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

[MadMaxHellfire]

i'm starting to think dices are weighted.
i already had a suspicious streak of a 80% roll failing 9 times in a row (that's astronomically improbable, 5^9, one chance out of 1953125, are you fucking kidding me?), so i put this 50% roll in place and started reloading. although numbers are always different, i'm at the 11th consecutive failed roll.
edit: streak broke at 15th. one chance out of 16384, i thought worse. i'm going on.

 

[Forest Dweller]

Does the AI cheat in this game?

 

[Raapys]

Yeah, I was considering the project dumping tactic, but it's difficult getting enough good orgs for admin, security and projects to all fit on one guy. And I don't have anyone with high sec that doesn't come from orgs.

Re the dices, I've noticed the occasional weird streak, but nothing that I haven't also seen in the classic '95% chance to hit' from RPGs. However, the chance of success does often change after you confirm actions, eg due to target traveling, something happening in the region, etc. Sure it's not just some weird consequence of that?

 

[None]

I've been playing this for the last week or so and I all I can say it that it is a pretty fucking cool game. There are issues, my biggest one is the fact you can roll absolute dogshit councilors at start, but we will see if the devs can iron the game out. I've kept my eye on Hooded Horse in the expectation they'd publish a "Paradox-killer" game and this may very well have the potential. At the very least it'll light a fire under Pdox's ass to get their shit together. I do not mean to imply I'm jumping ship if Pdox can turn themselves around, this game is good enough to stick around and I've already had a blast.

So far I haven't gotten farther than 2024. Spending lots of time trying to nail the early game down and figure out what works best. Also I know I could just go look up what is meta but that defeats the purpose of playing the game. Here are some random thoughts:
- Public Campaign is probably the best mission. I like to have at least 3 councilors capable of this, not mentioning those who can do it via an org.
- Speaking of which, orgs are fantastic imo. Boosting Administration for more orgs is good, but it's even better because it increases the chances of Hostile Takeover, which means even more orgs. Also getting an org that increases admin and picking up 2-3 other orgs at the same time feels like winning a jackpot.
- USA #1. In game, like in real life, it just has everything going for it and little to no downsides. I've tried a few other areas and I can never stop myself from thinking "if I would have gone in on the US at the start I'd be better off". Still, other nations can be a fun challenge in comparison.

I've got other thoughts but I've rambled enough. Fun game. 7.5/10 eager to see what else it has to offer.

 

[Alpharius]

i'm starting to think dices are weighted.
i already had a suspicious streak of a 80% roll failing 9 times in a row (that's astronomically improbable, 5^9, one chance out of 1953125, are you fucking kidding me?), so i put this 50% roll in place and started reloading. although numbers are always different, i'm at the 11th consecutive failed roll.
edit: streak broke at 15th. one chance out of 16384, i thought worse. i'm going on.

Are you sure the councilor wasn't turned? Also there is a "use random seed" option in settings, so maybe without it the same sequence of actions should produce the same result. Although i did some save scumming ocassionaly and it seemed to work. (I didn't enable that option.)

Btw managed to make my battlecruisers with huge green laser cannons shoot, apparently they were on point defense mode by default, or maybe i forgot to specify the primary target. Aaand they absolutely horribly suck.

The alien destroyer that would die to several t1 missile hits took about half an hour of real time on max speed for me to kill with two big green laser cannons (3 nose slots). Almost ran out of delta v because it kept drifting out of range. The only good thing about them is that they can also shoot down missiles and cannon projectiles, but then it would seem the point defense would be more effective.

Are arc lasers any better?

Also side mounted railguns and coilguns can do point defense too. Gonna try a battleship packed with light coilgun batteries next i guess.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

people here have very very very very poor reading skills.

 

[Jaedar]

Btw managed to make my battlecruisers with huge green laser cannons shoot, apparently they were on point defense mode by default, or maybe i forgot to specify the primary target. Aaand they absolutely horribly suck.

Lasers typically get 500% increased penalty from armor at long range. So even though they have super high range, and always hit, they hit for very little, since aliens have enough delta-V to always pack armor (I haven't looked at the human AI shipdesigns, they might frequently have 0 side armor which would make lasers super strong).

I am personally researching plasma weapons, skipping straight over railguns and coilguns in my weapon designs. But I have yet to figure out all the requirements for an actual spaceship plasma gen and engine, because it's all over the fucking place.

Does the AI cheat in this game?

Depends on what you mean by cheating. The human ai factions seem to follow the same rules as you do, no skips or cheats. But one of them is supported by the aliens which is sort of like cheating, and the aliens themselves are so technologically superior (at least at the start) that they might as well be.

- USA #1. In game, like in real life, it just has everything going for it and little to no downsides. I've tried a few other areas and I can never stop myself from thinking "if I would have gone in on the US at the start I'd be better off". Still, other nations can be a fun challenge in comparison.

The downside is that it costs like 300 CP to control, and is only really best at military. USA start is stronk though, because high military is good for conquest and the us also doesn't lack anything. But you can cobble together a group of nations that surpasses it in everything except militech pretty quickly I think, and probably cheaper in CP as well.

 

[thesecret1]

Btw managed to make my battlecruisers with huge green laser cannons shoot, apparently they were on point defense mode by default, or maybe i forgot to specify the primary target. Aaand they absolutely horribly suck.

I did warn you about lasers

Are arc lasers any better?

No. They are a sidegrade with the exact same issues

 

[Jaedar]

I did warn you about lasers

At the same time, missiles are easily(?) shot down by PD, and from the stats I'd expect mag weapons to be pretty easy to dodge at high range (they only move at like 3 kps, that means you have 5 minutes to dodge at 800 km).

So the lesson here might just be that everything is bad at high range once the ships get serious, and lasers seem like they'd be perfectly viable up close, although not much advantage over mag weapons at that range either I guess.

 

[thesecret1]

I did warn you about lasers

At the same time, missiles are easily(?) shot down by PD, and from the stats I'd expect mag weapons to be pretty easy to dodge at high range (they only move at like 3 kps, that means you have 5 minutes to dodge at 800 km).

So the lesson here might just be that everything is bad at high range once the ships get serious, and lasers seem like they'd be perfectly viable up close, although not much advantage over mag weapons at that range either I guess.

Mag weapons just werk at medium range. Lasers only work at really, really close distance, but by the time you get that close, mag weapons already killed the enemy. Missiles are worthless unless you can deploy a whole swarm of them to overload the point defenses

 

[Cyberarmy]

Your stories from the game are making me to play it!

 

[Monocause]

perfect run. i owned all russia up to berlin, all china, all the arabic speaking countries fused into a single one. all three producing 0 unrest and a lot of money. mars was all mine (quite literally) extracting enough for every need, all my bases had 4-5 layered defenses and marines which meant they couldn't be taken.
i had to take china from servants's hands, while they just went and took it i had to bring pop support to 75 and unrest to 7 to have my max stat guy have a 26% crackdown chance. i savescummed like crazy.
then they couped the european union out of the blue. 0 unrest, 0 support. couped.
then they infiltrated the usa just like that.
they also turned india in a pinch. when i had tried to, my max stat guys converted a grand amount of 0% on a success and 1% on a crit.
then they gifted india to aliens. game over.
this is retarded.

Your post (and your other posts in this thread about the AI magically fucking you over) sounds either like bullshit or like you're doing something horribly wrong and are painfully unaware (like going massively over your CP limit or some such).

I think it might be the latter as if you claim that "Mars was all yours", you're doing it wrong. There's no reason for you to waste MC points on controlling ALL the bases on mars. You want to control the best resource loads. Less profitable base sites, you just make sure it's not fe. the Servants who control them (if you play an anti-alien faction obv). If they do, you either obliterate these bases or capture them and sell them to factions that are more aligned with you - so that you're not wasting precious mission control points on bases that really don't bring you that much benefit.

At some point even this has diminishing returns as the pro-alien faction (def the servants, not sure about the protectorate) starts receiving "subsidies" from their alien overlords, meaning that you cannot indefinitely cockblock them from going into space.

For each of your suboptimal bases on Mars with poor resources you could have a base on an asteroid, Ceres, Mercury or whatevs with greater yields, or an orbital with great boosts to your research, or a bunch of other things.

EDIT: Also, 4-5 layered defenses + marines on EVERY base? This isn't a game where you turtle and build like this. This game isn't about map painting. This is more of an AI War kind of a setup, where for half of the game you try to do your thing without pissing the aliens off too much and then start very rapidly arming up and going into oen conflict once you're ready for it. And you carefully define which stuff you own are absolutely critical and which are ones you can sacrifice, because you WILL give ground to the aliens and there's no possible way to build up your entire empire to be completely impenetrable. Most of these defenses could have been productive modules that give you boosts/resources rather than eat into your resources.

If you have so many defenses on ALL your bases (which you also apparently set up super inefficiently if you're trying to control ENTIRETY of Mars), you really need to understand the game a bit better and git gud. I'm not an expert at TI and I'm learning the game just like everyone else but there's definitely a lot of problems with the way you're playing.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I'm not an expert

it shows.
all your endless monologue is built on a single assumption, a completely made up one, and which in turn is absolutely wrong.
please stop embarassing yourself.

 

[thesecret1]

Many layered defenses are mandatory on everything once aliens decide to come for you, as they'll quickly purge anything that doesn't have them. You won't be ready for an open war when they decide to come for you, but luckily, neither are they strong enough to go and wipe you out instantly - there's a sort of cold war period where they're content with raiding you and prodding your defenses.

 

[Monocause]

I'm not an expert

it shows.
all your endless monologue is built on a single assumption, a completely made up one, and which in turn is absolutely wrong.
please stop embarassing yourself.

Sure. Go ahead being apparently the only person around who complains how the game magically fucks you over despite your "perfect runs" and flawless gameplay. Whatever floats your boat.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

I'm not an expert

it shows.
all your endless monologue is built on a single assumption, a completely made up one, and which in turn is absolutely wrong.
please stop embarassing yourself.

Sure. Go ahead being apparently the only person around who complains how the game magically fucks you over despite your "perfect runs" and flawless gameplay. Whatever floats your boat.

pick servants. grab a bunch of shithole countries, just enough to research the meeting with aliens. sack all your agents, don't lift a finger. watch how the game wins for you.
i just did. aliens burned a hole through entrenched fortified china effortlessly, no local support, no elaborate plans, they just handed its nodes to me one after another. then it was the turn of russia. while i spent most of the game playing whack-a-mole with usa in central and south america just to goof around, i spent most of the time abandoning smaller countries to stay below the cap.
then aliens landed in africa, taking one country after another, and no one did anything. factions don't react to aliens, who can in turn rotflstomp anyone and anything, *alone*.
servants should be just removed. and the balance would still be offensively off.

Its a pity the TI US is less powerful than it should be because it doesn't properly portray navies and airforces. US should be like the Final Boss of Earth for the aliens.

well, we thought pretty much the same about russia up to few months ago.

 

[Jaedar]

Damn, the alien armies are ridiculous, and the ui in this can be so bad. Somehow they moved every single army into the us and the first time I get a notification is when a defensive army is destroyed. Not sure I can do much against 9 alien armies anyway, but still :/

I was doing p good against them, but either I was just lucky, or they got a tech boost, or something, because suddenly my 7 armies got crushed by their 3, forcing me to retreat, and before I could repair they land another half dozen armies and go on the offensive.

Edit: even nukes aren't helpful. This is bad, possibly game-endingly bad. Gonna have to revert to an earlier save.

And somehow the resistence is pilfering my techs left and right, despite none of my councilors showing that they are detected by resistence. Which means they either flew a councilor out to my asteroid belt skunkworks, turned one of my loy25 councilors, or something bullshit is going on.

It seems the alien nation will accept peace, always, but every region counts as a separate war so each of my countries is at war 4x with alien administration... that is perhaps not intended. Also I'm not sure what will even happen if I peace them, odds are they'll just conquer the world.

 

[thesecret1]

Im doing pretty fine. Aliens are mostly leaving me alone all of a sudden... They must know they stand no chance against my doomstack, no idea why they stopped going after my stations though. They do have the numbers to overwhelm them. United Africa under african union, then united African Union under the caliphate... What a fucking mega nation. The Caliphate is probably the best tag in the game in terms of pure landmass, though it only covers shitholes (still, with everything, it's economy rival's China's... not bad).

I've absolutely demolished all the other faction. Only the protectorate isn't in debt thanks to holding onto China, everyone else is in red numbers. I hold all of Europe and Russia, all of Middle East, all of India, all of Africa, Indonesia + Malaysia, and the US, AND I managed to fit it all under the cap. Then I gradually murdered all the veteran, levelled up councillors of all the other factions, meaning they all have low skill shitters... Meaning I sort of delivered a game over upon them – they cannot attack my CP's because they're too difficult for them (and even if they did, I'd just grab them right back). They cannot even do public campaigns because with their low skill, they'd need cash to boost their chances... and they have negative cash. Basically all they do is tour my nations and do the surveillance mission in each, probably for the lack of anything else to do. And of course fight each other to the death for some Latin America and SE Asia shitholes.

Really, the best way to fuck over the faction lies, basically, in resource denial. Just starve the fuckers right out. Starting in the EU is the best for this – every nation you unite there is a nation that's forever out of their grasp, especially if you later combo it with uniting with eastasian federation. Then just do Caliphate + African Union and you've basically got the majority of the world (not to mention the overwhelming majority of the world population).

Right now I'm just cleaning up Earth and prepping to finally confront aliens in space – gotta set up a proper cash farm around Earth (space resorts!) and colonize the asteroid belt something fierce. And maybe finally get my hands on some decent ship drive. It's ridiculous how garbage almost all of them are. I'm hoping that now that I'm reaching the right side of the tech tree, I'll get some that are actually good.

 

[Humanophage]

I've been having Terra Invicta pitched to me via Facebook for over a year now, at regular intervals. I hope other people are getting it too. Personally, I always found it upsetting that they pitch early access games that you can't play, especially given the endless vapourware floating around. Feels like a pointless cock tease. It makes me happy that it actually got at least partly released and is shaping up well. Not going to play it for the next 2-3 years, but

.

 

[Jaedar]

I think I'm going to have to find a populated, mountainous region to make a final stand in. Hopefully the defender advantages will somehow prove sufficient.

And maybe finally get my hands on some decent ship drive. It's ridiculous how garbage almost all of them are. I'm hoping that now that I'm reaching the right side of the tech tree, I'll get some that are actually good.

I'm all in on intertial fusion and its accompanying drives. Need to contest the aliens in space, pronto. Probably figure out some orbital bombardment schemes as well.

Edit: had prepared to make my last stand in taiwan, but after getting 10 armies in there the alien decided to attack tokyo and australia instead (resistance owned) with all but one army, and after I annhilated that army in 48 hours the aliens lost naval superiority. The 4 alien armies send to tokyo were crippled by resistance armies and 2 nukes (HNNNNG) after which I managed to score an alliance and mop up the survivors. So now the aliens have 6 armies in australia, which is decidedly not great, but assuming I can stop any more from landing (a big ask), it's fine. I live to fight another day.

I also ditched all the project granting orgs except for one on my esp 25/sec 25 councilor, and the ai still pilfered a tech from me a month after it finished, so I think something is busted.

 

[Jaedar]

I'm now in 2040.
To stop rampant thievery, I took one my councilors and put him permanently in space being useless, and then give him the project org. This stopped thefts. To make up for the loss of efficiency, I made a mercury platform with 6 skunkworks.

The aliens are being remarkably passive, even though I'm messing with their interests left and right. I've also started trying to establish an actual space navy to try and shoot down any future carriers that come to earth. We'll see how it turns out.

The strategy I have for ships is to use gunboats with mixed arclasers and plasma: the plasma shots make the aliens scared so they take crazy manouvers, which in turn exposes their sides which are comparatively lightly armored (2 vs 11 on the nose) where I intend to pepper them with lasers. I just started researching the laser modules though, so we'll see how it goes. And so far though my ships are not manouverable enough themselves that I don't take a loss or two in exchange, but that's mostly ok because I have infinity metals.

Question: What is even the point of early game ship components? I mean, this early, you don't have the proper space economy for a proper space fleet.

There are faction missions early on that require you to shoot down an alien ship, and the scouts are not that hard to kill. You could also use your early fleet to shoot down enemy stations/habs and cripple them.

 

[Alpharius]

- Got the US and Canada locked down tight, but I'm noticing randos doing missions on my territory. Especially Servants and Initiative. Aliens are probably involved too, but I can't see their movements yet. I even detained and killed this Servant bitch because I couldn't turn her for some reason (no influence?)

Perhaps you didn't have enough intel on her, i think you need to see their loyalty in order to turn them. Usually takes 3 turns investigating for me. AI started to fire councilors on the next turn after i detain them so that i wouldn't be able to steal tech, orgs or turn them that easily.

Question: What is even the point of early game ship components? I mean, this early, you don't have the proper space economy for a proper space fleet.

There are faction missions early on that require you to shoot down an alien ship, and the scouts are not that hard to kill. You could also use your early fleet to shoot down enemy stations/habs and cripple them.

And ships that build outposts and troop transport ships may be useful, also i think the bigger alien ships may provide additional projects.

Btw i've been donating some habs and techs and resources to all factions expect for protectorate and servants throughout the game, seems to kinda work to distract the aliens at least. Initiative is often fighting them around Earth and Resistance somehow always has more mc than me so the alien fleets constanly bomb their bases. A pity their fleets are mostly made of small ships with t1 missles and t0 guns. The alien hate meter got stuck at maximum for several years already, perhaps it takes other factions into account? (i have 90<MC and two techs for -25% alien hate)

Also my battleship packed with t1 coil gun batteries seemed to kinda work but not at point defense, because all coil guns shoot at the same projectile when defending. It quickly kills any alien ships at short range though, and some of them like divine bombing. Destroyers with medium coil cannon and 2 point defence seem more efficient.

Anybody took out an alien base yet? I'm thinking i'll need a large ship with spinal mount coligun or plasma cannon for that to stay out of range cause they all seem to have like 5 battlestation modules.

 

[Jaedar]

Anybody took out an alien base yet? I'm thinking i'll need a large ship with spinal mount coligun or plasma cannon for that to stay out of range cause they all seem to have like 5 battlestation modules.

Yeah, the aliens love their defences. Can you drop marines on their bases? Might be easier to build 3 ships of marine modules than to try and take out all those stacked defences.

All human defences afaik are armed with best mag weapon and best laser, possibly also some pd? If aliens have that as well I doubt staying out of range will be a valid tactic, although I guess as long as you have enough manoeuvrability to dodge as well it could work.

The alien hate meter got stuck at maximum for several years already, perhaps it takes other factions into account? (i have 90<MC and two techs for -25% alien hate)

I think the alien hate meter might just be bugged. For me it went to max in like 2028 and never budged since.

And ships that build outposts and troop transport ships may be useful, also i think the bigger alien ships may provide additional projects.

Yeah, you unlock like 4-5 projects from shooting down a basic ship, I would not be surprised if you get more projects from the bigger ships, or bases.

 

[Jaedar]

Also, aparently the org rooster updates at the 15th every month, so get ready to press spacebar and get orgs before the computer vacuum sweeps them all.

I don't think the org roster is global. The ones you get are yours to buy, and eventually go away.

 

[Raapys]

My pure laser ships have proven surprisingly effective in my first combat. Two battlecruisers with 480cm infrared nose, 360cm infrared arc laser battery, 2x point defense arc laser turret, 3x laser engine against one large alien ship. The lasers first took down all projectiles the aliens sent, then they started shooting at their ship. Took only 2-3 main cannon shots from each to bring it down once it got close enough.