Terra. Invicta.
I controlled Mars, but the Servants, who worship the aliens as gods, had taken Phobos and Deimos. From a previous failed campaign I knew that if I let the Servants gain orbital superiority over Mars, they would shell all of my mines into regolith from low orbit while I watched helplessly. Then, starved of crucial shipbuilding resources, my faction - the Resistance - would wither and die. I’m sure they felt the same fear looking at my fleet. We were both building up our forces as quickly as we could: reinforcements, whether from Earth or the Inner Belt, would take more than a year to arrive, meaning that whoever won the battle for Mars orbit would control the fate of the red planet - and its riches - forever. Or at least until the aliens arrived to wipe us off the map, which amounts to the same thing. Eventually I was able to gain a sliver of a technological lead and force their fleet to battle.
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Hooded Horse came out of nowhere a few years ago to become one of the best (IMO) indie game publishers anywhere. I still haven’t been able to figure out whether they’re actually that good or if my tastes and theirs just overlap perfectly, but who cares: they’ve produced hit after hit. Not necessarily critical successes - though almost all of them are rated “overwhelmingly positive” on Steam - but games that just rule. The kind of game that swings for the fences and succeeds in more than it fails.
Terra Invicta is one of those games. Aliens have come to Earth, and you play as one of the secret societies reacting to that news. The first 10-15 hours of a run are spent in what is basically a political thriller simulator - your agents subvert governments, spread propaganda, and initiate coups to try to control as much of the globe as possible. All the while, you devote every resource you can to sprint towards where the actual game begins: space. At that point Terra Invicta turns into an outrageously detailed orbital mechanics simulation. I haven’t actually won yet so I’m not sure what happens after that, but so far it’s awesome.
It’s not for everybody. The game is kind of hostile - it’s obscenely complicated, really doesn’t give you much in the way of tutorials, and in each of my four attempts, thus far, I’ve realized that I made a deadly mistake about 3 hours ago from which there’s no recovery. (Specifically: One time, I concentrated too much of my space infrastructure on Mars, so when the Aliens cracked the planet, I lost everything. Another time, I was so focused on space that when the China-India-EU alliance invaded my America, I was wiped out. Another time, I was so aggressive against the Alien quislings so early that the Aliens left everyone else alone and crushed me.)
But if you’re the kind of person that thinks spreadsheets are fun - if you’re the kind of person whose biggest problem with strategy games is that they’re too easy - TI is the game for you.
I've been playing a lot (like, a lot a lot) of Terra Invicta recently and it I wouldn't necessarily just call it complicated. It's obtuse and actively hostile to the player.
There's some interesting stuff in there, but it's built with such a specific mindset that eventually the wheels start to fall off.
For example, there's a whole diplomacy system, but if you get far enough ahead it becomes unusable because you generate so much threat automatically that you have to spend as much time fighting off the other humans as you do fighting off the aliens.
And the tech tree is full of traps. Not just useless technologies, but in some cases ones that are actively harmful. For example, unlocking exofighters means the other human factions will just use them to blow up your stations. You're better off never bothering to research it. For context: there's a global tech tree that unlocks individual "projects" and you have to split your research between them. So you can't really research tech without giving it to everyone, and you're not even guaranteed to always get what you invest in.
I'm a big fan of games where you have to learn them in order to achieve mastery, such as Noita or Cultist Simulator/Book of Hours. Terra Invicta is kind of like a twisted version of that where some parts of it require learning and mastery, but other parts are more like the sort of "guess what the DM is thinking" brand of bad TTRPG puzzle.
Everything in space uses physics simulations of varying complexity and accuracy, but for everything planetside it's weirdly gamified. Merging France and Germany, for example, into a single country should not be easier conceptually than getting a ship to Mars. It feels deeply incongruent.
All in all I would call it an interesting game, but not a good game. It has interesting ideas and deep, foundational flaws. You can work around them if you're willing spend a lot of time reading and even more restarting, but it requires buying into the dev's specific vision
There are definitely flaws, but I still consider it a great game. I think for me, for a game like this, I’d rather the devs have this massive, ambitious vision and mostly pull it off than have a perfectly polished, balanced, but ultimately less interesting game. I do think your point about having to buy into the devs’ specific vision is fair, though: I’ve also had the experience where I get too far ahead of the other human factions and get crushed by the aliens, which is kind of inevitable given the threat meter mechanic. But with a lot of that sort of thing (see also: unifying nations, sometimes aggressive behavior by other human factions, sometimes subservient behavior, etc.) I’m willing to accept it as part of the emergent story about humanity being massively overpowered by the alien arrivals.
Weirdly, exofighters have only ever been a positive for me. If I were to complain about the tech tree it’d be the 16,000 different drives, which I understand are apparently quite realistically modeled but only about 5% of which are good.
Yeah, it's definitely got some interesting stuff going on and I do recommend folks play if all the caveats don't drive them off. But it's a very specific type of game for a very specific type of person. And while I agree that I would rather have this than something perfectly polished and, for lack of a better term, AAA, I would also have liked someone on their team with the authority to make obvious QoL changes. Like drive + reactor combos really should come in bundles. No one needs the level of granularity they put in and it's deeply unintuitive. Or how about someone who could say they should rethink their random percentage unlock system for projects. I get the vision, but, at least IMO, it's bad and doesn't work.
Anyway, it did end up being significantly better than I was expecting from the Long War people, but I still feel like it falls apart after a while.
Perun - the Australian YouTuber who does a weekly hour-long powerpoint on defense economics (that I then post here on Sundays) plays this game on his gaming channel.
I've not watched his gaming channel as I just like his defense economics analysis presentations, but after reading your synopsis on the game, I'm seeing why he likes and plays it.
Thank you.
He's also in the game, in a little easter egg. You can amass organizations that help you run the world, and one of them is Perun.
WHahaaaaaaa????
Oh that's hilarious!
Oh, hey, they did it!
Quick history lesson: Pavonis Interactive, the studio that made this game, got their start as a team of modders; specifically, modders for the rebooted XCOM game. Their mod, Long War, was such a hit that the developers of XCOM 2 purposefully made that game to be extremely mod-friendly, citing them as the inspiration (the XCOM devs even brought them on to make a few mods that were launched with the game in the Steam workshop). The Pavonis folks took a step back from modding at this point though to focus on their own game, Terra Invicta.
Now, personally, Long War never quite clicked for me; it was a little too involved and complicated for my tastes, but I loved XCOM 2. The mods opened up so much customization of almost literally every aspect of the game, and really extended the the lifespan of a work whose franchise now seems effectively dead. So while Terra Invicta seems like one I'd probably bounce off of, it's a real bright spot in my day to see that the people who contributed so much to something I enjoy seem to be thriving.
Well, this is piling on the budding pressure I feel to give Terra Invicta a try, thaaanks :D
I'm not sure there's any way to fit both this and Europa Universalis V into my already scarce gaming time ^^
I, like the others in this thread, have been playing the hell out of this game. Its the inverse scope of XCOM and the dev experience with the Long War mod really shows.
I'm only just now in my second attempt able to comfortably leave the early game with a decent position but I'm now seeing the challenges in my plan. Unsurprisingly, the populace loses interest in your faction when you lose 5 armies in a war. Also, defensive fighting and offensive fighting are apparently scored differently. I got absolutely smashed when I tried to cross the border and gain a territory after kicking the enemy out of mine.
Overall I love the game. I understand some of the criticisms, and they are valid, but I also love how they set up the pieces like a crazy complex board game. It scratches my itch for those games nobody will play with me because they are too intimidating and take all day. I can happily push my pawns around a board and wait for the consequences later.
Would someone please be able to tell me in a spoiler free way, at the beginning is there anything I should be doing beyond councillor missions?
I just started last night, probably an hour in. I understand the game will open up later, but I have this feeling I’ve missed something crucial.
At the stage you're at it's basically counselor missions, consolidating countries, research, and buying companies
Space will kick off when the Mission to the Moon global technology finishes. Ideally you want to be saving up boost so that you can establish a moon base with a mine on it. You'll probably want around 50 boost by then if you can manage it
Wonderful, thank you
The moon is very short on resources compared to almost everywhere else in the solar system, so you really want to use the moon as a stepping stone to Mars and beyond, for your planning. You likely don't want more than 1-2 bases there - just enough to get some resources and decrease the boost cost for missions elsewhere.
In case it hasn't become clear yet, you'll need boost and money to establish any sort of facility in a new orbital system, but once you have the core (and it doesn't even have to be finished building), you can use space-based resources to build everything else. Your power sources, your mines, etc. That'll save you tons of boost, to the extent that boost stops becoming the bottleneck quite quickly.
Also, you'll likely want to build a construction center/nanofactory on your first mars facility. That will let you build additional facilities with resources instead of boost -- and, much more importantly, will let you start it from the facility instead of Earth, meaning your construction time for the facility will drop from something like a year to 40 days.
It's been on my wish list for a bit I think. Been on a bit of a grand strategy fix having completed a few victoria 3 and shadow of the forbidden gods run throughs. This looks right up my alley.