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

[Cyberarmy]

Meh, another early access :/

 

[Jaedar]

You just really need to figure out the councilor game and get to know some useful strategies.

Probably. There's just a few too many actions, and like a 100 countries each with their own strengths and weaknesses, which makes it really hard to know what to do, especially when you don't even know which resources are needed in what ratios for medium and long term goals the game hasn't even told you about.

Meh, another early access :/

Supposedly it is feature complete, and the early access is just to gather feedback, figure out the AIs weaknesses and so on. No idea how true that actually is though.

 

[lightbane]

The "join the aliens!" factions are silly if the aliens are indeed bloodthirsty savages that want to exterminate humanity. Hopefully the presence of these factions means the aliens are not one-note monsters. Otherwise, it would be akin to trying to negotiate with space bugs.

 

[Joggerino]

You just really need to figure out the councilor game and get to know some useful strategies.

Probably. There's just a few too many actions, and like a 100 countries each with their own strengths and weaknesses, which makes it really hard to know what to do, especially when you don't even know which resources are needed in what ratios for medium and long term goals the game hasn't even told you about.

Meh, another early access :/

Supposedly it is feature complete, and the early access is just to gather feedback, figure out the AIs weaknesses and so on. No idea how true that actually is though.

What ratios lol... Influence is key early game. I like to get at least 2 persuasion councilors with propaganda and control nation. Then you decide what you want to do, check out claims because they allow you to unify countries, for example the EU, or the Eurasian union. Research unlocks more claims for further unification. Some countries are hard to control so you first take over countries around them to get some bonuses.

 

[Jaedar]

The "join the aliens!" factions are silly if the aliens are indeed bloodthirsty savages that want to exterminate humanity. Hopefully the presence of these factions means the aliens are not one-note monsters. Otherwise, it would be akin to trying to negotiate with space bugs.

It makes some kind of sense when you consider that the game starts with just a crashed alien spaceship, and no one really knows anything else about them.

But well, some Rabbis cooperated with the nazis. Humans can just be foolish like that sometimes. And in game, it's possible the pro alien factions are plants or mind controlled or something.

But yeah, I also hope the aliens justify having 7 factions.

 

[Ranselknulf]

Y/N: ?

 

[thesecret1]

Couldn't wait so I got it and played for an hour or two. So far, it's surprisingly solid for an Early Access – everything seems to work as it should, there are no unfinished parts I'd notice, and really, it overall feels like a finished game. Performace is kinda bad, but nothing game-breaking. The tutorial is kinda shit, but luckily, you can sort of just go with the flow and figure things out yourself easily enough. Haven't gotten far enough in the game to comment on more than that, but I liked what I've seen so far. Though the AI seems to severely underperform on Normal difficulty – it seems really passive and I'm already leaving it in the dust when it comes to expanding in space (and I haven't even focused in that direction). Hopefully it'll pick up the pace soon, but you probably needn't be afraid of starting on a higher difficulty from the get go.

 

[Joggerino]

It's probably not too different from the demo. The AI does pick up.

 

[Talby]

I will be joining Humanity First. We will drive the xeno scum back into the cold blackness of space.

 

[cyborgboy95]

https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/1176470/view/3266821940207547123

Terra Invicta Released + Development Plans
Hi everyone!

After many years of development, we are thrilled to share Terra Invicta with all of you!

Learning to Play
If you'd like to see some materials to help learn some strategies for your own playthrough, you can check out our release stream at the store page of Perun's playthrough, where he goes through each aspect of how to handle both geopolitics on Earth and Solar System colonization, or take a look at the quick start guide on the wiki: https://hoodedhorse.com/wiki/Terra_Invicta/Beginner%27s_Guide

Early Access Plans
This is a rough roadmap for what we’ve got planned for Terra Invicta in EA and beyond. This is hugely subject to change based on player feedback and our own judgment, so don’t regard any of this as a promise, just a plan as it exists. We hope that during EA you’ll watch the game get better and better as we work toward a 1.0 release.

Scenario

We’re planning to work on what we’re calling a “2070” scenario during EA. This is essentially a start for players who want to play with a (smallish) space program up-and-running from the get-go. This will show up in a regular update of the game at some point. (See below for the status of the Cold War and Foothold scenarios.)

General UI

• Camera operation will get a look. Right now the UI tries to helpfully focus/zoom/pop an information panel when you click something. Sometimes that’s not desired. We’ll look at making mouse-camera interactions consistent so you can, say, get the information panel without moving your camera.
• Notification controls. There are a few of these already, but the game generally is coded for notifications pop an alert, add info to the top-center horizontal feed, or just add something to the left-side vertical newsfeed. We remain hopeful we can reach player consensus on what specific events belong where but we’ll look at adding specific controls for alert priority if we can’t.
• We will look at scaling UIs for greater accessibility and better Deck support. This may not be trivial to pull off; there’s a lot of information to present.

Nations

• Numeric breakdowns of what’s changing certain nation values. Along the lines of “In the last month, GDP in Mexico went up due to the Economy priority by $20M, went down due to environmental damage by $3M, and down by $5M due to warfare.”
• Longer term, if we can keep it performant, we’ll record interesting national data for long term performance reviews.
• Also this kind of feedback for climate change values.

Nation Policies
Add major policies for nations.

• Close Borders. Massive hit to economy. Defense bonus. Severely limits which councilors can visit. Essentially how North Korea is now.
• Mobilization.

Army Warfare

• Army manual pathing and/or destination selection that allows for multiple steps.
• A UI breakdown for army combat about all the modifiers going to a battle.
• We’ll test an “annex region” option during warfare. This will be a long-duration operation by an army to transfer a claimed and occupied region to its home nation. Right now armies capture a capital and claimed territory transfers as a part of a regime change. This is an alternative mechanism to slowly transfer territory in what is otherwise a stalemate.

Space Combat

• AI that works better towards flanks and protects its own flanks better. AI that uses standoff tactics on stations. Greater preference for self-preservation.
• Controls for ships to stay in formation with other ships.
• Group commands.
• A “Pincer” pre-combat option (or some other name like that). Right now, the way to engage fleets that have more Delta-V than you do, and don’t want to fight, is to send two fleets at once so they are forced to engage the second one. We’ll simplify that by letting you split your fleet as the combat starts; the enemy will be forced to fight the weaker of your two fleets.

Habs

• A “duplicate hab design” button. This will be limited in some ways because habs in different locations have different power production and requirements.
• Shipyards need some work; the higher-tier shipyards aren’t helpful enough.
• Need to review antimatter mining. It will never be that much – there is very very little natural antimatter created in the Solar System.

Modding

• Our current modding setup doesn’t allow you to add or substitute new text in easily. We’re planning to fix this.
• Down the road we’ll start conversing with modders about how we can open up aspects of TI better for modding – like exposing a constant in code to config.

Startup options

• Some control of your initial councilors professions, etc.
• Difficulty fine tuning
• Global research speed multiplier

Space Exploration / Navigation

• Aerocapture
• Gravity-assist trajectories
• Allow fleets to abort planned trajectories while waiting for their launch window (this is in progress.)
• Ship propellant-sharing, so they can refuel each other. This should enable tanker-type ship designs.
• Large comets. Need VFX.
• 2 Hab Site space bodies, like Vesta and a few others.

Councilors

• We’re going to explore hard stat caps for various councilor classes (below 25) as a balancing mechanism and to make you think a little harder about who you recruit.
• Invest in your orgs to upgrade them
• Traits or other mechanisms that can lower loyalty of councilors

AI

• The late-game human AI needs to get better at building and utilizing fleets and pursuing its victory conditions.
• AI peacemaking will get a look. Interstate wars tend to persist longer than they need to.
• Human hab AI building still needs some work, particularly with regard to non-required modules. We’ve also seen successful players fill low earth orbits with stations to gain the Earth bonuses. The AI doesn’t do this nearly as much as we’d like.

Translations

Non-English translations of Terra Invicta are still being tested and improved. The game has a couple novels worth of text, and we know there will be some issues remaining – please be patient with us as we work on fixing problems and increasing translation quality.

Performance

• The main remaining problem is that the late-game AI has a lot to do and sometimes the game can get pretty choppy while it is considering its options. This includes designing and building ships, organizing fleets and managing orgs.
• We made a lot of progress with combat and Earth-UI-related performance issues shortly before release. There might be some UI improvements we can still manage.
• There are some large summary UIs (research and nations in particular) that are slow to load.

Content

• More event/mission/objective illustrations are on the way
• More strategy layer music tracks are in production
• Additional faction leader voice files

Probably post-EA: the Cold War and Foothold (far-future) scenarios

These may not be available during the EA period. We’d like to add some additional features to Terra Invicta to better support these, like wet-naval warfare and nation-like polities in space. These are quite a bit more complex to add than some of the things we’ve listed above, so we’ll need to assess what it will take to develop these. Stay tuned.

This is all in addition to the bugfixing and balancing we’ll be doing.

Thank you!
You all have been so great in supporting us over these years of development. From the entire development team at Pavonis Interactive and the publishing team at Hooded Horse, thank you, we can't wait to see your reviews and feedback on the game!

 

[Joggerino]

Sounds fantastic!

 

[RobotSquirrel]

• Camera operation will get a look. Right now the UI tries to helpfully focus/zoom/pop an information panel when you click something. Sometimes that’s not desired. We’ll look at making mouse-camera interactions consistent so you can, say, get the information panel without moving your camera.

Glad this is at the top of the list, its the first thing that stood out as annoying.
Will say it's a lot more stable and feature-complete than most Paradox launches, who btw have the nerve to call their games released half the time. Surprised really at how polished the game is for an early access title.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

The "join the virus!" factions are silly

sounds more believable now?

 

[Talby]

Currently in mid-2025. My pro-human faction has firm control of North America, but the fifth column traitors have seized control of the EU and are rapidly expanding their influence on the continent. The aliens have bases as close as Saturn. I'm hoping to have some military spacecraft soon to launch some counter attacks, or at least eliminate their spy/infiltration ships that are reaching Earth.

 

[Mitleser2020]

The "join the aliens!" factions are silly if the aliens are indeed bloodthirsty savages that want to exterminate humanity. Hopefully the presence of these factions means the aliens are not one-note monsters. Otherwise, it would be akin to trying to negotiate with space bugs.

Some people would support the aliens even if they turn out to be evil space bugs.

 

[lightbane]

The "join the virus!" factions are silly

sounds more believable now?

Different things. If you meant the cough-virus, we still don't' know where it came from (and we will never learn) and the MSM tells you what to think. The Space Aliens are real and the space ship can be seen and more are coming to finish the job, so factions supporting mass-murdering aliens would dispose of themselves by default at some point...

The "join the aliens!" factions are silly if the aliens are indeed bloodthirsty savages that want to exterminate humanity. Hopefully the presence of these factions means the aliens are not one-note monsters. Otherwise, it would be akin to trying to negotiate with space bugs.

Some people would support the aliens even if they turn out to be evil space bugs.

Unless they're like these guys who seem to be crazy to the point of being cartoon villains who want to kill themselves that hard. Even then the article mentions the "pro-aliens" have subfactions with opposed views on the matter.

By the way, I noticed that it seems to be a somewhat common trope of Chinese works of hating humanity to the point of wishing for complete destruction. Stray, the cat cyberpunk game, also had humanity gone as a plot point.
Coincidence, or do they hate life that much?

 

[Jaedar]

My pro-human faction

That's a nice way of saying absolutely nothing concrete about what faction you are playing

The Space Aliens are real and the space ship can be seen and more are coming to finish the job

I mean, how do you know the aliens are real? You're not gonna spot their base in the kuiper belt with a telescope in your backyard. Same with the abductions.

 

[Parsimonious cook]

My pro-human faction

That's a nice way of saying absolutely nothing concrete about what faction you are playing

The Resistance is the only pro-human faction. Everyone else is either a traitor or some kind of a cuck. For example some business elite faction would not be nationalist (pro-nation) because they want to bring in niggers as cheap labor.

 

[thesecret1]

Holy fuck, this game is slow. SLOOOOOOOOOW. 20 hours in and I'm only in 2030, AI is slowly starting to build mining outposts in the solar systems, and first ships (hilariously shitty compared to alien ones, will take a lot of research to make the competitive) are starting to appear. The aliens aren't really doing anything either. Occassionally they build a new mining colony on some asteroid or whatever, and other than that, they just send agents to Earth to perform abduction missions and spread xenofauna (which I subsequently cleanse with fire). It started off so great, when everyone's scrambling for control points and figuring stuff out, but then it turns into a repetitive as fuck grind as you mostly just wait around, sitting at your control point cap, waiting for more research to finish. Except the vast majority of research is shit you don't really need (a small incremental upgrade on a ship part that you don't need because you don't really need ships at this point in the game anyway, for example), so really, you are mostly waiting around for some really long research project to finish to give you something to do for a couple turns, and then it's back to waiting.

They really should redesign this part of the game, the progress is absolutely glacial and there's nothing but routine busywork to do.

 

[thesecret1]

Also watch out, the AI can fuck shit up pretty badly. In my game, USA attacked EU (which was just a merge of France, Spain, and Denmark), and they proceeded to nuke the shit out of each other. EU expended ALL of its nukes, and US used like 80% of them. EU went from one of the richest places in the world into essentially an unlivable wasteland, and US didn't fare much better, being left about on par with middle eastern shitholes. Which would all be fine and dandy, except the environmental damage this caused essentially halved the GDP of everyone in the world.

 

[Joggerino]

Also watch out, the AI can fuck shit up pretty badly. In my game, USA attacked EU (which was just a merge of France, Spain, and Denmark), and they proceeded to nuke the shit out of each other. EU expended ALL of its nukes, and US used like 80% of them. EU went from one of the richest places in the world into essentially an unlivable wasteland, and US didn't fare much better, being left about on par with middle eastern shitholes. Which would all be fine and dandy, except the environmental damage this caused essentially halved the GDP of everyone in the world.

This is the servants ideal scenario. The richest nations destroying each other leaving humanity very weak and vulnerable. Should be a tough game for you now.

 

[thesecret1]

This is the servants ideal scenario. The richest nations destroying each other leaving humanity very weal and vulnerable. Should be a tough game for you now.

The servants, funnily enough, ended up controlling both the EU and the US after the war was over, so you're likely right.

 

[Catacombs]

Holy fuck, this game is slow. SLOOOOOOOOOW.

Thank god this game is in early access.

 

[Axioms]

So I gave a lot of early/beta negative feedback on this game UI wise and with the annoying half real time half turn based thing, and the publisher and devs did not want to listen. All the worst parts of Paradox timer/event based gameplay with a worse UI and lower budget graphics.

 

[thesecret1]

Thank god this game is in early access.

Yeah, I'm hoping for some pretty big changes to the design. First of all, speed shit up. Like a lot. Second, the research is bonkers. To give an example, I have like 10 different kind of shipdrives, some of them straight up better than others, some on more or less equal footing, yet all of them SHIT when compared to even the weakest of alien vessels, with prospects of researching 10 more just as shit drives before I get to something actually good. Why? I get it, I'm supposed to have shit drives at the start so that my ship is slow, etc., but why are there 20 different flavours of garbage? Not to mention, you are researching all this shit at a point in game when you have zero reasons to actually build ships, so you're actually researching lots of stuff you don't really give a hoot about, yet feel you need to research so that you don't fall behind in the future. And it's like that with so many things in that research tree.