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

[Raapys]

I had a single laser beam shot take down a 250 firepower alien vessel, from full health to instant explosion... I'm thinking maybe there's some kind of critical hit feature? Or could these aliens be triggering self destructs when they run out of ammo and realize they're gonna lose?

At any rate, I see they have far more powerful ships than these, fleets consisting of 1k firepower dreadnaughts, so I'm gonna need to do some upgrading. Lasers in defense mode until incoming projectiles have been taken care of seems to be pretty much a must-have in these space combats though. And I get the impression that defensive weapons are more effective when the combat is running at 1x speed than at higher speeds, so I'm slowing it down when a salvo approaches.

 

[thesecret1]

Such a beautiful sight...

 

[Cyberarmy]

Man, this UI is something else.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

Such a beautiful sight...

What does that "Victory: Not yet known to faction" means?
Is victory condition part of research tree or is that just game being early access?

 

[thesecret1]

What does that "Victory: Not yet known to faction" means?
Is victory condition part of research tree or is that just game being early access?

It's part of research tree. And since I reduced those factions to basically no research...

 

[Jaedar]

Such a beautiful sight...

That it is.

I am trying to consolidate control over earth. It's pretty slow going though, because I got an event that imprisoned one of my councilors for 4 months, which put me 50 over cap, so I instantly lost control points in china and india to alien lovers, and it takes several turns of maxed out crackdown/purging to recover. Even so, I'm one country away from finish warsaw pact, then back to working on pan-asian union. I took ethiopia in the hope of getting the unified africa tech, but so far no luck, and holding anything in africa is a pain when half the factions are well under their control cap.

Also, I feel there is something goofy with space station attacks. I have a fleet in orbit around the station, but still the aliens can destroy it without triggering combat. If I tell the fleet to engage the alien, they flee because my fleet is too strong. I also tried to intercept the ship as soon as it got to earth orbit, but that takes 3 days (for some reason I don't really get), and the alien targeted my station before I got to it.

I also launched 3 troop carriers against various asteroid belt bases, if it turns out to be effective I'm gonna build a lot more. My intended goal is to steal all the resource generation from protectorate and servants, putting them deep in the black.

And there is definitely something broken with project thefts, but at this point I don't care so much. The ai all have less than 1k research anyway, so if they wanna spend 3 years working on a plasma cannon, fine.

Speaking of plasma cannons, they do very little damage, but they also fly very fast and seem to be immune to PD(?) making them pretty reliable, if slow. I'm definitely interested in uv lasers as a complement/replacement though.

 

[thesecret1]

Alright, my massive economic buildup ran into certain issues... Remember how worthless Boost became once you got your space economy going? Yeah... it turns out it's not useless at all. Basically, once you decide to get a real big gig going in space, you'll realize you aren't making enough money to fund all those research labs and what have you. The solution to that are space resorts and geriatric clinics, which make amazing amounts of money, but require to be situated in Earth's orbit (or a 50k+ colony, but I haven't managed to grow one anywhere near that size yet). Okay, not problem, there's plenty of space there, only, since Earth has an atmosphere, anything you put in its orbit is going to cost you upkeep in boost (and pretty big one too!). And since the practically only way to manufacture boost is through nations, all that time of zero investment in boost really bit me in the ass.

 

[Alpharius]

I also launched 3 troop carriers against various asteroid belt bases, if it turns out to be effective I'm gonna build a lot more. My intended goal is to steal all the resource generation from protectorate and servants, putting them deep in the black.

Did that too. Captured some mining habs from Protectorate even though they had point defense modules. Seems kinda too easy, if the AI were doing it too i'd be fucked. Now thinking about sending some marines to caputre alien habs. Though they usualy have fleets protecting them.

Btw found out that defenses on orbitals use small ballistic & laser batteries for t1 orbitals, medium for t2 and large for t3 so its a good idea to research them even if the ships aren't using them.

I was fighting a lot of space battles recently and using the four dropdown lists to pick a formation each time gets old real fast so i often forget about it and end up with a shitty formation. Imo would have been better if the game allowed to position the ship on the map before the battle. And the point defenses sometimes glitch and hold fire for no apparent reason until cycle the firing modes.

 

[Jaedar]

I just think it's really cool that the radiators glow when they're dissipating heat (I forgot to put heat sinks on my ship).

I started going for the kill on all protectorate space assets, going to move against servants as soon as my next generation ships launch. I also made a forward base around europa to construct ships to try and take out the aliens in the same system.

Also, UV phasers seem crazy, but so far my ships are still building. 107% armor at 1000km, 4% at 200km. I think I'm going to just melt everything I come across. If only there was a way to slow down the initial combat speed without turning your back to the enemy...

On the ground, I took ethiopia to form pan african union, no nation in africa has nukes or an army, so my russian/chinese armies are just going to cleave through the continent in the name of the negus.

 

[thesecret1]

Took over the entire world, split between 7 mega-nations. Proceeding to genocide the other factions – you can actually take them out of comission for a long period of time once you get them sufficiently weak. Just turn one of their councillors to see where the other ones are, and proceed with mass murder. Their only source of influence points tend to be councillors, so if you kill them fast enough, you'll deplete their reserves, and lower its income to something like 0.05/day or similar joke number. The cheapest councillor costs 30 influence. You do the math how long it'll take them to save up enough to buy one of them. And then you'll just quickly kill it again. Currently destroyed the Initiative, Academy, and Servants this way, and about to deal with the rest.

 

[Jaedar]

Took over the entire world, split between 7 mega-nations. Proceeding to genocide the other factions – you can actually take them out of comission for a long period of time once you get them sufficiently weak. Just turn one of their councillors to see where the other ones are, and proceed with mass murder. Their only source of influence points tend to be councillors, so if you kill them fast enough, you'll deplete their reserves, and lower its income to something like 0.05/day or similar joke number. The cheapest councillor costs 30 influence. You do the math how long it'll take them to save up enough to buy one of them. And then you'll just quickly kill it again. Currently destroyed the Initiative, Academy, and Servants this way, and about to deal with the rest.

How did you get enough admin cap for it? I currently just control meganations+ 30 points worth of israel and benelux. Would love to also take europe from the resistence (it's the only faction that feels like it could be a threat on earth), but there's just no way I can fit the 80 points within my cap. And if I go above the cap at all the servants and protectorate just instantly steal points.

 

[thesecret1]

Took over the entire world, split between 7 mega-nations. Proceeding to genocide the other factions – you can actually take them out of comission for a long period of time once you get them sufficiently weak. Just turn one of their councillors to see where the other ones are, and proceed with mass murder. Their only source of influence points tend to be councillors, so if you kill them fast enough, you'll deplete their reserves, and lower its income to something like 0.05/day or similar joke number. The cheapest councillor costs 30 influence. You do the math how long it'll take them to save up enough to buy one of them. And then you'll just quickly kill it again. Currently destroyed the Initiative, Academy, and Servants this way, and about to deal with the rest.

How did you get enough admin cap for it? I currently just control meganations+ 30 points worth of israel and benelux. Would love to also take europe from the resistence (it's the only faction that feels like it could be a threat on earth), but there's just no way I can fit the 80 points within my cap. And if I go above the cap at all the servants and protectorate just instantly steal points.

The entire world came up at around 870 control points, so you aren't that far off. Basically, you need one or two important global techs that give assloads of control points – you really, REALLY want quantum encryption, it's a major CP source. Administration algorithms were also pretty good if memory serves. In general, global techs that need society science or information science tend to raise CP limits, though there are exceptions.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

"this game i'm doing fine, india and china, all the space installations are well defended, steady resources income, i'm a bit behind on the main quest, let's see, now i have to capture an alien, i'm at 0 threat, they're not going to be pissed off too much... 5. max.

also i still don't understand why the capability to travel in the void of space of a ship is measured in delta-v.

 

[Jaedar]

also i still don't understand why the capability to travel in the void of space of a ship is measured in delta-v.

Delta v is a convenient way to express how far a ship can go in space. It's used in real life, the devs didn't make it up.

I am really bad at the space combat. Took a slightly obsolete laser ship against a fleet of servant ships (a lot of chaff they've been saving up since the beginning of the game). Everything went great (PD is so amazing, I keep thinking I'm going to die to that stream of projectiles for sure and then they all get blown away no issue), except I forgot to account for one of the enemy ships which was hanging back, and I looked away for 2 seconds and got instantly destroyed. I had my back turned to it (it was really far away, the enemy fleet had otherwise gone past me so I needed to turn around to hunt down stragglers) so probably I just accidentally wandered into laser range, at which point even the shitty low tech laser punctured my unarmored rear.

I'm getting close to what I think will be my final 'mothership' design though, spinal coilgun backed up by uv phaser and phaser pd, and a full g of combat acceleration, they're currently in production.

Also fucking protectorate swiped one of my stations just before it finished building, and now the modifiers to take it back are like -50. In revenge I am couping every nation they have with MC, hopefully them winding up in negative 10 will make it possible to steal it back.

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

delta-v is related to speed. delta-velocity. it has NOTHING to share with the ability of covering DISTANCES when even gravity is not involved. instead, according to the game, moving from a place in deep space to another place in deep space has a minimum delta-v required, which raises with the distance involved. you're not taking off from anywhere, you're not leaving atmosphere, delta-v required should be 0.
my guess is that they couldn't have dynamic travel times, so in order to reach the specified target in the pre-stablished time (or bracket of timings) then, and only then, an object needs a minimum delta-v required.
still retarded.

 

[thesecret1]

There we go. Wiped every last base, hab, and ship of the other factions from space. Several of them have no sources of influence and are thus, essentially, dead for all intents and purposes (they have no councillors, and have no income to hire more of them). Other factions have some other sources of influence that I cannot do anything about, and thus need to have their councillors wiped out periodically. Eat that, cunts. Now, to deal with the aliens...

 

[Jaedar]

delta-v is related to speed. delta-velocity. it has NOTHING to share with the ability of covering DISTANCES when even gravity is not involved. instead, according to the game, moving from a place in deep space to another place in deep space has a minimum delta-v required, which raises with the distance involved. you're not taking off from anywhere, you're not leaving atmosphere, delta-v required should be 0.
my guess is that they couldn't have dynamic travel times, so in order to reach the specified target in the pre-stablished time (or bracket of timings) then, and only then, an object needs a minimum delta-v required.
still retarded.

As it turns out, your ability to go from one orbit to another in the solar system has everything to do with your ability to change velocity.

Also I have no idea what you are smoking but the game does let you spend more delta-v to get somewhere faster.

The intuition you seem to be lacking is that in space, orbiting something is the closest thing to being stationary, and orbiting something is just a fancy way of saying that your speed perpendicular to the nearest large mass is sufficient to make you continually fall past it. If you don't have sufficient speed, you either just fall down and crash, or zoom away from it.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

As it turns out, your ability to go from one orbit to another in the solar system has everything to do with your ability to change velocity.

oh yes, planets and asteroids change velocity all the time to move anywhere.
nigga please.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

"interesting" moment.
alien nation expanded too fast, it's at 9.6 unrest. when all the raise/lower unrest are resolved they're picked randomly, with minimal savescum i could manage to make one of mine end on top, and make the nation crumble. i actually pulled it off. halted the aliens with 0 threat produced, awesome. problem is, apparently the game treats those regions as conquered by the last mission's sender, in order to roll on the coup table, so as soon as the alien nation disappear i'm treated as if i just conquered all the south america and one third of africa, which severely adds to threat, and on top of this some more stuff like "corpse retrieved" might trigger, furtherly adding to threat.
as soon as the alien nation broke down, i got assigned max threat. i doubt that's working as intended.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Right now my plan against the AA is to Raise the fuck out of that unrest.

even if it's what i just did, it doesn't really work. for every 1-2 you can raise it (and only in the beginning, it's not like you've 25 command people to spare), aliens can effortlessly lower it by 3-4 every turn, because the aliens alone are overpowered as fuck, but also servants and protectorate cooperate in this, while the other factions NEVER do, in nothing, most probably you're being outright sabotaged by your supposedly closest faction right now.

The few hydra agents I found had Security 25 so yeah, good fucking luck killing those things.

they all have. aliens. overpowered as fuck. but for once it makes sense and i'm glad it's like this.

besides, 2030 sounds very early, usually you have until 31-32. but it's not going to make a big difference anyway. losing is fun, isn't it?

 

[Jaedar]

As it turns out, your ability to go from one orbit to another in the solar system has everything to do with your ability to change velocity.

oh yes, planets and asteroids change velocity all the time to move anywhere.
nigga please.

Is this one of those "jokes I was only pretending to be retarded situations"?

You do understand that planets and asteroids are orbiting the sun? And that orbiting something means you are moving in an elliptical path? And that, barring a change in velocity, you move in a straight line?
Planets and asteroids have 0 delta-v however, so they're stuck in that same orbit for all time. If you want to change your current orbit around earth (which is also mostly an orbit around the sun at a certain distance) to an orbit around mars, you have to change your velocity at least once to break out of earth orbit (or at least get on a really really wide earth orbit that happens to intercept mars at one end of the ellipse) and get on a path to mars, and then once again to match mars orbit.

If you want to get an intuition for how these things work, I recommend landing a rocket on Mun in kerbal space program.

Right now my plan against the AA is to Raise the fuck out of that unrest.

I strongly recommend trying to deal with the alien armies asap. The AA are mostly immune to coups/crackdowns, so force is what remains.

 

[RobotSquirrel]

Just turn one of their councillors to see where the other ones are, and proceed with mass murder

Watching peruns run, yeah very powerful strategy especially when coupled with hostile takeover, you can pretty much cap stun them until they can't even maintain the countries they have, kill their counselors over and over, they never recover, and are stuck in negative gains. At that point its just you vs the aliens.

I strongly recommend trying to deal with the alien armies asap. The AA are mostly immune to coups/crackdowns, so force is what remains.

The more the alien nation takes the worse its unrest gets, so if you let it take just enough you can make it implode.
Fun fact: territories annexed by the alien nation become entirely new nations when liberated.

Ok seriously The restore the commonwealth and CSA techs look hilarious I need to try these.

 

[thesecret1]

Watching peruns run, yeah very powerful strategy especially when coupled with hostile takeover, you can pretty much cap stun them until they can't even maintain the countries they have, kill their counselors over and over, they never recover, and are stuck in negative gains. At that point its just you vs the aliens.

Yep, going for that right now. I wanna be free of the councillor popamole, having to undo the damage of their public campaigns, etc.

Fun thing is, earlier on, you can demolish the factions even easier. Just go and kill each councillor they have once every decade or so. The replacement newbies will have low skills and be pretty harmless.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

look at me! i'm voyager probe! moving from planet to planet only through the sheer power of my engine!