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

[Mortmal]

43 hours later, I am still not mastering everything. I wonder how to make a really powerful ship while my layered defense on the station gets 500 combat units each, my battleship gets only a meager 40. Then the game is clearly favoring turtling; it's really hard to invade big nations. China is almost impossible without three times the amount they have, and it's quite realistic all in all. The game is pretty great, and it's finally a competitor to Paradox games. Plus, I paid barely the price of one of their game DLCs.

 

[Jaedar]

43 hours later, I am still not mastering everything. I wonder how to make a really powerful ship while my layered defense on the station gets 500 combat units each, my battleship gets only a meager 40. Then the game is clearly favoring turtling; it's really hard to invade big nations. China is almost impossible without three times the amount they have, and it's quite realistic all in all. The game is pretty great, and it's finally a competitor to Paradox games. Plus, I paid barely the price of one of their game DLCs.

Yeah, stations are crazy good. And they upgrade their weapons for free when you tech up. For land invasions they only really favor turtling if you invade mountainous regions.

 

[Mortmal]

43 hours later, I am still not mastering everything. I wonder how to make a really powerful ship while my layered defense on the station gets 500 combat units each, my battleship gets only a meager 40. Then the game is clearly favoring turtling; it's really hard to invade big nations. China is almost impossible without three times the amount they have, and it's quite realistic all in all. The game is pretty great, and it's finally a competitor to Paradox games. Plus, I paid barely the price of one of their game DLCs.

Yeah, stations are crazy good. And they upgrade their weapons for free when you tech up. For land invasions they only really favor turtling if you invade mountainous regions.

What I've seen are invasions, most often impossible. The AI sends one tank at a time, and the regional defenses are enough to take it. Likewise, when you invade, you better have a lot of divisions, as you lose control very fast. Orbital strikes help a lot, but I haven't seen the AI doing it either. One thing it does, and it's a really unfair mechanism, is when you are doing too well it instantly grabs control of your countries. For example, I was warring against Servant China with India and making progress, then instantly, it switched my leadership in India, making it almost impossible to take the points back. Then, most of my control points were gone instantly, the army control gone just like that despite having councillors on watch.Is there even a way to prevent it ? I assume its cause of alien agents hard to detect, and even harder to assassinate.

 

[asfasdf]

Just put a lot of plasma guns in every ship, instant win.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Is there even a way to prevent it ?

uninstall.exe.
welcome to terra invicta.

 

[eXalted]

Is this one of those threads where everyone has 1000+ hours playtime and can't wait to scream how much they hate the game?

 

[Mortmal]

Is this one of those threads where everyone has 1000+ hours playtime and can't wait to scream how much they hate the game?

Only spent 49 hours in the last three days, i am not qualified yet to tell how much i hate. But this sounds like it, 100% worth the purchase. Everyone is welcome to try and rage too.

 

[Crayll]

It has a ton of flaws, but I can't think of much else with this kind of gameplay. I got my money's worth out of it, if it has a full release at some point with more features and things fixed I'll be even happier.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

wait, people really *play* space battles? i was dead sure they were just a practical prank pulled on players. no one in his sane mind would consider that "a game", let alone enjoyable.

Later on when i get decent tech and make a proper bigass ship i play each battle and masturbate

 

[Storyfag]

Is this one of those threads where everyone has 1000+ hours playtime and can't wait to scream how much they hate the game?

Only spent 49 hours in the last three days, i am not qualified yet to tell how much i hate. But this sounds like it, 100% worth the purchase. Everyone is welcome to try and rage too.

You have to complete it seven times...

 

[Mortmal]

wait, people really *play* space battles? i was dead sure they were just a practical prank pulled on players. no one in his sane mind would consider that "a game", let alone enjoyable.

Later on when i get decent tech and make a proper bigass ship i play each battle and masturbate

Though, too, but it's not the way to play. In fact, you need to attack the surveillance ships very early, with your shitty ships; otherwise, for each abduction, they get a bonus when making hostile ops against you. Seeing the huge combat rating of those ships, I expected to lay low until I got the tech, but no, after 40 hours and going into the middle game, you see you are completely fucked and have to restart.
Of course the tutorial never tell you that. At least you can read the 300 pages manual..Oh wait there's no manual.

 

[asfasdf]

If you keep attacking the aliens early they will obliterate all your colonies.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

wait, people really *play* space battles? i was dead sure they were just a practical prank pulled on players. no one in his sane mind would consider that "a game", let alone enjoyable.

Later on when i get decent tech and make a proper bigass ship i play each battle and masturbate

Though, too, but it's not the way to play. In fact, you need to attack the surveillance ships very early, with your shitty ships; otherwise, for each abduction, they get a bonus when making hostile ops against you. Seeing the huge combat rating of those ships, I expected to lay low until I got the tech, but no, after 40 hours and going into the middle game, you see you are completely fucked and have to restart.
Of course the tutorial never tell you that. At least you can read the 300 pages manual..Oh wait there's no manual.

Yeah, realized that after a 3rd failed playthrough. Made some rustbuckets and managed to down their surveillance ship to boost my research.
After that every playthrough became easier

 

[Riel]

43 hours later, I am still not mastering everything. I wonder how to make a really powerful ship while my layered defense on the station gets 500 combat units each, my battleship gets only a meager 40. Then the game is clearly favoring turtling; it's really hard to invade big nations. China is almost impossible without three times the amount they have, and it's quite realistic all in all. The game is pretty great, and it's finally a competitor to Paradox games. Plus, I paid barely the price of one of their game DLCs.

Some of my thoughts on Space tactics.

First a review on Weapons:

• Laser: precise but hits like a pea-shooter at medium range, only useful as short range weapon but mostly as Point defence against enemy missiles and magnetic weapons.
• Railguns tier 1 and 2: Hits like a truck but they are so slow they don't hit almost anything but the largest alien ship, lighter ships will simply dodge them. Also moderately vulnerable to enemy point defence
• Railguns tier 3 and Coilguns: Faster muzzle speed allows them to hit most alien ships above Corvette size, they also hit like a truck, moderately vulnerable to alien PD.
• Missiles: Slow but they can correct course to intercept their targets so they are pretty reliable to hit target if they are not destroyed by enemy PD, they are extremely vulnerable to PD btw. Also come with very limited ammo limiting severely their usefulness
• Torpedos: In theory they are larger missiles but due to them being slower and scarcer than missiles while being just as vulnerable to PD as them they are mostly useless, with the exception maybe of nuclear torpedoes, they are very hard to hit with but when they do they are insta-delete so they have a niche role if you have nothing better available to fight big ships such as Alien tranports.
• Plasma: Plasma is a projectile weapon but its ultra fast muzzle velocity helps it connect almost 100% of the time, unfortunately it's a weak weapon. That said it doesn't suffer from the damage decay issue of lasers and it's immune to PD so it can hit weakly but noticeably up to 800 km range, so it's a good weapon to attack enemy light ships.
• Particle: More than short range it's a melee weapon, I suppose you can use it effectively in early skirmishes, but later during fleet on fleet engagements it's unpractical, do as if t doesn't exist.

With all that said my fleet composition is this:

• Core ships: Battleships with 2 Laser PD, 2 Hull 2slot railguns and 1 Nose Railgun
• Budget Core ship: Destroyer with Nose Railgun and 2 Laser PD or 1 PD + hull coil.
• Escort: Monitor 4 Laser PD
• Missile Ships: Monitor 4 light and abundant missiles, for example Viper.
• Later on when I get plasma I get rid of the missile boats and instead use Plasma weapons against light ships. Just be mindful they are not exactly heavy hitters so use large plasma weapons to minimize those situation when your hit power is smaller than target's armor.
• Do note between 60% to 90% are core ships, depends on alien fleet composition and the need for extra PD and missile/plasma ships to deal with light alien ships.

How to fight:

• Form in a Compact High Wall with heavies in the centre.
• Group all core ships in a single group.
• Group all missile ships in another group.
• Reduce initial speed so the battle flows slower
• Maintain formation at all times, all the controls you need for your core ships are select target and padlock so you point your nose at the closest enemy target which happens to be both the most dangerous and easy to hit for your railguns.
• Look at enemy list of ships and focus fire the closest ship larger than a Corvette in 800 km range with your core group of ships, you can try your luck against lighter ships if they get <500km range
• If some pesky light ships flanks your group launch a missile volley at it, those ships are usually isolated and have no PD, so they are easy targets for your missiles.
• The worst alien enemy ship are corvettes with plasma weapons, you PD does nothing against them and when they flank you and start hitting at your ship's sides they take serious damage
• Other than that provided you have a big enough fleet with abundant PD you can take on very large alien fleets that have Fleet Power far above your own.

On the topic of Fleet Power: it values very hugely acceleration and dV, the reasoning is sound, ships with low dV can't move far away and ships with low acceleration can't engage enemy fleets, while that sucks to attack faraway alien bases or to try and clear earth's orbit of alien ships it means nothing if you just keep annoying the aliens so it is them who will be attacking you, so a dV in the 12-20ks range with any acceleration is just enough. Enemy fleets will suffer attrition from your coilguns so provided your PD screen is good enough you will slowly grind them down, just don't break formation EVER. And remember alien Fleet Power is extremely overrated due to very high acceleration dV ratings, so you can actually wipe the floor with alien fleets that have several times your fleet rating as long as it is them who are attacking you. And if you can just stand by one of you bases under the cover of its PD it will be much better (just set initial speed to zero in that case)

 

[Mortmal]

I am giving it a try too. Auto-resolve does poorly, so I'm trying to maneuver them by hand, but I can't manage to turn them on the Z-axis. Then, on the X and Y axis, they almost don't turn... fine, I'll adapt. So, I mass-produce shitty escorts with 2 missile launchers and send them straight ahead. When the alien ship starts shooting at them, I unload all the missiles at once, which overwhelms the ship defenses.
Yes, combat rating is irrelevant, and another noob trap. I expected you had to lay low and just tech up, when in fact, you absolutely have to take down those surveillance ships. But be careful! Only that, else it triggers so much hate that they will soon counterattack and overwhelm you.
Game is absolutely great but so unintuitive.

 

[thesecret1]

I usually entered battle (because autoresolve is shit and arbitrary), then handed control to AI and enjoyed the flashing lights. I understand what they were going for with the battle controls, but that doesn't change the fact that they're a massive pain to use.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Auto-resolve does poorly

NEVER auto. watch battles instead. any base defense which would absolutely brutalize an alien fleet can easily die with 0 kills in auto.

 

[asfasdf]

Manual battles are a joke, watching the AI trying to move ships around is funny, as they go haphazardly all over the place. Plasma is by far the most effective weapon, just get a bunch of pd and a few front lasers to kill the torpedoes and let plasma kill everything. You don't need to move the ships (the movement system is too insane), just let them move forward and lock their rotation to whatever target you want to pound.

 

[Mortmal]

2035 and it's game over already:

When it reached earth it had 10 ships more reinforcing , 3 motherships with 78 destroyer and battleships as escort. Dont know what i am supposed to do,probably nothing at all twiddling my thumbs till 2050 or so in hope i will build something good enough ?

 

[Mortmal]

Still took one while going down...

 

[Riel]

2035 and it's game over already:

Spoiler

When it reached earth it had 10 ships more reinforcing , 3 motherships with 78 destroyer and battleships as escort. Dont know what i am supposed to do,probably nothing at all twiddling my thumbs till 2050 or so in hope i will build something good enough ?

This screenshot makes me believe you lost the geopolitical game much before that happened. 83 science by 2035 is a joke, 138 mission command is very low and 3.4 influence tells me popular support on earth for the resistance is almost non existent.

So a few tips for that:
BOOST is only useful early in the game, never invest on it, just try to take Kazakhstan and break the federation with Russia, also early in the game some orgs provide meaningful boost, once you start producing water, volatiles and metal in space boost becomes of very little use. Instead invest on Mission Control from the get go, specially in small countries since IPs are a lot more efficient on small countries than in very large countries. For example control many EU countries, invest fully into mission control and and merge them later into the EU.
Something that maybe you are missing is Interface Orbits, Low Earth Orbit 1, LEO2 and Tiang Gong and ISS orbits are interface orbits. When you place science modules there they provide very interesting bonuses on earth that should allow you to keep faction's popular support high and control the big countries as well as help all countries you control with bonuses to investments in different areas such as Mission Control, military tech, economy, public campaigns... these bonuses have a cap you should try to get all of them up to it, your measly 2 science station on earth make me think you probably didn't. Over time they add a lot.
In relation to the previous point RING and COLONY techs are paramount to get the most of... well everything related to space economy: more tech, more bonuses to EARTH, more defences on bases/colonies, faster and large ship building.... make a run for the two techs.
Which brings me to another point, try to direct as much of earth's technology as you can. You really need to produce lots of science to keep control of at least one of the three science slots to steer world science towards key techs.

Well geopolitics is a very complex topic with many different aspects but I hope this helped you for your next play through.

 

[Mortmal]

It seems there's a very strict build order, and you cannot deviate from it at all. So, in fact, I better ignore completely building ships, except for 3 corvettes at the beginning to take down one surveillance ship, and instead, spam science stations, as anything before green lasers and improved missiles techs is completely useless in a fight. As for the boost i invested a lot into it early to rush mars and mercury.

 

[Jaedar]

It seems there's a very strict build order, and you cannot deviate from it at all. So, in fact, I better ignore completely building ships, except for 3 corvettes at the beginning to take down one surveillance ship, and instead, spam science stations, as anything before green lasers and improved missiles techs is completely useless in a fight. As for the boost i invested a lot into it early to rush mars and mercury.

Boost is useful to stake initial claims and miners on mars and the moon, by the time you get further you should have enough space resources to render boost obsolete. Early ship weapon tech is indeed not very useful as the ai doesn't try to contest your stations or mines and fighting the aliens just means escalating in ways you can't keep up with.

 

[Iluvcheezcake]

It seems there's a very strict build order, and you cannot deviate from it at all. So, in fact, I better ignore completely building ships, except for 3 corvettes at the beginning to take down one surveillance ship, and instead, spam science stations, as anything before green lasers and improved missiles techs is completely useless in a fight. As for the boost i invested a lot into it early to rush mars and mercury.

Tbh same as early Civs, you need strong economy and tech control before building an army to steamroll everything

 

[Riel]

Another thing that bears careful management is relation with other AI factions. Proper alien hate management to not trigger retaliations when it's most inconvenient of course, but also with other human factions which is what I want to talk about since there's plenty of guides available explaining alien hate elsewhere.

The threat human factions pose in space is almost non existent, and this is one of my biggest complains with this game at the moment, but if you go into the intel panel and see that everyone is at war with you you are in hell in the geopolitical game, because each faction has 4 to 6 agents and if they are at war with you they will be spending many of their turns against you with: public campaigns, turn agent, sabotages, steal projects and it's really very difficult to counter with ~5 agents the work of ~35 agents... so keep relations civil with other factions as long as you can. Of course you need to antagonize someone, as the Resistance for example you want to kick the Servants, but maybe you can keep things civil with the Protectorate for a time so they focus on someone else. Ultimately who you antagonize is going to depend a lot on who controls CPs you want to acquire for yourself.

I usually antagonize 1 or 2 factions in the early game, and keep thing civil with the rest, I also trade resources, projects and orgs with them to keep good relations, also very useful to get one way or another Advanced Pulsar Drive too. This means no purging or couping countries or CPs of factions you don't want to antagonize, and if you really have to do it go butter them up immediately with trades back to good relations. Doing this really makes your life a lot more simple.

Oh fuck, I'm getting the itch to play this shit again...