My Thoughts About Terra Invicta (Long)

[chetandy]

I've been loving a lot about Terra Invicta. It's a game with incredible promise! Every time I see a review, the word “ambitious” seems to come up in the first few words and that’s for very good reason. The complexity, details, and ludicrous number of different ways to play are a welcome addition to the gaming library of those who want to immerse themselves in the grittiest of details of long-term strategy. That said, there are some really rough edges in the game yet that are absolutely going to need to be smoothed out before I can recommend it to others that don’t mind the absolute grind of a game of this magnitude. Before I go into any of this, please be aware that there are absolutely some HUGE spoilers here, so PLEASE don’t read any further if you’re concerned about game plot points being revealed. They absolutely are revealed and discussed in the following text!

The Good

1) It’s impossible to overstate the scope and scale of what the game is trying to be. It is MASSIVE, and the idea of going from a tiny faction of a couple counselors attempting to convince a few members of the public in Tbilisi to join your cause, to eventually unifying continents under your banner, to colonizing and conquering the solar system, is an epic journey that takes careful forethought.
2) The factions’ concept is so wildly different from the traditional “you are country X and you’re just trying to conquer all the other countries” concept that most games work off of. It’s really interesting to find yourself thinking about which countries you want to control and develop, and which ones you’re ok with abandoning, or possibly even letting another faction control. For instance, if you’re still looking to grow multiple countries/continents and you plan to develop another country next as a military power, you might be ok with letting another faction like Humanity First control that country and hope that they raise the Miltec level and build armies on their own and you can come back later and steal the country away after it’s been developed and you have the control points to own it.
3) The game stages are fantastic. Early game, you’re focusing on small countries. Then you move on to bigger ones, then you work to unify continents. Meanwhile, you’re working on getting to the moon to mine resources, then to Mars, then to the rest of the solar system. The missions that allow you to meet, understand, and work for/against the aliens make for a nice story line as well.
4) The tech tree is immense, and the research system is unique and deeply strategic. You can just let the other factions do the researching for you, and you’ll still be able to access some of the benefits that come from that tech being unlocked. But it also means that you’ll be allowing other factions to control the direction of research. If you want better ship weapons, or better mining capabilities, or better ways of managing countries you control, you’ll need to spend the time and research needed to unlock the correct technologies globally. Global research projects unlock faction-specific research projects, so you’ll need to spend some serious time thinking about how much you want to steer the global research, and how much you want to spend on unlocking the personal faction projects that the global research unlocks. It definitely helps keep things on a relatively level playing field for most of the game.

The Bad

1) Turns drag so slowly. I don’t mind the fact that the game is a grind. It’s meant to be, and that’s fine. I also understand that the game has A LOT to process during turns and it takes a lot of time and CPU to get it all done. But the worst drag isn’t CPU time, it’s the constant irrelevant notifications. Did one of the 500 alien fleets move from Io to Europe? You’ll hear all about it. Do you want to trade with one of the other factions? You’ll get asked to do so 4 times a turn! Want to know when one of your countries is being overrun by an alien army? You actually won’t get notified about that. You just have to be lucky enough to notice it at the exact right time. Every turn is interruption and notification hell. To make things worse, there’s little rhyme or reason to whether hitting “Continue” is going to resume the game or leave it paused. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve sat there staring at my screen wondering why a turn is taking so long only to realize that the game paused after a notification. It wouldn’t be so bad if it was consistent, but it’s all over the place! The game has a desperate need for a “Manage notifications” interface.
2) Terrible lack of automation. Sure, there’s an option to permanently assign a counselor to a specific mission type, but that’s about it. Do you want your high persuasion counselor to automatically run a campaign in the country with the lowest public support among those where you hold a control point? You will have to manually find that country every turn, then manually assign that counselor to that country every turn. Do you want a counselor to run public campaigns in a country until support is at or above 60%? No problem, but again, you’ll have to manually check that metric on EVERY SINGLE TURN! You’ll spend A TON of time managing public support and unrest levels in countries, and it’s rough.
3) You can’t auto-sim. The game is meant to be an intense grind, and the more details you understand and pay attention to, the better off you’ll be. But sometimes, you’re just a year or two away from anything interesting happening and it would be so nice if you could just set up a few of the basic automations mentioned above, and then tell the game to auto-sim a year or so, only stopping if something really needs your input, like having one of our countries taken or a fleet moving to intercept one of your own mines or fleets. If there was an option to apply some basic logic to counselor assignments and then move time forward a bit, this game would be insanely different. But again, there’s just no substitute for grinding, even through the most routine and monotonous tasks. This might seem like an odd complaint for a game that was made by a group that is famous for developing “Long War” mods for X-Com, which was already a relatively long game in the first place. But the scope and scale of the game are so large that giving a player the chance to bypass a little bit of the rote and monotony would be a welcome change. The fun part about Long War wasn’t having to do the same tasks over and over. Even the most patient of grinders will find themselves eventually pleading for a way to get to the next phase of the game without wanting for the excitement of watching paint dry.
4) General lack of visibility into why some scores are or aren’t moving. The tooltips are decent in many places, and some of the metrics are pretty intuitive. A nation with an extremely high level of inequality or low GDP per capita will likely also have a very high level of unrest. And the tooltip tells you so. There are also some great resources online that will tell you the exact formulas used in calculating the resting point of a particular metric score. But often, you just don’t get any visibility into why something is what it is. I’ve had times where I’ve put 100% of a nation’s priorities into the Knowledge priority but can’t get the Democracy score to budge above a certain level. There will be A LOT of times in this game where something works or doesn’t work, and you just won’t have any idea of how or why. There’s a GREAT system to let you know when you’re at the mercy of the RNG system, as most actions that you could assign to your counselor will also tell you the odds of success, but once you get past the success/fail odds of a mission, you will often find yourself having to do a fair bit of searching to try and understand why something is or isn’t happening, and there will be many times when you just can’t figure out what’s going on.
5) Stacks of megafauna SUCK. I’ve seen as many as 200 alien megafauna stacked in the same place and destroying your country/armies and there’s not much you can do beyond just waiting for them to split up and eventually pick off a few of the stragglers. Eventually you’ll get your chance, but when you’re left with that one island with 200 mega’s on it before you can remove the alien administration from Earth entirely, you’ll find yourself extremely annoyed with the need to build enough armies with navies (which take a LONG time to build) to knock a few of them out and then run the whole process over and over and over again. There is NOTHING more annoying than when the stack gets stuck on a region with anti-nuke defenses and you just can’t do anything except send some kamikaze armies at them.
6) Winning the game feels like little more than capitalizing on the aliens getting bored and lazy. I have a lot to say about space combat, but before you even begin fighting out there, you need to build mines and stations in space. The aliens start off being powerful enough to destroy every mine and station you will build for many years. But they won’t… until they do. They leave you alone for a time until you do enough to generate enough hate. That part is fine. But after enough time goes by, they stop sitting around waiting for you to generate enough hate and just come at you no matter what. They could destroy everything you have in a matter of weeks, but they just… don’t. But then then will, but not completely. For a long time, you’ll be building mines to collect resources and then just have to accept the fact that you’re unable to defend yourself in any meaningful way (the layered defense arrays and battle stations do little to nothing to defend against even the smallest of alien fleets) and you will eventually just have to start over again in a different part of the solar system. Or maybe even the exact same part of the solar system. It’s impossible to know at first where they’ll “let” you build and it’s incredibly frustrating to have to rely on them being too lazy to attack you in the right places through a trial-and-error process. The frustration of this is insanely compounded by my next criticism.
7) Space combat just doesn’t work well. First of all, those tiny 1-ship fleets that the aliens send around to bombard and destroy your mines can’t be caught by your fleet… unless you split your fleet into 2 fleets and let the aliens choose to fight against the weaker of the two fleets. Well into the game, alien ships are FAR faster and can avoid a single attacking fleet. If you try to chase them, you’ll just end up with a useless stranded ship that can’t be used for anything. But when an alien fleet runs away from one of your fleets, they will be stuck in that spot for a time, meaning that you can just split your fleets in two and let them run away from the first one only to be caught by the second. That system just feels broken and unrealistic, especially when you consider that it takes quite a long time to get able to build that kind of fleet power. For years, you’ll find that if you try to build a space station, which can take years to do, you’ll see that the aliens just show up the day before it becomes operational and then destroy it. So again, you’ll see that you’re just building stations until the aliens get lazy and just decide not to blow one up. And then you’ll start building a fleet, which the aliens will find unacceptable and make you start all over again. About 30 times into this cycle, the aliens will finally just get bored and let you build enough of a fleet to start fighting back and occasionally blow up one or two of their ships. That’s a pivotal moment for you because you have to destroy their ships to get the best materials in the game to build the strongest ships. When you finally get strong enough to build enough of a fleet to build some antimatter generators that you can defend, the whole game flips on its head. There is a MASIVE jump in capabilities of ships that use antimatter and exotics, the latter of which you need to destroy alien facilities and ships to get. Once you’re collecting those resources, your combat capabilities take off.
8) Designing spaceships is inconsistent and it’s very difficult to work around resource constraints. Do you want to build the best ship that doesn’t require exotics because you don’t have those yet? The game doesn’t have any way of doing that for you. And you can’t just let it auto-design a ship for you and then replace a few parts because every change you make will impact the weight, distance that can be traveled, combat speed, and will likely lead to incompatibilities in parts. Changing your ship’s drive will likely also mean you have to change out the radiator, power system, battery, etc. While it can be fun to tinker and toy around with the different parts, the level of detail and fine tuning you’ll need to do to find the right kind of ship for your current need will be an overwhelming task for quite a while. And the worst part of that is that you’ll likely spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out whether something is even possible. Do you have enough tech and resources to be able to make it to Mars and back with a fleet that’s strong enough to defend itself against an alien fleet with 10K fleet strength? You might end up redesigning a few ships 25 times over only to discover that you’ll be compromising too much in one area or another to make your entire idea impossible.

Overall, I give the current state of the game a 6/10, but I have to add that it absolutely has 10/10 potential. If a few more of these things get smoothed out, this game is one that I could see myself playing for many years. It’s a game that fills me with hope and excitement if the developers can get just a few of the major wrinkles addressed.

I’d love to hear any thoughts you have as well!

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by chetandy:

To make things worse, there’s little rhyme or reason to whether hitting “Continue” is going to resume the game or leave it paused.

If there's another notification, Continue will move on to the next notification. If that was the only notification remaining, then Continue will unpause the game.

I’ve seen as many as 200 alien megafauna stacked in the same place and destroying your country/armies and there’s not much you can do beyond just waiting for them to split up and eventually pick off a few of the stragglers.

You could've burned the xenoflora with your councilors before they spawned?

[DEMONVIA]

All valid points, hoping these issues and suggestions get implemented with the next patch.
just wish the devs were more transparent in what they are working on or when to expect these fixes, i've joined their discord group, the forum and here in order to see what's happening though just been getting radio silence, even after asking when the next patch is coming on their discord get's straight up ignored lol.

[ulzgoroth]

200 megafauna? How is that possible? I think in my entire game there have been at most five.


I'm recurrently boggled by the idea that people want automation for aspects of this game. Yes, there's a lot of fiddly stuff. But it's important fiddly stuff. And automation is extremely untrustworthy. (And greatly increases the risk of you not noticing important decisions that are being made for you.)

Clearly a fair number of people think otherwise, but I'm baffled as to how.

[Gudabeg]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

200 megafauna? How is that possible? I think in my entire game there have been at most five.


I'm recurrently boggled by the idea that people want automation for aspects of this game. Yes, there's a lot of fiddly stuff. But it's important fiddly stuff. And automation is extremely untrustworthy. (And greatly increases the risk of you not noticing important decisions that are being made for you.)

Clearly a fair number of people think otherwise, but I'm baffled as to how.

All true, but spending years doing the same actions every two weeks gets very old very fast.

[chetandy]

I’ve seen as many as 200 alien megafauna stacked in the same place and destroying your country/armies and there’s not much you can do beyond just waiting for them to split up and eventually pick off a few of the stragglers.

You could've burned the xenoflora with your councilors before they spawned? [/quote]

It's definitely true that you can spend turns early in the game going after the Alien Assets that show up all over the globe, but that's a lot of counselor time and energy to spend. I'd be fine with going after those pesky things in my next run at the game. Just don't want to restart again just because of this one issue. It's easy to not know/care about the megafauna that are across the globe tearing apart other countries that you won't be able to control for many years. I had assumed that other factions would take them out if they controlled those countries, but it really seems that they don't.

[chetandy]

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

200 megafauna? How is that possible? I think in my entire game there have been at most five.


I'm recurrently boggled by the idea that people want automation for aspects of this game. Yes, there's a lot of fiddly stuff. But it's important fiddly stuff. And automation is extremely untrustworthy. (And greatly increases the risk of you not noticing important decisions that are being made for you.)

Clearly a fair number of people think otherwise, but I'm baffled as to how.

I'm honestly surprised that you don't see any value in putting in some sort of system where you can tell your counselors to prioritize certain actions. Let me ask you the question another other way: Would you prefer that you had to set every single country priority on every single turn? Probably not. You're probably glad that you can just set the general direction of IPs once and come back and check on the country in a few months or annually or however often, right? That's because it SUCKS to have to set those priorities every turn. Why are your counselors any different? If you know that you're just going to end up setting your highest persuasion on whichever country has the lowest popular support for the next X number of turns, why not have a game mechanism that allows you to skip a few clicks? Manually selecting monotonous tasks isn't the fun part of the game for me. It's the general strategy-setting, not the manual click,click,click,click,click,click implementation of it. Anyone that doesn't want to set up "Counselor automatic mission priorities" or whatever you'd call them would have every ability to play the game exactly as it is now.

[ulzgoroth]

Originally posted by chetandy:

Originally posted by ulzgoroth:

200 megafauna? How is that possible? I think in my entire game there have been at most five.


I'm recurrently boggled by the idea that people want automation for aspects of this game. Yes, there's a lot of fiddly stuff. But it's important fiddly stuff. And automation is extremely untrustworthy. (And greatly increases the risk of you not noticing important decisions that are being made for you.)

Clearly a fair number of people think otherwise, but I'm baffled as to how.

I'm honestly surprised that you don't see any value in putting in some sort of system where you can tell your counselors to prioritize certain actions. Let me ask you the question another other way: Would you prefer that you had to set every single country priority on every single turn? Probably not. You're probably glad that you can just set the general direction of IPs once and come back and check on the country in a few months or annually or however often, right? That's because it SUCKS to have to set those priorities every turn. Why are your counselors any different? If you know that you're just going to end up setting your highest persuasion on whichever country has the lowest popular support for the next X number of turns, why not have a game mechanism that allows you to skip a few clicks? Manually selecting monotonous tasks isn't the fun part of the game for me. It's the general strategy-setting, not the manual click,click,click,click,click,click implementation of it. Anyone that doesn't want to set up "Counselor automatic mission priorities" or whatever you'd call them would have every ability to play the game exactly as it is now.

For the analogy, country priorities don't operate on 'turns', they're (quasi) continuous. And TBH, while I wouldn't say I'd prefer it, it would probably make actually more effective play at a low design cost if at each councilor turn you ran through all your countries and picked a single priority for them to 100% focus for the turn, and it wouldn't even have to be much of a bother to do it with a smart UI. It'd be miserable if you had to keep recoding a whole set of mixed priorities, but that's not analogous and also probably not actually the best tactic.


There's several levels on which I don't see much value in what you're saying.

First off, you're proposing automation that, frankly, is better than games that are serious about automation often demonstrate. And it's going to need a fair chunk of UI. Which countries does your councilor prowl? How do you rig it up, update it, copy it to other councilors at need, and restore it if you have to interrupt the pattern? The UI part is solvable, but it's not trivial and TBH I'd not expect it done well here.

Second, I don't really spend as much time on that as you seem to think. I've got one councilor who often winds up stuck on PR duty for lack of a strong mission selection, but I try to keep my council cycles mostly focused either on something more active or something more passive (that is, long-term Advise missions in superpowers). I can see why you'd want it if what you describe it as doing is an accurate description of what you spend a lot of time doing, but I don't share that perspective.

Third, I don't trust this automation not to be a trainwreck. Do you really want them to focus on Eritria if it's 1% lower support than the USA? Do you get an interrupt every time your councilor is detected, or what are you doing to keep them from being assassinated while they drift around mindlessly? Do they ever spend resources for bonuses?

[Twelvefield]

Discussion about the merits of automation almost completely sidesteps the larger concern that cumbersome parts of the game can be editted out or omitted, and the gameplay would be the same.

[DarthVishis]

The two major issues which I absolutely agree with are that

1) The UI sucks at presenting you with the info you need.
- it will tell you there is a fleet arriving In 6 months, but won't give you a heads up a few days before.
- enemy armies attacking one of your regions, you will never hear about it.
- A quick overview of your controlled nation's which highlights issues. Nope.

Yes you have a nation's screen but it's a lifeless table with poor visual cues and no ability to assign missions in context.

Probably something that would work is to include nation's where you have a presence in the outliner, with visual cues for public support levels, unrest, etc. This way you could see impending issues without having to spin the globe and click on each nation.

2) the two week mission phases get to be tedious as hell.
- would be nice to set threshold values for certain issues to be brought to your attention. Like unrest going over x% in a nation. Unless you examine each nation every turn you will never know.
- also, it's extremely hard to know why certain metrics are heading in a certain direction. You have a vague idea sure (it's climate change, or enemy missions, or alien activity) but specifics are lacking.

[lemurs2]

Op, I agree with some of your points, but the last one is not a problem for me.
I love designing ships and have a background in astrophysics, so love that part.

[chetandy]

Originally posted by lemurs2:

Op, I agree with some of your points, but the last one is not a problem for me.
I love designing ships and have a background in astrophysics, so love that part.

I appreciate the comment! I really don't have too much trouble with the design stuff with the one major caveat that I really can't stand the inability to design around a resource constraint. If the game could intelligently suggest a build that you can you know... actually build, it would be fine. But it's insulting to hit autodesign and basically be told "Here you go... just spend 200 of the 12 exotics you have, and then you can build this ship!" Any resource constraints basically instantly make autodesign worthless and I can't stand that particular nuance.

[orangebookworm]

I've really liked what I've seen so far (I've no complaints otherwise), but one thing that's definitely bugging me are the initial Councilor drops. I'd say 60% of the time, I start with an almost useless scientist that can't do jack in the early game. Sure, the extra research is nice, but the persuasion is almost always so low that control missions are a bust and advise ones cost influence that is expensive in the early going.

I could ditch the scientist, but then most of the time the pool of replacement candidates doesn't really work either. Fixer? Nope, but how about this corrupt pariah politician of a major nation that you can't use in said home nation? Or an operative who starts with an 8 investigation and 11 espionage (was positively salivating about this one until...) but has cynic, suspicious and an apparent loyalty of 0?

Yes, I'm aware that you can dismiss characters, but taking one out (heaven forbid that I get two garbage characters) initially means that you're spending precious influence to break even, and then waiting a month for possible favorable drops, all the while other factions are motoring along grabbing nice, juicy nations with high research, money and military.

It sounds like I'm ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ about this game in general, but I'm really not. I love it otherwise. It just drives me nuts with the starting characters though (I've restarted games quite a bit trying to find a decent enough starting position). I really think it should switch over to choosing the initial two councilors (with no influence loss) instead of just being given a pair at start.

[gimmethegepgun]

Originally posted by orangebookworm:

Or an operative who starts with an 8 investigation and 11 espionage (was positively salivating about this one until...) but has cynic, suspicious and an apparent loyalty of 0?

Apparent Loyalty is almost entirely useless. It never changes along with their loyalty when Inspiring (except Transparent/Loyalty Monitor, obviously). And their loyalty starting low isn't really very important considering with 11 espionage and Suspicious no one is going to find them, so the only problem is that you might get the news broadcast event from having very low loyalty.

[Gudabeg]

Also, GDP, nation research, and Control Point cost needs a big rework.

Currently getting a nation over ~40k GDP per capita is useless as it barely increases research and costs a ton in control points. This makes Mercury Dyson Sphereing for research just better in every way.

The fix would have to be something that makes it more rewarding to increase the economy of countries in terms of research, and makes it less punshing in terms of control point cost. To balance out the extra science from nations space campus and universities could have their science halved and instead give a % modifier to nation science, to encourage more nation development. This modifier could turn back into a flat science boost if the extra science from nations is less than the modifier's income.

Using easy numbers, if for a research campus it's 50% and nations make 50 science then it turns back into a flat 50 science as the modifier would only give 25 science.

[dichebach]

I've played about 250 hours now, all on Normal as Resistance. I figure I'm at no more than 1/4 of the way to "mastery" of the game and possibly more like 1/5. Have only made it as far as 2035. Have five or six archived saves I could go back to and continue but so far I've been enjoying restarting and trying to apply what I've learned from previous partial campaigns.

Some of the game mechanics which are of particular importance are pretty non-intuitive (the way nukes work, the way attacking Alien landings work being the two most notable) and on top of that there is an ENORMOUS amount of content and concept to digest and grasp, much less to master. I had one match where I made it to about 2028 had control of Japan, U.S, Canada and Taiwan and Protectorate controlled PRC war decked me so I invaded. Just as I was about to conquer Beijing the computer nuked my stack, so I nuked every region in PRC. Had no effect on the coherence o their ruling regime, no effect on their nuclear arms stockpile, no effect on their command and control: one-third of the population of PRC killed and they were still in power and able to use their remaining barrages. Just to test this, I sent in another stack to try to take Beijing: yep they nuked it. Nuclear winter ensued (which was believable), but I found the way the nukes were used by the computer to avert defeat and the fact that my barraging the entire country had basically no effect on their regime to be fairly preposterous so I archived it.

Then there was the session where I made it to mid 2030s, had the best economy, best research, awesome councilors, was making great progress into the Xeno research path and had quite an impressive array of space mines and habs with hotels, command centers, research facilities, etc., etc. Aliens showed up, and realized I goofed again and put all my eggs into the "space empire" basket but without the "space fleets" to protect it.

There were a few other partial sessions where I advanced to varying degrees, realized I had made a big mistake and decided to shelf it and start over and I'm not even referring to the first few times I played the game for 20 hours or so just to get the sense for the basic mechanics and how RNG tends to work.

All of this is not so much a criticism, as it is an observation on how massive of a learning cliff this game entails. I'm not sure I'd want that to be 'easier' (though I am critical of how some of the 'less realistic' mechanics like the aforementioned nukes work), but it is important to note that, the typical user is unlikely to endure through this much effort to get to mastery of the game. Perhaps on Cinematic things are more approachable though.

My chief criticisms of the game as it stands:
1. UI needs to be de-obfuscated and accessorized with many QoL features.
2. Hidden stuff (techs, etc.) which is hidden with good reason could at least be hinted at a bit more.
3. The ability to simply click "re-roll" to come up with a new set of starting councilors without having to go back to the Main Menu and restart a whole new session would be fantastic.
4. Nukes, how they function, how they are effected by nuclear strikes, needs to be HEAVILY expanded and reworked if the intent is for the game to come across as realistic. Presently, this part of terrestrial warfare is exceedingly cartoonish. The military formations are only slightly better.

Re: points made by OP: automation I agree would be nice.

I kind of agree with your points about the "Notification hell" are partly you not understanding how to relate to the UI and game flow and, but it is definitely true that, despite the game being incredibly engrossing, I find myself nodding off while playing it too often. I think you may also have something changed in settings that is making things worse for you, but overall, the ability to configure notifications more precisely would be nice.

What I do to get through turns: Hit confirm, then I keep my left hand spread across the Esc and space keys. When I get a notification I tap Esc (which causes the turn process to continue). When I get a mission notification, I tap space (which causes the turn process to continue). JUST THIS, might help you a lot.

As far as the space battles: have not made it that far really, but I think it is pretty undeniable that right now the space battle stuff is a bit rough edged. I get the impression that there is an intent to more fully feature and polish this aspect of the game.

I DO recommend this game to others but not the casual or faint of heart. It is a hard-core 4x grand strategy game for those who are already fans of those genres / styles.