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

[MadMaxHellfire]

We'll see when the game actually releases.

trust me, i'm an engineer. with epic skills and epic gear.
a game like this needs a huge following and/or a huge memetastic potential. this game has neither, it's a patchwork of needlessly overly complex formulas and barebone systems, it's been barely worked on (last patch two weeks ago, while they should be daily considered the extremely poor conditions the code is in) and by the look of it it seems considered by the devs "feature complete" while the game desperately needs not to.
if not even the codex keeps playing and talking about it, the last bastion of the monocled gaming, this is on the way of being forgotten fast and hard.

 

[Jaedar]

a game like this needs a huge following and/or a huge memetastic potential. this game has neither, it's a patchwork of needlessly overly complex formulas and barebone systems, it's been barely worked on (last patch two weeks ago, while they should be daily considered the extremely poor conditions the code is in) and by the look of it it seems considered by the devs "feature complete" while the game desperately needs not to.

Ehhh, I guess we'll see, but I'm taking the radio silence as "we're working on larger overhauls instead of fixing critical bugs and minor usability improvements".

if not even the codex keeps playing and talking about it, the last bastion of the monocled gaming, this is on the way of being forgotten fast and hard.

I mean, I did one playthrough, like 100 hours long. I think that's fine performance, this whole "constant buzz or it's shit" is kinda stupid. The smart money is probably waiting for a more polished version, which makes sense.

 

[Jaedar]

I do think random is bad, but I also think each faction have premade starting councilors would be good, to help ease you into their various playstyles.

Premade is not appropriate for this kinda game methinks, which is why I think it would make more sense to let you just recruit your two first councillors for free, instead. Maybe as some toggle for newbs or tutorial mode.

I think it makes sense lorewise (you can always replace them). HF has some guerilla warfare ideology going on, makes sense if they start with a commando. Academy by their name you'd think they'd start with either a scientist or an astronaut (who delivered them ISS). Initiative should get a mogul, and so on.

Starting with recruitment would just make the factions more homogeneous as you'd always want to pick the same councilors for the initial landgrab.

 

[Jaedar]

Since MadMaxHellfire is upset we don't talk about his favorite game enough:
There's new patch notes

Spoiler

0.3.41

- Fix fleet resupply operation not processing correctly (new bug in .40)
- Improved Maintenance Procedures properly decreases chance of Cascading Failure instead of increasing

0.3.40

Gameplay/Content

- Added nation of Patagonia, project to unlock, and claims on Neuquen (capital) and Santiago
- Greater India now adds claim on Myanmar
- West African Community project now grants Nigeria claims. Nigerian Confederation now requires WAC (and grants more Nigeria claims).
- Slavic Commonwealth renamed the Intermarium and adds Ukraine, Baltics, Belraus, Hungary, Finland and Romania to its claims
- fleets can use combat acceleration in pursuits
- combats will start 250 to 500 km further apart to allow for more initial maneuver before firing. fleets defending habs will start at 100 mps instead of 500. Stopgap fix
- Added Repair and Resupply fleet operation, combining both into a single operation.
- You may not disband armies or disarm nukes in a nation until executive power is consolidated
- added more AI emphasis on mission control, less on boost and military
- regional defenses will no longer just function as anti-occupation/anti-megafauna forces; they will now fire against enemy armies that are fleeing, and armies fighting other armies
- wars will now track last date of hostile action (involving armies or nuclear weapons); AI will now start to recognize stalemated situations
- Annexing can put nations on the cusp of revolution but not put them over the top by themselves
- alien nation annexing other nations will see reduction in democracy based unrest increase based on servant public opinion proportion
- game will track claims added that aren't from bilats but instead from annexation. A successful succession roll will give primacy to claims added from bilats than those that aren't
- added handling for alien nation nuclear arsenal on AN destruction. Nukes will either be transferred to a successor nation with a nuclear program (high chance), add to loose nukes (very small chance), or destroyed (low chance if any successor nations have a nuclear program, otherwise very high chance)
- Army AI will pull back during civil wars at home
- Added small damage randomization during army combat
- Improved Hydroponics Bay and Farm output
- Nerfed Research Campus, costs an MC now and has 200 crew. we will designate a hate zone somewhere for this change, but producing 1000/research a day in the mid-30s is far too much
- Destroy Hab operation is no longer an atrocity
- Atrocities for bombardment no longer trigger during individual FireMissions. They instead now trigger at bombardment start, when against civilian targets (regions, launch facilities, mission control facilities). Exception: Sufficient damage to regions directly can still trigger an atrocity via usual Damage Region method.
- A nation now must be at war before its space facilities can be targeted by a human fleet for bombardment (like armies)
- Bombing launch facilities and mission control centers on Earth from orbit is an atrocity
- Atrocities for attacking habs now work on a module-by-module basis. Most modules (and entire habs) there are no consequences to destroy at any time. Some modules count as an atrocity to destroy if you are in an inhabited region of space (50000 pop, so mostly just in the Earth-Luna system). Some modules -- generally hospitals and tourist facilities -- are always an atrocity to destroy. These will be tracked individually if you blow up an entire hab.
- If after regime change a nation is only colony regions, those regions will declare independence if able.
- reduce the money and research gain from unused mission control
- added ~30 new org icons
- added new project and org from backer

UI
- You may now set non-adjacent destinations for your armies. The multi-region path itself is currently invisible. We are still working on this visualization for a future patch.
- Added operation to set a homeport for your fleet. This will be the default transfer destination when you aren't parked there (and that's all it is).
- Added transfer option to automatically initiate repair and resupply if arriving at a friendly hab that can do at least one of those things.
- Updated Combat Tutorial to include the new lateral controls and burn hotkey rebind.
- transfer UI will display ESTIMATED ability to pursue an enemy fleet you are considering intercepting
- Split fleet UI has a little more detail now about ships

Bugfixes
A
- fix Deep Space Telescope not triggering for Exodus. Will fix stuck saves.
- Fixed 2 "PlanMissions" crashes introduced in 0.39 when a faction does a crazy Ivan on itself but it has no valid targets for the missions
- Bugfix #2950: Old saves sometimes include fleets that re-use the same trajectory (because they have the same flight path). That caused a slew of bugs, so we now copy the trajectory for each fleet. The code to update the save (copy the trajectory) was running too early, before the fleet had a visualizer, which would cause it to crash. That's been fixed.
- Bugfix #2951: When a fleet is intercepting a destroyed enemy fleet, it now goes into a temporary orbit, instead of crashing the game. Bugfixes (related to #@2951): Prevented various crash bugs caused by inconsistent states in old saves.
- Fixed case where targeting tool was showing no candidate destinations, potentially leading to a UI crash
- Attempt fix issue of region ownership being duplicated during breakaways, led to crashes
- Reduced size of fleet screen render textures to reduce Vram impact.
- Moved RepairPotentialInvalidTrajectoryFleetReference() earlier in the fleet initialization. A fleet with a bad trajectory was causing an NRE when initializing its visualization.
- Fixed a crash when a fleet with no armor on one facing attempts to repair
- Added some save-repair and logging for phantom fleets existing after combat (leading to crashes)
- Fix a crash when you tell a turned councilor to resign and they abort their mission, report it to you, and you hit "take me there"
- Fix a crash clicking a dummy councilor list item in the faction intel screen when a faction is out of councilors

B
- Fix several timing issues related to bombardment. At high time compression bombing damage was fully processing while counterfire was stuck in the queue; when counterfire finally processed it found the defense module was already destroyed by 6-12 hours of bombardment. Worked on bombardment visualizations.
- rework of conditions for neutralize nation goal, and several steps to make sure it gets turned off. It appears this goal was lingering when it should have been discarded after faction wars and causing at least some of the problems with the AI trashing nations.
- fix automated bases not initializing with correct core module
- Fix for 2900 - Fixed a bug caused by AI trade values not being cleared when finishing a trade, causing the values to be carried into the next trade..
- Using index speed controls now respects the speed limit when camera is following an object orbiting a spacebody. Prevents rapid screen flashing.
- Fix for combat ambient sfx persisting indefinitely when loading a save game while focused on an army at war while sfx is playing
- Fix for radiator audio persisting indefinitely after combat or when loading a save
- fix (again, maybe for reals this time) threat monitor sitting on top of UIs on 16:10 AR
- fix some AI end combat voting settings overriding each other and not displaying properly
- Having a hab in combat should no longer result in draws or enemy wins when the other side flees or is totally destroyed and the hab is disabled or a noncombatant.
- DesignShip() : Do not use obsoleted parts unless there is no other choice.
- Attempt fix issue of space defenses priority becoming available not forcing recalculation of priority proportions
- fixed bug where drives weren't receiving minimal repairs (to 5% function) after combat
- Fix issue when regime change of a nation in multiple caused region transfers to non-allies of the nation causing the region change
- fix Chevron formation pattern
- Turning power on to a combat module on a hab with an enemy fleet docked with now trigger combat. Also changed check on hab module completion to this check.
- You will no longer dock with an enemy hab after combat if any combat modules survived on the hab
- Player habs should not repower things on session load. (This is a stopgap fix. Initial intention is that players would not be allowed to turn off critical occasional-but-critical use defensive modules, which is what the game is trying to enforce here. This kind of micromanagement isn't intended gameplay.)

C
- fix farm water/volatiles values in the UI
- fix spelling on a couple of internal variables that no player ever sees because I just can't stand to see it spelled "persuit" Ben, seriously, how are you misspelling things in parts of the game you aren't even working on; no I don't care if it's Tau's code ... fine, if you're leaving I hope it's to go buy a dictionary
- "Center" not "centre" my dear colleagues; this game speaks 'Murican. Also it's "theater" not "theatre."

Nerfed Research Campus, costs an MC now and has 200 crew.
 we will designate a hate zone somewhere for this change, but producing 1000/research a day in the mid-30s is far too much.

So the game is going to get a lot harder. But the space science was kinda crazy, so I think it is good change. I guess this will make india/china way stronger since I've seen some people get crazy science from them by investing in their GDP.

 

[SunKing]

The player count did drop when Victoria 3 was released.

 

[Demo.Graph]

- Greater India now adds claim on Myanmar
- Slavic Commonwealth renamed the Intermarium and adds Ukraine, Baltics, Belraus, Hungary, Finland and Romania to its claims
- You may not disband armies or disarm nukes in a nation until executive power is consolidated
- regional defenses will no longer just function as anti-occupation/anti-megafauna forces; they will now fire against enemy armies that are fleeing, and armies fighting other armies
- Annexing can put nations on the cusp of revolution but not put them over the top by themselves
- alien nation annexing other nations will see reduction in democracy based unrest increase based on servant public opinion proportion

Adding these to the general direction of the game development, I think that devs went full Paradox.

 

[Jaedar]

- Greater India now adds claim on Myanmar
- Slavic Commonwealth renamed the Intermarium and adds Ukraine, Baltics, Belraus, Hungary, Finland and Romania to its claims
- You may not disband armies or disarm nukes in a nation until executive power is consolidated
- regional defenses will no longer just function as anti-occupation/anti-megafauna forces; they will now fire against enemy armies that are fleeing, and armies fighting other armies
- Annexing can put nations on the cusp of revolution but not put them over the top by themselves
- alien nation annexing other nations will see reduction in democracy based unrest increase based on servant public opinion proportion

Adding these to the general direction of the game development, I think that devs went full Paradox.

What does going full paradox mean?
I actaully missed regional defences firing against enemy armies, that's a huge buff to defensive warfare.

 

[Demo.Graph]

What does going full paradox mean?

Strange gameplay mechanics, irredeemably low general quality, sjw topics imputations everywhere.

I actaully missed regional defences firing against enemy armies, that's a huge buff to defensive warfare.

Regional defenses are another instance of slider-based mechanic that I can tolerate as a placeholder, not as a core gameplay feature.
If I wanted to watch sliders slide, I would've launched Democracy. It's at least kinda fun in there.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

his favorite game

it's not, but i felt it was close to grandeur and i wanted it to succeed (like for pretty much every game ever. why would i want my hobby to suck?). something that's never gonna happen, and this makes me sad.

 

[thesheeep]

But why Finland tho? Slovakia and/or Czech Republic would make more sense.

In truth, everyone here is just a slav in disguise.

 

[Malakal]

- Slavic Commonwealth renamed the Intermarium and adds Ukraine, Baltics, Belraus, Hungary, Finland and Romania to its claims

Intermarium being formable makes sense.

But why Finland tho? Slovakia and/or Czech Republic would make more sense.

The idea of Intermarium is to guard against Germany and Russia, it could also include multiple Balkan nations (Bulgaria, Greece, Yugo area).

 

[thesecret1]

- Slavic Commonwealth renamed the Intermarium and adds Ukraine, Baltics, Belraus, Hungary, Finland and Romania to its claims

Intermarium being formable makes sense.

But why Finland tho? Slovakia and/or Czech Republic would make more sense.

The idea of Intermarium is to guard against Germany and Russia, it could also include multiple Balkan nations (Bulgaria, Greece, Yugo area).

Too bad it's gonna get merged under EU in one year's time in this game, and under Eurasian Federation the year after. The merging stuff makes all these things pretty pointless, it's all gonna end up being a couple superblobs, because it's the only viable way to play

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

i absolutely *love* how when speaking of strategies all the people on retardit answer "it's perfectly viable if you exploit this and that, cheat there and there, and move these 14 capitals 10 times each, but only if the ai doesn't this, this, this, this, this, this and this, which it happened to me once in a million games which means it always happens".

 

[thesecret1]

i absolutely *love* how when speaking of strategies all the people on retardit answer "it's perfectly viable if you exploit this and that, cheat there and there, and move these 14 capitals 10 times each, but only if the ai doesn't this, this, this, this, this, this and this, which it happened to me once in a million games which means it always happens".

Why even go on Reddit? Of course all the opinions you'll get there will be retarded shit and dev dicksucking; it wouldn't be reddit otherwise

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Why even go on Reddit?

where else?

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Why even go on Reddit?

where else?

Resetera ofc

 

[Grotesque]

Is there a bug with the "layered defense array" where it's not shooting at ships that are bombarding from orbit?

It worked fine for me shooting from planets, but when a small ship attacks one of my base on an asteroid, the array is not shooting back.
I have researched IR lasers

 

[Jaedar]

Is there a bug with the "layered defense array" where it's not shooting at ships that are bombarding from orbit?

Could be. But orbital bombardment also works really weirdly where the attacker gets one free volley off, and if that volley takes out your defenses then they never get a chance to fire back.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Its bugged atm when time is over >>> speed

 

[Grotesque]

Is there a bug with the "layered defense array" where it's not shooting at ships that are bombarding from orbit?

Could be. But orbital bombardment also works really weirdly where the attacker gets one free volley off, and if that volley takes out your defenses then they never get a chance to fire back.

I've loaded and replayed the scenario.

The second time the array still not fired, the last time it was the one destroyed first and just gave up.

If de aliens decide to attack my asteroid bases, I could just abandon to play right now because they pound my ass and attack me non-stop and without resources it's game over

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

the bug is about shooting back. once hopefully fixed, the intended behaviour is that bombarders still are free to oneshot your bases if they bring enough luck/firepower.
this feels more and more like neocron's development: the more they go forward, the more they completely ruin the game by showing how inept they are.

 

[Jaedar]

If de aliens decide to attack my asteroid bases, I could just abandon to play right now because they pound my ass and attack me non-stop and without resources it's game over

T2 Bases have waaay stronger defences. Also, consider visible lasers?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

T2 Bases have waaay stronger defences.

doesn't matter, you can have every slot filled with battlestations but when the bombardment starts you could lose them all anyway. i did my experiments, point defenses absorb damage as well as battlestations, absolutely no point in having anything more expensive than them. it's a matter of either false math, you see numbers but the mechanics is just not there, or for some on the countless bugs it doesn't work, and the result is the same.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

Hardened habs (25% less dmg from bombardment) and at least layered defences for more hp does make a difference. Point defences are shit

 

[Grotesque]

the more they completely ruin the game by showing how inept they are.

I don't know how inept they are or not but these guys managed to make a game that gives me the chills like X-com: Terror from the Deep did back in the day.
So at least they they did this right. The rest are technicalities.

^The Salamander alien from Terra Invicta is straight up this guy!