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

[Alpharius]

6 gunships armed with a light phaser canon and 1000 front armor and 100 side armor

That's absurd. The game really needs to limit the maximum armor depth.

Intended to tank with the gunships but they spawned way back and i couldn't be arsed to micro all of the ships so they only managed to eat like half the enemy shots.

My kingdom for a way to actually control starting formation.

Do enemy stations add to the enemy fleet strength? I'm honestly considering just never attacking the stations and just wrecking all the alien fleets. Not a fan of just zerging them with dozens of ships. Meanwhile the ground bases are fairly trivial to take out with marines.

They do in the pre-combat screen. Not sure about total alien vs non-alien fleet strengths used for victory conditions.

Autoresolve is also an option, these 1k gunships with 1k armor had like 1k strength each and alien stations usually have around 4-6k. Will try bringing 10 of them in next time, they are relatively cheap and fast to build.

 

[Jaedar]

Autoresolve is also an option, these 1k gunships with 1k armor had like 1k strength each and alien stations usually have around 4-6k. Will try bringing 10 of them in next time, they are relatively cheap and fast to build.

Autoresolve sounds good. I wonder what ship designs have the highest combat rating / cost ratio. Some basic tinker seems to give 1 slot uv phasers a combat value of 8, whereas the viper t1 missile has 11 (30mm autocannon has 3). Nose mounted 1 slot uv phaser has 25(!), so nose mounted weaponry seems to be the way to go. But also the value doesn't scale additively. A corvette with just a nose mounted mag has more combat value than nose mounted mag + viper missile....

The autoresolve strength is really weird, I don't think I'm autistic enough to figure this out. It seems to count front armor super highly, lateral armor as negative, and rear armor as +-0. I think part of it just comes down to armor negatively impacting manouverability...
Anyway, this is the most cost effective design I made so far (with the goal of not using any exotics), although it is clearly suboptimal because I have put extremely minimal effort into size 1 nose weapons or missiles and those seem to work best for AR.

You'd only need 400 (I wonder if a fleet of 400 ships will crash the game) of them to get 10k combat strength, and they are very cheap to produce. I bet you could get at least 2x better than this, possibly much higher. And obviously 400 MC is too expensive.

I also learned something about PD today: Missiles and projectiles have effective armor ratings, and this affect PD damage, and PDs wont fire if the expected damage is too low. This means that even though Phaser PD in theory has 350 km range, it in practice will never shoot at anything that far away. So laser PD kinda sucks ass, the particle cannon is better, and if you want to shoot down mag projectiles you should probably go for 1 or 2 slot non PD lasers, and honestly just having lots of ships with non pd lasers is probably the correct way to deal with missiles as well, since you can then effortlessly layer them...

 

[Jaedar]

So I accidentally drew aggro from a mothership with one of my offensive fleets, but I had 600 deltaV, it has 236. I evade. It spends all its 236 to chase. So now It's a drifting hulk. I still can't kill it legitly(fucking coil cannons being immune to phaser PD), so I hit autoresolve. The result is a draw, with my ships being injured, mothership being fine, but all its missiles and coil ammo are gone (as are mine). So now it's a drifting hulk with a single UV laser, and I still have a plasma cannon on each ship. So I engage, tell my fleet to all stop and just start shooting.

And keep shooting. And in the end the mothership drifts into one of my ships (they're fully stopped, so the navigation nodes are inside the ships, so I can't control them....), dies and I get 0.6 tons of exotic salvage. Come again?

(I reloaded, tried again, didn't ram it, and this time I got 75 tons. Ought to be enough for a *real* fleet).


Meanwhile, the servants have constructed a megafleet on mars without me noticing (I really wish there was a way to get notified of stuff like that..), and while a lot of it is worthless chaff (with armor made of pure exotics because the servants are rolling in 800 of it) there are a few good ships there as well. Hopefully I can mount a martian defence force before they kill all my colonies.

I'm also sort of out of volatiles (of all things!), preventing me from building ships as fast as I want. Even at +550 it's not enough.

 

[Demo.Graph]

What's the hivemind's opinion on this? Tacticoolness, strategizing, cyoaness, etc.?
Is it gameworthy right now or the balance is lolrandom?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

it's a great game in its intentions, but it's coded by baboons who actively don't want you to enjoy it. and i'm not even speaking about the scientific details that *I KNOW*, perfectly, and are absolutely unnecessary and confusing, but mostly i am talking about the interface and how the game, as a general rule, loves to hide rules and numbers from you. several aspects need to be ironed out, they'll make the difference between greatness and total failure. a game in these conditions needs at least a patch per day, instead they're coming slow, uninteresting or sometimes in the outright wrong direction.
what even more discourages me is the relatively tiny amount of mods available, despite the game professing being very easy to mod and very friendly to them.

 

[Jaedar]

What's the hivemind's opinion on this? Tacticoolness, strategizing, cyoaness, etc.?
Is it gameworthy right now or the balance is lolrandom?

The game has a lot of problems. Your willingness to overlook those problems probably depends on how cool you find "near-future realistic space exploitation".

If you can overlook those problems, it's a really cool secret world order / hostile first contact game. Just be aware that the ui sucks, and the game has a tendency to freeze for a few seconds whenever you open a menu.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

it's not really a "freeze": it needs its time to gather all the informations and load a throng of impossibly tiny icons. also because menus are not optimized at all: you click on "ships", then you're asked if you want to design, build or manage the already built. this is dumb. worst is "intel": it's used to check on other factions, also on aliens actions and structures, also on earth climate, also on factions power (in the same screen as climate. lolwut?), also on ships en route, also on planetary resources. of course it takes an hour to load. of fucking course i need to check it every three seconds because every fucking thing is fucking hiding in the fucking menu. fuck. in fact, habs tab, which contains only habs and bases, loads in an instant.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

aliens priorities must be changed.
i kill one of them: hate raises 1/5.
i declare war on them: meh, dude. 0.
i nuke their capital region: so what? i ain't made of bitch. 0
i take one of them alive: ZOMGWTFBBQ 5/5 YOU'RE GONNA DIE SCUM!

 

[Alpharius]

Yeah alien priorities and AI in general could use a lot of work. They weren't attacking me for like 10 years (other than moving a few ships into low Earth orbit ang getting rekt) but then i captured a Servant base without point defense on Ceres and suddenly like every alien fleet on the map started going for Ceres. My anti-station fleet just polished off the alien station there so i left it in orbit until the defenses were finished. A 6k fleet was destroyed by mine 7k without any input from me cause ofc if a fleet is strong enough do destroy an alien station its strong enough do destroy an alien fleet.

What's the hivemind's opinion on this? Tacticoolness, strategizing, cyoaness, etc.?
Is it gameworthy right now or the balance is lolrandom?

Imo space combat should be redone almost entirely, both the mechanics and AI ship designs and tactics. Its kinda ok only in early game where whovever overwhelms enemy point defense wins, though still sucks because delta V and acceleration almost don't matter at all. Against coilguns the alien point defense is almost ineffective, and against plasma and uv phasers its like totaly pointless. The player phaser point defense is too strong on the other hand, like wtf a destroyer with 2 phaser pd is cant intercept all shots from an alien battlecruiser.

AI tactics of just doing random evasive manuvers also works only agains early game ballistic weapons and becomes hugely counter productive agains plasma and phasers due to showing side armor. Presenting front armor and focusing fire at all times would have worked much better in late game. Also alien designs definitely lack armor.

Also the whole thing with overpowered station defenses doesn't make sense. There should be plenty of oportunities for an attacking fleet to destroy a target moving on a predictable orbit without taking return fire. Imo instead the fleets should be used to protect the stations that are about to be attacked, that way the aliens could still threaten the player in mid game.

Also why wouldn't the aliens start destroying all my unprotected asteroid mining stations when they are afraid of bringing a large fleet to attack my stations in Earth orbit? They could park some ships at various lagrange points and cover much of the potential mining locations to immediatey destroy any of my bases when they get butthurt, or retreat when a larger fleet is approaching. Would have been impossible to defend against with the current UI but then the UI should be changed.
Like order the fleet to intercept all threats in X region of space and thats it. More deltaV - can defend more space, more acceleration - can react faster. But less mass devoted to weapons and armor.

Another thing that could use an improvement is human faction AI. It should be capable of not going into negative amount of resources at least.

Other than that, the economy, research, councilor stuff and the Earth gameplay in general seem fairly well done.

Could turn into a great game eventualy. Its already worth at least one playthrough. Maybe even the mods could fix it substantially without devs.

 

[Jaedar]

plasma and uv phasers its like totaly pointless. The player phaser point defense is too strong on the other hand, like wtf a destroyer with 2 phaser pd is cant intercept all shots from an alien battlecruiser.

That's not my experience. Plasma is indeed immune to PD, but I find phaser PD to completely fail at dealing with coil projectiles, even with 2 of them. PD does invalidate missiles almost entirely though.

AI tactics of just doing random evasive manuvers also works only agains early game ballistic weapons and becomes hugely counter productive agains plasma and phasers due to showing side armor. Presenting front armor and focusing fire at all times would have worked much better in late game. Also alien designs definitely lack armor.

It depends. Some of them have plenty of armor. I also think that showing side armor + rolling means you can expose a different armor piece over time, but fucked if I know for real.

Also the whole thing with overpowered station defenses doesn't make sense. There should be plenty of oportunities for an attacking fleet to destroy a target moving on a predictable orbit without taking return fire

Yeah, I agree. Stationary objects should be complete sitting ducks: just fire something massive enough that no PD in the world will be enough to ablate it once it's in range. The real problem though is that the aliens don't have any actual modules to build, so they just fill every empty slot with defenses. Human stations with 1-3 defenses can actually be overcome, whereas alien stations with 8 are kinda bullshit when they also outrange every weapon you can build.

I can take down an alien mothership with some trouble and a few dead ships, but I still have no idea how to deal with alien stations (except for just spamming ships I guess, which will eventually let me autoresolve, but I don't have the resources for that).

Another thing that could use an improvement is human faction AI. It should be capable of not going into negative amount of resources at least.

Yeah, seeing the other human factions running around with -600K cash is silly. At that point they should just get game overed, or at least be forced to sell all their assets to make up for the shortfall.

Imo space combat should be redone almost entirely, both the mechanics and AI ship designs and tactics.

I like the tradeoff between manouverability and tonnage, at least in theory (in practice navigation sucks so hard it's not worth making manouverable ships). I also like the pros/cons of the different weapon types.
Basically, the ship designer feels good, but in actual combat most of the time I don't even command my fleet, or at most tell the autopilot to face the primary fleet target. If they just redid the whole navigation ui and clarified some of the mechanics it would be cool. Also maybe add some ship designs that do the sensical thing and have forward and side thrusters so you don't have to turn the ship around to nudge it in different directions.

 

[Alpharius]

That's not my experience. Plasma is indeed immune to PD, but I find phaser PD to completely fail at dealing with coil projectiles, even with 2 of them. PD does invalidate missiles almost entirely though.

Huh, strange. I also have a regular uv phaser cannon on most ships, maybe it makes a difference.

It depends. Some of them have plenty of armor.

Well a mothership that i can see now has 28 front armor. According to in game codex 1 armor absorbs 20 megajoules, which equals 1 damage according to weapons stats. So that like 2 shots from heavy plasma battery at 1000 km (it has 15.3 damage) if i'm not mistaken about how it works. Basically as good as unarmored when i have 5 ships with double heavy plasma batteries in my fleet.

I think battlecruiser has more armor though.

 

[Jaedar]

Huh, strange. I also have a regular uv phaser cannon on most ships, maybe it makes a difference.

It makes a huge difference. A normal uv phaser can easily deal with one ships worth of coil projectiles.

Well a mothership that i can see now has 28 front armor. According to in game codex 1 armor absorbs 20 megajoules, which equals 1 damage according to weapons stats. So that like 2 shots from heavy plasma battery at 1000 km (it has 15.3 damage) if i'm not mistaken about how it works. Basically as good as unarmored when i have 5 ships with double heavy plasma batteries in my fleet.

At the same time, I'm pretty sure I have fired 20+ heavy plasma shots at a mothership without any part of it turning yellow. So I think there's something more going on. It took 3 of my ships with 1 heavy plasma each at least 30 in game minutes to kill a single mothership the one time I did it, so with a fire rate of ~50s that's 108 shots, give or take. And most of those hit the front of the ship, although not all).

Plasma is real slow at killing, but nothing beats it at reliability.

Meanwhile: I'm slowly mopping up the remainder of earth into empires: The african union has like 3 regions left before being complete, bolivia is halfway done with claiming south america, the us is steamrolling central america, and I'm about to coup indonesia so I can use it to claim the neighbouring islands including australia. Not sure how to unite the middle east, I guess it's the caliphate?

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

28 front armor.

how does armor work? ablative or threshold? i guess the latter, since in my last game my point defense installations have been using lasers to fight back, i even rushed greens against pretty much t1 aliens, and they suffered 0 damage, point blank. gray all the way. while the same ships would instantly die when hit by any stray bullet.

 

[Alpharius]

28 front armor.

ablative or threshold?

Perhaps both, as otherwise the aliens wouldn't have been able to kill my 600 front armor gunships at all, other than at point blank range with lasers. But the alien stations do it somehow.

Btw switched to the last anti matter non-torch drive, seems like its the best drive in the game currently for general purposes. A single engine is about the same as six of the best non-torch proton boron fusion drives that i used previously, but with double delta v. Antimatter is kinda expensive to produce though.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

engines need to be cut down to one tenth in number and be buffed to tenfold in power. i'm almost at endgame and i still can properly propel only tiny ships, anything bigger than a corvette must be stationary and built in-place.

 

[Alpharius]

Made an anti-station fleet of my new ships with better drives and more phasers (replaced the bigger ones with lots of light uv phaser cannons since range difference is not so large) and now it won't let me deploy all the ships at the same time even though there are less of them than before. (I have 5 dreadnoughts, 6 gunships and 4 destroyers now.)
Had to try a bunch of pre battle formations so that it would at least let me bring all the dreadnoughts.

Currently the most trouble i have with combat is that my dreadnoughs will constaly accelerate like retards and die to station point defense. Cant slow down beacuse they have shitty manuverability and will take like 4 "turns" to rotate through 180 degrees so they will eat all shots with rear armor if i try this. Apparently they do it to avoid collisions with friendly and alien ships (aliens like rushing into close combat even more than before when they have lots of light ships).

 

[Jaedar]

Speaking of autoresolve fleets, I designed this... thing:

Can't believe it's worth 1k in autoresolve. I'm pretty sure a single PD would counter 3 of these ships. And it costs basically nothing to build. My actual combat ships have the same autoresolve value, but cost 16 times as many resources. It does seem that the game is keeping some track though, I sent a fleet of these (12k strength) against an alien station (5.4k) and the result was total wipeout with no damage to the aliens. I'll still probably spam these to get to the wincons faster...

Also the global warming in this game is p lulzy. At this point a full third of the worlds economy is put into welfare(the anti global warming priority), oil has been abolished, but even so carbon dioxide is only going down 0.1 ppm per year. Only 130 ppm to safe levels!

The academy are supposed to be the peace loving nambypambys, but that this point this is basically me:

Needing to control at least 75% of earth's pop, control points, and have 75% of the total fleet strength in space is pretty much impossible without going full space hitler...

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

when the retardation flows strong through you:
- removed all salvo fire from missiles; all missiles and torps fire steadily every 5-8 seconds
are they really this retarded? the problem with missiles is that they're all shot down by the simplest point defense because there's too few of them. the only way to make them useful (and realistic) is to go the macross way: a hundred missiles all at once, goot luck shooting down and dodging all of them. but no, they patch the game once in a month, the amount of changes is tiny and negligible akin to a minuscule hotfix, and deliver the exact opposite of what the game would need.
i have no words other than insults.

 

[Malakal]

when the retardation flows strong through you:
- removed all salvo fire from missiles; all missiles and torps fire steadily every 5-8 seconds
are they really this retarded? the problem with missiles is that they're all shot down by the simplest point defense because there's too few of them. the only way to make them useful (and realistic) is to go the macross way: a hundred missiles all at once, goot luck shooting down and dodging all of them. but no, they patch the game once in a month, the amount of changes is tiny and negligible akin to a minuscule hotfix, and deliver the exact opposite of what the game would need.
i have no words other than insults.

Holy shit thats retarded. But maybe they will add missile defenses/shields/armor/ECCM etc

 

[Jaedar]

So I just had my first massive armada vs armada fight. I lost some ships. Aliens lost a lot of ships. Then after 30 minutes of trying to chase down a mothership (the AIs tendency to accelerate at the start and then just let itself drift until the world ends once it passes you is REALLY annoying) the game crashed so hard it took half my running programs with it. Fun.

The combat ui is so fucking horribad to chase down stragglers too. As soon as your ship gets slightly tilted it becomes impossible to control as the area that tells it to accelerate and not just turn becomes a single pixel wide, with no rime or reason to where that pixel is located.

 

[Alpharius]

Finally won as Humanity first in 2055. Destroyed all the alien bases except the last one but it was still not enough to get the required fleet size advantage cause there were a lot of alien fleets in transit and they started building new bases eventually. I've had 3 big anti station fleets and 4 small ones for intercepts at the end. Researched all technologies but didn't take over the whole world.

The biggest fight was against 15k fleet near the main alien base, they've had like 100 ships but there were only 20 present at one time, the rest coming as reinforcements once one of the original ships was destroyed. Was doing fine while they were only spawning to the front but then they started spawning on both flanks and my big ships only have forward facing phasers and plasma batteries so some of them got rekt by missiles and ballistic weapons. Also the game kept crashing with out of memory errors after the fight.

Surprisingly the most dangerous ships turned out to be the assault carriers since they have crazy armor of 38 and plasma battery. Perhaps the alien armor works differently than human armor cause they seemed much more resilient than my 600 front armor gunships.

I guess i'll play again when it comes out of early access, can't see much potential for trying something different right now. Other limiting myself like for example not using crackdowns and purge to acquire territory or not interfering with alien councillors.

The combat ui is so fucking horribad to chase down stragglers too. As soon as your ship gets slightly tilted it becomes impossible to control as the area that tells it to accelerate and not just turn becomes a single pixel wide, with no rime or reason to where that pixel is located.

Yeah had that too. I've managed to quickly intercept some stragglers by doing full stop + lock direction on primary target, then it lets me accelerate the ship in the direction of that target at least. Doesn't always work though.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

The biggest fight was against 15k fleet

i have several 20k fleets roaming around, and a special fun one of over 40k in mercury's orbit. i researched everything and my ships still suck, it took me a whole year to put together my strongest fleet which has been mercilessly slaughtered. at least alien ships don't repair, maybe i'll try again next year. i just repelled an about 25 units alien army, but i could only because they landed in my turf so i could face the 50% hps units which die by looking at them wrong. also because "china full military spending for 30 years" had better tech.

 

[Jaedar]

Finally won as Humanity first in 2055.

Do you know if you need to bombard the final enemy base before doing the final mission? Or can you launch it from space like every other marine assault? If bombard is necessary it's going to delay my victory by at least a year (currently in 2051, only remaining enemy base is the main one and I'm 6% units away from fleet strength objective), cause I just assumed it worked like normal (I never did a councillor action on a base before). Also, what is the best way to bombard? The few times I tried I got instantly destroyed, but I assume some weapons are simply more suited to it than others.

 

[Alpharius]

Finally won as Humanity first in 2055.

Do you know if you need to bombard the final enemy base before doing the final mission? Or can you launch it from space like every other marine assault? If bombard is necessary it's going to delay my victory by at least a year (currently in 2051, only remaining enemy base is the main one and I'm 6% units away from fleet strength objective), cause I just assumed it worked like normal (I never did a councillor action on a base before). Also, what is the best way to bombard? The few times I tried I got instantly destroyed, but I assume some weapons are simply more suited to it than others.

I've did a regular assault alien asset mission from space (had to bring 4 frigates with full marines in utility modules), then it turned out i have to land the councilor at that base and then the "i win" button became active. No need for bombardment.

Also didn't try attacking the bases with councilors before the last mission, perhaps it provides different benefits comapred to assaulting with just the troops.

The biggest fight was against 15k fleet

i have several 20k fleets roaming around, and a special fun one of over 40k in mercury's orbit. i researched everything and my ships still suck, it took me a whole year to put together a my strongest fleet which has been mercilessly slaughtered. at least alien ships don't repair, maybe i'll try again next year. i just repelled an about 25 units alien army, but i could only because they landed in my turf so i could face the 50% hps units which die by looking at them wrong. also because "china full military spending for 30 years" had better tech.

Are you plaing on hard difficulty? I was on normal cause i thought that -2 or something modifiers for councillor actions is a big deal and then didn't want to restart.

 

[Demo.Graph]

I've put this game apart a bit and... damn, the devs are clumsy.

I'll elaborate in detail for those who haven't played yet.

Spoiler

The basic game loop is get pokemon agent councilor, map paint, receive resources, train your pokemons, give them items organizations, repeat. It's quite nice.

But then some idiot had decided to include in this system ultra pokemons - the ones that would improve faster due to inborn perks Quick Learner (-20% xp per skill) or Striver (-30%).

How significant are they?
It's a turn-based game with 2-week long turns. ~25 turns annually. Agent conducts 1 mission per turn. Agents get 2 xp per successful mission and 1 for the failed one. Suppose that 2/3 missions are successful, it's ~40 xp annually (maybe more, since missions could be farmed for xp).
Skill raise costs 20 xp, or 14-16 xp with a discount.
A common pokemon would get ~2 skill raises annually, cool ones would get 2.5-3.
Agents have a sum of starting skills in a range of about 12-20, so a discounted one would outpace competition in a few years. With better skills they would succeed more often, get more xp, repeat loop.
There're 6 skills that matter, each with a skillcap of 25. If a game lasts 25 years, agent would get 1000 xp. Or 50 skill raises for a common agent, 62 for a quick one, 71 for a striver. An equivalent of an additional maxed-out skill or a bunch of utility picks.

Agent slots are limited (4-8), so with this system a player isn't interested in a majority of agents. Only xp-discounted ones matter. Common agents could be used temporarily, but one would and should hunt for dem shiny ones.

Then one notices that while agents seem to be randomized, the same shiny ones repeatedly appear between saves.
I've dug into savegame files a bit and yes - there's a tag for agents that denotes whether they're randomized or pregenerated.

Only pregenerated agents get discount skills. There're 7 strivers and 17 quicklearners in the game, total.

Agents also have a mother country that determines what items orgs they may purchase. And there're 2 prestige classes perks that limit the orgs that agents can use (government and criminal - e.g. only criminal agents can use criminal gangs).

If we're looking at a balanced game, those unique agents should be spread out across countries somewhat proportionally. Is it so?

	Striver	Quick Learner
Canada	1​	1​
China	1​
EU	2​	1​
India		3​
Ireland		1​
R Korea	1​
UK		1​
US	2​	10​

Nope! Fucking Yankees are pretending to be chosen by god again. 16 out of 24 agents are from US or UK dominions.

Since there're only 7 best agents and maximum 8 agent slots, the ideal pokemon crew would always look the same.

Government-Criminal agents are also unbalanced, but whatever.

It's as if someone made a decent mechanic, but then ingame content was populated by chimps.

tl;dr I really hope that this game would evolve out of early beta, and not degrade into pdox-grade dimwittery.