KickStarter Terra Invicta - sci-fi grand strategy from Long War mod creators - now available on Early Access

[RobotSquirrel]

why have all that big solar system if we can't play with it? well, because the amount of micro this game requires is beyond retarded.

you know you can play on a smaller map right? there's more than one map.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i know, but why would i?

 

[RobotSquirrel]

i know, but why would i?

it runs better, and has fewer useless asteroids. I'm wondering though without those asteroids how the aliens behave because they generally try to colonize the asteroid belt first before moving onto attacking mars, my thinking is they'll just beeline to mars which could actually make the game harder but that said it would also mean the aliens have fewer resources so it could take them longer to build up.

 

[Jaedar]

the extent of the alien invasion should be customizable. why have all that big solar system if we can't play with it?

I'm kind of assuming I'll use the outer solar system as staging areas/shipyards once I have sufficient ships to defend myself.

Meanwhile, despite me having angered the aliens, it seems they are content with taking their rage out on humanity first by blowing up all their platorms around earth. R00flez! (HF had 2 stations, now 0. I have 12 in earth orbit alone)

Reading all the stuff in this thread about alien armies has also made me decide that china is not just going to be a research farm like india, but will actually invest in armies. I'm still gonna try and fix it though, but I'm content with 50% knowledge investment.

Edit: also is steal project bugged? I would have assumed it gave you a finished project, instead it seems to give you the ability to research it... which you will probably have regardless, since all global techs are shared? I guess you can sometimes skip a prereq but even so...

 

[thesecret1]

How can you manage that though?

Navies. Navies give absolutely massive strategic mobility to your armies, and it does not matter if your armies are stationed next to water or not (though the destination has to be). From England to Yemen in about 15 days, no problem. Aliens take 30 days to disembark, so if you're fast, you can just barely make it, provided the aliens didn't choose some really shit location (fortunately for me, they've been sticking to middle east for now, which is easily accessible by water). By the time alien armies disembark, there's an 8 army doomstack welcome commitee waiting for them.

EDIT: your armies actually do have to be next to water, it turns out. Oh well. Still incredibly useful

 

[Jaedar]

How can you manage that though?

Navies. Navies give absolutely massive strategic mobility to your armies, and it does not matter if your armies are stationed next to water or not (though the destination has to be). From England to Yemen in about 15 days, no problem. Aliens take 30 days to disembark, so if you're fast, you can just barely make it, provided the aliens didn't choose some really shit location (fortunately for me, they've been sticking to middle east for now, which is easily accessible by water). By the time alien armies disembark, there's an 8 army doomstack welcome commitee waiting for them.

Interesting. I've been neglecting navies. Do you need one per army?

Also, I'm rather digging the lore in this game. Just read the transcript of alien interrogation.

Meanwhile, alien structures started popping up on earth, so I started raiding them, and then the ui popped up "councilor, we are detecting increased alien activity in the solar system. Perhaps we should stop antagonizing the aliens for a while?". So I guess I might also be in danger. But I got a lot of exotics from it (even though I don't have many good uses for em yet) so it was probably worthwhile.

 

[thesecret1]

Interesting. I've been neglecting navies. Do you need one per army?

You do. And the country needs to have at least 4 control points to be able to build one. I find them massively important if you want to actually project your force (and you have to, if you wish to prevent aliens establishing themselves). An army without a navy is practically worthless.

Also, I'm rather digging the lore in this game. Just read the transcript of alien interrogation.

I enjoy that those bits are faction-specific. A nice touch. Where a resistance leader is surprised by a hydra regenerating and killing some of his men, Humanity First leader doesn't even know it has that ability prior to autopsy, as they filled the hydra with so much lead it was well and truly dead.

 

[Jaedar]

An army without a navy is practically worthless.

I managed to make the eurasion union quite big without navies . I'm considering dismantling their nukes and gtfoing though, they don't have a lot of use left. I needed them early for boost, then I wanted to keep them to prevent that boost from falling into enemy hands, but at this point everyone has 100s of boost lying around. At the same time, those 30 nukes might be really helpful someday?

I think I might be able to coup the US soon if I tried, except I'm really afraid the aliens are going to hate me for it. But if I managed to coup the us and secure it I'd be golden on earth I think. I'd control the armies of china, india and us, resistence has all of europe locked down... if I then dismantle russias nukes, maybe also give a bunch of stuff independence so the other factions have lots of harmless things to fight over....

 

[Joggerino]

How willing are you all in using nukes against aliens?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

alien administration in... drum roll... china.
game over man, game over.

playing servants is just TOO easy. the aliens are already strong, they don't need further help. there's already the protectorate, if servants were removed from the game i couldn't complain at all. after all, all it takes for them is to grab north korea, pakistan and israel (all of them are turn 1 grabs) and bomb the world to stone age.

 

[Jaedar]

all it takes for them is to grab north korea, pakistan and israel (all of them are turn 1 grabs) and bomb the world to stone age.

I don't think 4 nukes is enough to do that?

How willing are you all in using nukes against aliens?

I'm a bit wary because the game hints that the damage to global GDP is quite high, but I'd certainly prefer nuking the aliens over the aliens taking one of my important countries.

 

[thesecret1]

How willing are you all in using nukes against aliens?

Unwilling. Global damage to GDP hurts you long term, while losing a couple armies is nothing to the aliens. Nukes are pretty much a last resort is everything else fails

 

[RobotSquirrel]

I don't think 4 nukes is enough to do that?

one nuke is enough to reduce global GDP by about 1-2K. 5-10 Nukes give the nuclear winter event which kills 50% of the world population, the graphic is glitching out for it though so its hard to tell if Earth is in nuclear winter or not.
Nukes are bad. You'd only consider using nukes once your space logistics surpass that of Earth and even then you'd only be using it to 1.Save your campaign from certain failure or 2.A fun and dramatic conclusion to a disastrous campaign like I did. Otherwise its not worth the investment. You'd be better off instead using the money to build nukes for upping your miltech level so that your armies perform just as good as a nuke.

As the servants sure beeline for a nuclear power and sabotage everyone but I found it makes for a very boring game as you're just waiting around for the aliens to finally put humanity out of its misery. The servants are fairly boring to play because they can end the game in the first year, I think it'd be nice if there were a defcon system so that you had to justify the use of nukes first and then have to scrap laws before they become available at this point its too easy to just go ahead and do it. So it might make more sense to go North Korea or Iran as Servants because they won't have any laws prohibiting nuclear weapons, everyone else however would. It needs to be more difficult to do.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

oh my, the tech tree is sooooo baaaaad, hiding so much stuff. i just can't find where the upgraded solar panels are hiding.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

It'd be nice if they'd just have it so you could minimize and maximize the techs you wanted instead of having to load the entire damn tree each time. That initial lag because its loading an entire list of data each time is annoying it just shouldn't be happening if they implemented their lists in a way that doesn't induce lag. Ie. Loading the list in segments or loading the list over time rather than all at once. Can tell you what they're doing wrong, they're calling a LoadFullTechTree() and there's a loop in that which goes through all the techs and assigns them a button, that loop is causing the game to freeze until it reaches the end of the list. Pretty easy to fix just don't run the entire loop at once, split the loop into chunks.

 

[Jaedar]

one nuke is enough to reduce global GDP by about 1-2K. 5-10 Nukes give the nuclear winter event which kills 50% of the world population, the graphic is glitching out for it though so its hard to tell if Earth is in nuclear winter or not.

For me I got the achievement of nuclear winter even though no nukes had fired. I hope it didn't trigger the GDP/population drop (doesn't look like it for pop at least). 5-10 to trigger nuclear winter seems very extreme, I guess you really are supposed to dismantle every single one.

oh my, the tech tree is sooooo baaaaad, hiding so much stuff. i just can't find where the upgraded solar panels are hiding.

Yeah, the search needs to include some kind of "where can I find the next tier of this module/tech I already have". I have no idea where to find t2 mission control for example. T2 solar is solar array, but I can't recall where you get it.

 

[thesecret1]

Aliens seem to be doing pretty poorly against massed layer defence. Basically, they have a pretty limited amount of ammo and shoot things that can be shot down. And layered defense modules are really good at shooting down incoming projectiles – I just had a mothership come and shoot its load at a space station with 4 of those modules and then die an inglorious death as it slowly tried to turn its massive bulk and GTFO while being shot by thousands of low damage laser shots. It failed and got destroyed, despite being eastimated at having twice the military power of the station.

 

[Raapys]

Nuclear winter also seems triggerable by volcano eruption events, in which case it doesn't cause much damage to the world. I had one happen a few months in.

There are some tricks to the tech tree I've found. Obviously click the View Full Tree button, then search for the tech you need. Left-clicking the tech node highlights all connected techs going all the way back and all the way forward. Right-clicking it opens a sub-tree which shows only the branches relevant to that specific node, which is quite a useful view if you're looking for how to reach a specific mid or late-game tech. To avoid wasting research points, picking a target tech from the end of the tech tree and working backwards to find the first techs you need to research seems to be a wise approach, since there are quite a lot of parallel paths that are probably better done to the exclusion of others(eg fission vs fusion vs antimatter reactors and drives).

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

still "solar array" is hidden, it doesn't appear anywhere. i wanted to create some trap bases, with just defenses, to see how they'd do, if they could bait fleets away from ground bases.

 

[Jaedar]

The fucking automated X are the opposite of what I wanted: increased mission control cost for lower resource upkeep. And of course the codex article for this is unlocked AFTER you get the research. Billions of R&D budget down the drain...

I tried to unrest the USA again, but it's impossible, so instead I started throwing 20% crackdowns at it... which succeeded but then the ai instantly took it back via fiat and now the aliens are mad. But fuck it, if losing a few space stations is the price to pay for disabling the US's nukes and partitioning it into 6 substates then that is a price I am willing to pay.

Edit: swiped control, immediately reversed every single foreign policy decision they had. We'll see how many servant countries survive without the umbrella of US armies to defend. Need to hold it for 178 days before I can give texas, california, etc independece tho I think.

 

[pickmeister]

I never played any 4X games as their mechanics always seemed too abstract and unrealistic. Too tabletop like.
I played CK2, Vicky 2, and Imperator. They’re a bit better in this regard but always seemed to lack something.

How is Terra Invicta? Does it have anything to offer? Is it immersive, well thought out simulator?

 

[Raapys]

still "solar array" is hidden, it doesn't appear anywhere. i wanted to create some trap bases, with just defenses, to see how they'd do, if they could bait fleets away from ground bases.

It's definitely appearing here. Are you sure you're in the 'view full tech tree' mode? The normal mode just shows you global techs or some such.

 

[Jaedar]

I am independencing stuff from america right now. Quite funny, as even though I only hold 1/3 of kwa I get 100% of the new nations. I might actually decide to keep one of the remnants as a military farm.

And just as I write that the servants decide fun time is over and instacouped (good thing I tripled up on independence granting this turn) the american executive and one of my sacred indian control points. This instacouping feels kinda bullshit (I have even researched lots of anti alien subversion tech). Although it might be related to being vastly over admin cap with "aliens just grab stuff randomly" being the penalty once you go more than 50 over cap or something?
Current USA remnant existence:
Alaska, north and south west coast are each their own principality. I abandoned all of them.
Center and south is american dominion (I might keep this one for army farming, it's "only" 100 points total in admin, hopefully less after I ditch minneapolis to the natives)
Northeast also independent.
(minor gui spoiler)

Spoiler

Getting interrupted is a problem actually, I wanted to bring america down to 3 points so it can't build navies (I think creating the republic of texas will do it, if not I'd have to find a way to cede washington to the dominion). Still, I cut the servants terrestrial armies in more than half, and got rid of all their nukes. A good haul, and since the remains of USA is pretty tiny (60 CP total) it should not be hard to take it over again and finish dividing it.

 

[thesheeep]

Is it immersive, well thought out simulator?

I would say it potentially is.
But a lot more work would have to go in, especially into the UI.

Not sure how far the devs consider their game to be, but to me it feels like an early access of something that could be really great.

Either way, though, one thing it does nail is uniqueness - I don't think I've played anything quite like it.
The closest might have been Shadow Empire, but that was an unreadable, (thanks to UI) barely playable spreadsheet.

 

[thesecret1]

And just as I write that the servants decide fun time is over and instacouped (good thing I tripled up on independence granting this turn) the american executive and one of my sacred indian control points. This instacouping feels kinda bullshit (I have even researched lots of anti alien subversion tech). Although it might be related to being vastly over admin cap with "aliens just grab stuff randomly" being the penalty once you go more than 50 over cap or something?

Getting over CP cap gives enemies bonus to success on all missions against you, and it scales really fast with each point over. In my experience, so long as I am within the cap or like up to 5 points over, nobody even tries attacking my control points (all I gotta handle is them trying to do public campaigns on my turf and shit like that). But if I go 20 or higher, everyone starts purging away at me.