interface first. Even just disentangling the nightmare pile of how the tech trees is set up would be a big step. And add graphs! I know that's a bizarre thing to ask for in a game, but they would help so much in understanding the cause/effect of manipulating investment points. Also, I should absolutely not have to keep re-investigating enemy agents to get basic shit like their name and affiliation; I know for a fact that the Resistance has at least one pen and sheet of paper where they can write that shit down so I don't have to investigate the enemy agent stack blindly to find a particular enemy agent.
Effectively the way you would create conflict etc would be that the humans don't know what the aliens want, and the aliens don't understand humans, and the aliens are always going to err towards being a bit 'colonial invadery'. IE, even the friendly ones don't bother to explain to humans why they are doing what they are doing until the humans have certain techs and so on. So there's always going to be a clash between HF and the aliens, and always going to be a desire to keep the servants down if you are the resistance. Because you don't know what the aliens are planning to do, and maybe by the time you do HF has killed 20 of their 'friendship cruisers' and now they are PISSED.
This game has got some deep hooks in me now.
If there was one thing I'd change, it'd be wishing they'd let you pick your two starting advisors. There's no way you're going to expect me to start with two advisors who have no persuasion or administration between them. I'm just going to restart until I get serviceable advisors because the early game is just too important.
Currently DMing: None
Characters
[5e] Dural Melairkyn - AC 18 | HP 40 | Melee +5/1d8+3 | Spell +4/DC 12
I've seen that it's also crucial to get Advise on two agents, as low Loyalty in the mid- and late-game is just serving up high-powered agents to the aliens on a platter and the only way to get Loyalty to a useful level is repeated Advise missions.
Anyway, after several restarts, I think I'm finally heading towards the mid-game in a reasonable way and I've gotta say that this early game needs to speed the fuck up. The early game is very very repetitive and good 3-4 times longer than it has any need to be; the vast vast bulk of the time is spent just growing up your resource production, leveling agents, and slooooowly taking more bites of the map and consolidating them. I see nothing being lost from the early phase being 3-5 hours, tops, and right now it easily runs 3-4 times that long.
I think you mean Inspire.
As far as I know the AI doesn't cheat but its hard to say what happened without more info. The most likely culprit is if India has a resting unrest of above 0 then some of your military spending goes toward lowering unrest rather than improving your military, the lower the government score the more is diverted to reducing unrest. Another is what the US has been putting IP into, you say India has been at 100% military for years but obviously if the US has been running 50% military since the start of the game(and the AI loves to invest in the USA's military) thats a lot more overall than India doing 100% for 4 years. The last I can think of is that whoever controls the US has more boosts to military funding than you do and as far as I know there is no way to actually check what investment bonuses other factions have.
Turns out that because Ireland and the UK are already in the United Kingdom federation, they can't join a different federation. So first you have to split them up and THEN individually add them to the EU federation and THEN wait for the cooldown to unify into the EU.
Ugh, I could've been gunning for the Eurasian union literally hours ago.
If you control the executive of the UK, you can cede Belfast to Ireland, since they have a claim, or cede Glasgow to Scotland, which will create Scotland as a "new" independent nation. You can also cede either of them to the EU, as the EU also has claims on both. If you want to merge all of them into the EU together, you would do so via France by first putting the UK back into the EU, and then waiting long enough that unification is allowed, usually a year.
The thing is, unlike most of the other European nations, the UK doesn't start off in the EU. So first you have to wait until the diplomatic cooldown has expired and they're allowed to rejoin, then have France / the EU invite them to join the EU Federation, then wait a year, then have the EU invite them to unify. Its definitely not the most friendly UI in the world, but it should be telling you why you can't do the thing you want to do.
The other priorities definitely aren't traps, but they can certainly be counter intuitive. I'd say mission control is probably the most valuable of them all. Sure, you can replace it with operations centers, but most nations would be hard pressed to even pay the cash maintenance cost of an operations center with 25 IP in funding, never mind all the other costs of running operations centers. Knowledge would be a good second, because the mid to late game is all about getting enormous amounts of research points to get tech parity with the aliens, and economy comes in there too because GDP per capita is part of the formula for research points.
Boost has its value in the early game but falls off quickly, welfare is important for getting inequality down to control cohesion and unrest, and money from funding (or spoils, if you don't plan to keep the country) is always useful. Unity is the only one I rarely use and even if sometimes gets a few points if I'm struggling to get a nation stuck at 0 resting cohesion out of a death spiral, but it can also be useful if you have a bunch of nations and not enough councilor actions to support them all. So they all have their use in the proper time and place.
Due to how IP and the priorities are handled, the larger the population the better a country is at Economy, Welfare, Knowledge, Unity, and military. Meanwhile, smaller countries do better at Boost, Mission Control, and build army, navy, nuclear weapons, and space defenses. Funding and spoils work pretty similar regardless of size. Basically, if something provide the same discrete item (like .2 boost production or an army) it's more efficient in a smaller nation, if something provides a change to a nation-wide statistic (like knowledge being 200 IP for +1 education and democracy) it's more efficient in larger nations. Something that provides a discrete item of varying size (namely funding and spoils) tends to be about the same regardless of nation size.
So something of a meta strategy right now is to build as much mission control as you can in a bunch of small nations and then unify them, keeping the MC, and then start working on knowledge and economic development to increase your RP output. Meanwhile you probably want one or two countries to focus on military for your faction, building a decent number of armies/navies and going heavy on miltech. Miltech is outrageously expensive, at like 800 IP per point of miltech without any bonuses, so it's really impractical to try to get a bunch of nations up to high tech armies.
Also they have seemed to steamroller Europe with only the UK being contested there. The first alien fleet has arrived and done dick-all as far as I can tell aside from crash, which I presume means I just don't have the right stuff to find them yet.
That last patch made the game perform 100% better on my system. From "almost unplayable" to "ok, this is fine"
I have NZ and Russia, 3/4 Mexico now. Oddly the only one that's been contested is Mexico?
I do hope they enable turning off the UI bounce soon. It's very annoying finding an enemy agent only for the map to scroll away from them.when you pick an agent to do a mission against them.
I didn't have Ireland or England before the initial cooldown lifted so some other stuff happened, but they 100% were in the United Kingdom federation when I finally got them. I dunno if the AI put them there or what, but the point is mostly that it was maddening that the game was clear as mud as to why I couldn't invite them into the EU. I was over and through all the various info panels and all I needed was some little note saying nations can't hop from one Federation to another and have to leave the current Federation, do the cooldown, and then enter another Federation to even start the cooldown for Unification.
Anyway, UI-wise, I would really really like it if they would stop the fucking turn processing to tell me the result of every mission as it happens. Just let the turn process through and give me the damn results at the end; I can't change missions mid-turn anyway, so it does me no good at all to have every turn end interrupted multiple times by every agent reporting in.
Honestly, the whole national policies being tied to research and only explicitly defined country groupings being allowed at all should just be removed entirely. Like most of the ridiculous tech tree, It's complexity for complexity's sake. You should simply be able to federate/unify/split anybody with anybody. You can leave the adjacency bonuses in, but if I want Poland to federate with Australia, I should be allowed to do that.
And the game definitely has an identity crisis between real time and turn based. I agree that if they are doing a hard 2 week cadence with the missions like a turn based game, then the rest of the game should also follow that turn based approach instead of this constant stream of interruptions. I don't need to be stopped and told that a defend mission was complete one day into a turn when there is nothing I can do about it, regardless of the outcome, for another 2 weeks anyway.
It just takes so. Fucking. Long. To do anything. Any. Fucking. Thing. Hours every night for most of a week plus the weekend and I have zero fucking clue how I stand and how I'm progressing, but I do know that it takes hours to progress through a year, the drives I can access are dogshit, and a mediocre interplanetary drive is probably 10-15 hours away. 10 or 15 hours of click. Wait. Click. Wait. Click. Wait. Is it normal to have this shitload of invasive alien fauna? Am I supposed to be wasting 40-60% of my agent's time fighting to keep the list of alien fauna back? It's going to take me how fucking long to send a troop ship out to Mars? Am I doomed to failure from something I did ten hours ago? Doomed to failure ten hours from now and I just don't know it yet?
The game overall needs a speed boost desperately. There is just zero fucking benefit to how long all this shit takes and how slowly everything scales or improves, it's really not that strategically complicated enough to justify spending 60+ hours on a single game when 98% of what you'll be doing is tremendously repetitive. Maybe 20 hours would be okay, with 25-30 at the top end and that's if you go ridiculous on researching extra tech. Making stuff take a long subjective time is fine but c'mon, there are definite reasonable limits to how long any of this shit should take.
Yeah, the time it takes to play could probably be cut in half just by committing to making it fully turn-based. Whatever advantage you might get by being able to stop the turn and build something is extremely negligible, may as well just make it so the player can only act on their turn. And turn off the constant damned agent action notifications; you could literally take the actions of every agent and stick it on one single easy-to-read window at the start of the next turn. Same goes for political changes and actions, just turn those into tiles and queue them up on a separate screen at the start of the next turn. While we're at it, give me some damned numbers as to what has changed and why with the territories I have. Even if the game code needs to process that two weeks to keep from choking, whatever, just let the player use that time to manage outposts and ships and whatnot.
But right now, holy shit is the game set up to pointlessly grind away a lot of your time without telling you what's going on.
I should probably escort this dude out an airlock shouldn't I
*edit*
I think I've figured out what really bothers me about the basic task-assignment process of Terra Inviticta; if I want to put a Councilor in charge of advising a country, and just leave them there "on auto" without any interaction, I still have to assign them the task, wait for them to do it once, and only then can I say "Do this forever, don't bother me again". There's no option to just say "Do this forever", you have to let them do it once, and then have your gameplay interrupted yet again just so that you can tell it "Yeah, okay, keep doing that and stop bothering me". Which seems like a minor thing, but you're going to be doing that a lot. This game is extremely click-heavy, and is in desperate need of a click-ectomy.
It would be pretty funny if the game got a really popular mod called "Short War" that streamlines the gameplay.
I'm really early on in the game but so far I'm enjoying it. I have no idea how I'm doing or what's really happening, but so far that seems rather thematic. I do have a few questions though.
1. How concerned should I be about my countries' economies? Even with >20% investment in economy and nothing in spoils my poorer countries seem to be at best rubberbanding between growth and shrinkage, and my most developed nation Japan seems to have gone steadily down for as long as I've controlled it despite my best efforts.
2. Does it seem like a viable strategy to develop the poorer regions of the world? I really like the idea of unifying Africa or SE Asia and turning it into an economical powerhouse, but I don't know how possible that is.
3. Even the most liberal policies seem to have very little effect on democracy. Are there faster ways to drive it upward? I couped one of own countries for the tutorial hoping that it'd become more democratic, but it only drove its democracy score from 1 to 0 and has only grown to 0.2 in the multiple years following.
4. How dire do the consequences seem to be for not fulfilling the demands for spoils? Is it mainly expressed as unrest or as hidden modifiers?
1: Not at all, until you get various techs to improve economic efficiency and counteract climate change putting IP into economy is mostly a waste outside of the biggest countries.
2: Very, but not at the start. You need the aforementioned economy techs as well as some of the unity techs to turn those areas around effectively. Once you learn the game you can generally start this around mid 2030s.
3: The only thing that raises democracy is investing in knowledge and its a slow process. Coups are really bad for democracy.
4: Its really only a bonus to other people coup-ing the nation, don't spoil countries you have an interest in long term.
Nearly every mechanic in the game has some kind of check against snowballing, if you pump one "thing" (and this can be anything from earth resources, space resources, investments, etc.) too high without improving other stuff you're going to get a new problem that will have to be solved.
1. Economy will grow your GDP and the per capita GDP of your pops. This will help to make all your future investments stronger, but it takes a long time. You also need to lower inequality with Welfare to prevent unrest from not running spoils, and some military to prevent unrest from growing your nation. Every point of Unrest over 2 drops your economy investment by 10% so that may be what's causing the rubberbanding. Knowledge is also important for improving democracy and research. I think with a low democracy score (China) you can kind of brute force research through sheer number of citizens and authoritarian policies but it's probably not as efficient.
2. I'm still pretty early and experimenting but I think the trick with unifying these nations is to build them up individually (so you can invest in Boost and MC while they are small and it's more efficient to build those up), then tune your orgs and techs to really juice the bonuses to economy and welfare. Once you can crank up the GDP and get inequality down to a reasonable level then you can start working on turning investment to knowledge/democracy and by then the super-nation techs should be available and you'll have a billion or so pops making decent income, a large bank of boost and MC and decent research. Conversely you can go full autocrat, which would give a very resistant to takeover power base and more Money through Spoils (and once you get max cohesion you can start to lower Spoils and invest back into growing the country) but this will reduce science and I think your main power base being the science engine is the way to go.
3. Democracy score increases with Knowledge, you'll need to pump it (and Economy) with high investment for a long time for it to grow.
4. Not fulfilling the Spoils demand increases threat of coups (it gives you a malus to your resistance). I think you can fairly safely ignore it in the early game (like, pre-Mars colonization) because most factions are building their own power base instead of expanding into their rivals, but if you're noticing a lot of activity in a region, like your public support suddenly tanking then someone may be angling to throw a coup. I'm only guessing here but I think it's a sliding scale, so if your oligarchs are demanding 30% investment in Spoils and you only give them 10% then you're negating 1/3 of the penalty. This is entirely conjecture though so use that advice at your own risk.
The points you spend in countries are called Investment Points and a countries Control Point cost is directly equal to the amount of Investment Points it has multiplied by the amount of uh, Control Point Nodes it has; the different sections of government that you take over separately. I'm not sure if they have a specific name, iirc the game just refers to both as Control Points, its not the clearest. So a nation with 5 IP and only the executive node will cost 5 CP to hold while a nation with 10 IP and 2 nodes will cost 10 CP per node, 20 in total. The amount of nodes a country has is directly related to how many IP it has and will gain/lose nodes as its IP goes up or down.
Boost itself is very valuable at the start of the game but its value falls off quite steeply as you establish space industry, once you've built satellites at each of the inner planets its really only useful if the Aliens blow up everything around a given planet. So while you definitely want to grab a nation with boost/the potential to build boost early you don't necessarily need to worry about keeping it long term, its perfectly viable to grab some place early, pump a bunch of IP into boost, and then abandon the country around the mid 2030s once your space assets get going. This is particularly the case if you are planning on taking territory out of Europe, the USA, India, or China at the start since few other places start with a space program pre-built.
I think one of the recent updates increased the aliens' fuck you threshold.