I haven't played in a while, then saw that there were a bunch of negative reviews AND a bunch of patches since I last played... so I figured I'd see if there's been any negative developments that would explain it.

Not really. It seems there were a bunch of new players who appear to not have understood what they were buying and, unfortunately for them, put too much time into it to get a refund. Well I'm here to save you from that fate - by telling you exactly what Terra Invicta is!

The game is an acquired taste. Like scotch. And, just like scotch, it will burn going down at first... until it gets sweet when you really get into it... until eventually it just poisons you altogether and you swear you'll never touch the stuff again.... and then, a week or month or year later, you start it up again.

Terra Invicta is an extremely nerdy game. Not nerdy like "I like to play videogames" nerdy. Terra Invicta is the best attempt ever made to create a scientifically-accurate alien invasion simulator.

And, if that wasn't ambitious enough, it's basically three different games in one: a space combat sim, a space war 4x and a deep-state-conspiracy strategy game.

Surprisingly - these three games actually interact pretty well most of the time... especially after some recent QOL improvements.

The most annoying thing is - when you've got one or two of the three down pat - they become tedious chores while you try to focus on the other one. So the conspiracy on Earth game gets boring once you've already conquered most/all of the world... and space combat can get tedious when you've got an unbeatable fleet... which just leaves the 4x logistics of getting your little metal airpockets of death several Astronomical Units away from Earth to the endgame.

What's going on
They're an unimaginably-advanced civilization that can break laws of physics we don't even know exist. You're a naked monkey who just split the atom and can't stop arguing over bananas with all the other monkeys. Oh yeah and they can do mind control.

Even on normal difficulty, you are near-hopelessly outmatched. Your one saving grace is the aliens have a limited throughput with their invasion pipeline and a limited population, so you can use home ground advantage to hopefully survive long enough to do enough research you need so you can fight back with tech they'll take seriously.

Space Combat
And that tech will (mostly) follow the laws of physics. Meaning that, like actual theoretical space drives proposed IRL, most of them will suck and be of little-to-no use in combat. And combat will also follow the laws of physics, so be prepared to watch in horror as your basic-fission-drive monkey ships get rekt because the enemy can literally dodge bullets with fusion drives, acrobatically flying circles around your fleet. If you want to survive the initial invasion, you need to outnumber the hell out of the enemy and overwhelm their point-defense with clouds of missiles.

Once you get dreadnoughts with (EDIT: BETTER ADVICE) good fusion drives, 66 units of armor at the front, a spinal coilgun, 2x large coils and medium UV phaser batteries... the aliens are basically toast. I just fought outnumbered 10 to one and the only thing that killed me was the game crashing (probably because RAM and crappy laptop).

The 4x strategy
As Sseth once said, 4x stands for: eXplore, eXpand and eXterminate all Xenos.

If the aliens could bring whole ships to the Sol system, you'd be screwed. But, as it stands, they have to build their invasion fleet using local materials... which gives you an opportunity to learn from them and respond in kind.

But that requires a LOT of raw materials. Colonizing Mars is just the start... in order to succeed, you'll need to grab valuable real estate in Sol's asteroid belt (Ceres is always popular).

Like I said, the drives (mostly) follow the laws of physics, so they WILL SUCK. The best drives in the early game require way too much Volatiles (jet fuel) or fissiles (nuke sauce) to be practical.

Several of the negative reviews mentioned this facet of the game... but, if you're a giant nerd like me, this is a positive. Think less Star Trek and more The Expanse. Most of the best drives are fusion-based and run on hydrogen.

The best drive in the game runs on antimatter, which comes with a breathtakingly-obscene logistics profile... as in, in order to make the stuff, you have to dedicate the resource equivalent of the total production of several colonies to produce anything more than - I ♥♥♥♥ you not - "femtograms" of antimatter. But, if you got it, then you've pretty much won the logistics war and it's all over but the alien crying.

The worst part about the 4x game is that the human-faction AI is totally incompetent at it. You can expect to suffer the brunt of the invasion yourself because, despite improvements since I last played, the AI is still totally hopeless at it.

The world conspiracy sim
So there are 8 different factions in-game and all of them, with one exception, have pretty solid backstories + raisons d'etre. You don't play as a country. You play as a secret conspiracy of unelected Deep State bureaucrats who wear countries like skinsuits and play politicians like sock puppets.

It does get a little boring once you've beaten it, but the ground game is easily the best part of Terra Invicta AND recent QOL features include an "automatic mission" button so you don't have to babysit your conspiracy council when the time comes. And this part of the game is, unfortunately, the most realistic part of Terra Invicta.

To give you the best idea of what that part of the game is like, here's what my recent Academy playthrough was like:

Academy wants to make peace with the aliens, which involves first studying them, then communicating with them and then threatening them with xenocide so they come to the negotiating table. But, in order for that to work, you need to get the vast majority of the human race under your thumb so you can credibly claim to speak for the whole species.

So I set about creating a world government by first starting in France, then making the EU into a super-state that totally crushed Brexit and dominated the UK... then I crushed Russia and dragged them in too... then allying with China, who proceeded to conquer everything east of India into the Pan-Asian Combine (democracy score= ZERO)... I then took India and Pakistan over and made them go to war with each other, so I could make an Indian super-state without the risk of starting a nuclear war (because I CONTROLLED BOTH SIDES).

I grabbed the US, then used it to conquer Canada and Mexico... then with my 4 massive super-states proceeded to crush every independent nation in Latin America and Africa into the South American Union and the African Union, respectively. Everything else ended up in the Sunni Calphate... (oof! Sorry, Israel! Hope they're treating you OK!). In the end, every nation on the planet was part of the European Union's federation.

But I still couldn't hold on to enough of these states to get the win condition because my management capacity wasn't high enough.

And then I realized what my problem was: the population was too high and GDP was too high - so the people were too free and prosperous to be controlled. I needed to sabotage the global economy to crush the will of recalcitrant western capitalists and destroy the nuclear family, or I'd never be able to exert enough control to dominate the world. So I intentionally tanked every Western economy, while turning the Welfare dial up to max everywhere. The standard of living cratered and so did the population, as the wilting flower of liberty took more lives from suicide, drug abuse and hopelessness than the aliens ever would have.

And, with that, I was finally able to bring Earth under the benevolent rule of a conspiracy of 6 billionaire socialists in order to make peace and end the alien threat.

10/10 would George Soros again

I cannot recommend this game in its current state.

I tried to like this game. Hard. I have never been so excited about the idea behind a game. I check the patch notes nearly every day to see if they fixed some of the annoying things. But the experience has not improved much since I tried the game for the first time a few months ago.

The devs made a fantastic game but forgot to make it fun. You are drowned in micro management, a horrible UI, and a large amount of clicks required for basic actions.

The devs are the creators of the popular Long War Mods for XCOM. XCOM had an amazing UI. It seems to me the Devs thought, hey, lets make the most complex strategy game ever made. But they forgot they also need a UI to handle such a complex game. In XCOM they were provided with it, so maybe they never appreciated the importance of it. I would understand, I didnt realize it either until playing Terra Invicta.

Someone posted on their forum what the typical actions are that are required to intercept a small enemy fleet. I would like to copy paste that here, as it sums up well the experience of the gameplay very well:

get notification that 1/2 corvette fleet is in Callisto orbit

Select 1st fleet

click transfer

click enemy fleet

click confirm

Select 2nd fleet

click transfer

enemy fleet

confirm

wait

maybe they don't get there in time and a module gets destroyed

get popup

select engage

enemy fleet runs away

get popup

select high wall

select engage

enemy fleet cannot run away

gamble with autoresolve or fight easy battle and kill enemy

order fleet back to station (if I don't it will be attacked despite my fleet being right next to it)

Wait 2 days

Repeat the entire loop


This is a very typical part of the gameplay. No thinking is required, just repeating the same actions over and over the whole game long. The early game was fun, when you are learning about the mechanics. But after a while, the game feels shallow. 10% of my time is spent on figuring out the complex grand strategy elements of the game, 90% is spent on menial tasks like above. Its just not fun. Its like instead of playing a grand strategy game you got a factory worker job that just repeats the same actions over and over for 100 hours.

Another example is producing ships for your fleets. You have to manually assign a new ship to produce to a ship yard. Then when a ship is finished producing, it needs you multiple clicks to send the ship to the orbit of your fleet. Then unpause the game, wait until it finishes transferring to the right orbit. Pause again, then select the fleet to merge the new ship into it. You also have to remember the name of the ship cause the UI makes it difficult to know which are the right ships to merge, so often time I find myself doing multiple clicks back and forth to select the right ship. Thats what you have to do for EVERY SINGLE SHIP you produce. Its slightly faster if you produce in the same orbit as your fleet is, but even then its annoying as every single ship needs to be individually merged with your fleet. There is no simple merge all fleets / ships button like in stellaris, or automatically reinforcing fleets. Every single ship you produce requires you to do clicks to assign it to a fleet.

Thats again just one example of the amounts of micro the game requires. The game is full of examples like that.

Most of the annoying parts of the UI and micro management could be fixed with enough focus from the developers. Most of the annoying parts drive me particularly nuts cause you can immediately think of some ways to fix this issue to 90%.

Its a shame that I have to complain so much about the game, cause the premise and idea behind it is amazing. Just the UI makes it horrible to play.

The devs are also very very responsive. I posted bugs to their discord channel a few times and they were fixed within hours! I guess the UI just wasnt in their priorities when designing the mechanics of the game. Now its tough to make the UI handle the complex mechanics.

I hope that maybe in a year or two, this will be a game thats fun to play. It has a lot of promise. Right now it gets annoying to play fast. Especially cause I want to finish my campaign, but would have to drag myself through a click grind fest for dozens of hours to do it.

I will update this review at a later point. Just at the moment I would not recommend to play it unless you have a high tolerance for the grindy micro that I described above.

They say too much of a good thing can be bad, and they’re right.

Terra Invicta is three early access games in one—an incredibly in-depth, accurate, and detailed geopolitical simulator that pits seven human ideologies against one another, a much simpler and more reasonable space industrialization simulator, and an impenetrable space combat simulator game that you’ll only ever see by playing the absolute ♥♥♥♥ out of the first two games—all while an alien invasion of the Sol system is going on. The game's main geopolitical layer is endlessly engaging, with a level of detail similar to Hearts of Iron or Victoria 3.

But the geopolitical cramfest doesn’t fall away to make room for the next layer of alien-fighting gameplay. So while you’re fighting a critical space battle, a lucky roll by the AI could coup d’etat one of your crucial countries, and you’re now juggling the unification of central America with how many UV lasers you can get down range before the aliens pulverize to atoms the fleet it took you 15 in-game years to build. And a restart isn't a simple thing--it's a 20-40 hour process to get back to building fleets that can take on the aliens.

So, It’s a grand strategy game that’s too grand and complex with an overwhelmingly large challenge, but that’s not its main problem. The game is too random for even a seasoned player to play well each time, and there are enough balance issues with the base game that replaying isn’t as rewarding as it should be. It’s too easy to overthrow years of work with an unlucky roll—or a lucky roll, depending on your perspective, and the game is so long you’re going to get some unlucky rolls in there. Imagine my surprise when I realized that a game that clearly wants to be the doctoral candidate in physics and political science spiritual successor to XCOM turns out to have the same random number generation problems. The RNG mechanics really keep it from providing alpha-level story generation much of the time.

On top of that, the playable ideologies aren’t ideologies so much as reactions to the alien arrival. They’re reactions to the presence of aliens, which is fine, but four of the factions seem to be the light and heavy versions of the same reaction—the Resistance and Humanity First are "resist" and the Protectorate and the Servants (terrible name by the way) are "submit." Since these groups have so much in common, they really ought to be easier to work together with, but they aren’t, because not much effort was put into the diplomacy system. The others are a grab bag of leftovers that are not as interesting to play. We should have gotten more variety rather than the light and heavy resist submit, in my view—or a faction that straight up denies that the aliens exist publicly.

Now I’m finished tearing it apart, because it absolutely is fun to play. There’s little more satisfying than when after 10 years of carefully manipulating Earth politics and building bases on and around the Moon, you launch your first, ♥♥♥♥♥♥ little ship to get vaporized by alien plasma cannons. Kudos to the devs for including Lagrange points and recognizing their significance for space settlement, and for pretty easily breaking down resources and making the space settlement part of the game fun, even if the graphics for that part look like they belong in 1996. But back to the positives.

My god, I love the councilor system, and I wish more games had this. Organizations are not mechanical devices that you can set and forget—they are made up of people, who have loyalties and weak points--and apparently can buy the CIA. Seriously though, some of the best parts of the game are when you save enough influence or money to buy organizations like Livermore National Labs or the obvious SpaceX clones that pop up in the game. In one game, I took over Sweden just so I could buy a space company based there. More of that type of gameplay might have made it a decent story generator—"Hey honey, I used the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to research space lasers, and my Pakistani ISI spy managed to murder an alien in Alberta." Chef's kiss story generation, RNG need not apply.

I've already mentioned XCOM mentioned as a spiritual predecessor for this game, but the truth is that Sid Meyer’s Alpha Centauri is just as much an inspiration for this game as XCOM. From the factions and their leaders, the little speeches and personal details about them when certain technologies are researched, and even their little logos, this game is dripping with nostalgia for Alpha Centauri a lot more than grotesque imitators like Sid Meyer’s Beyond Civilization, of which we will. Not. Speak.

The worst part was the realization that I’m never going to finish Terra Invicta, because I love the game. I’ve blown up the galaxy as ruthless annihilators in Stellaris, I’ve built huge kingdoms in Crusader Kings III, and I’ve won on Diety in Civ VI. But I have a family now, and Terra Invicta is just one hill I’m not willing to climb. More accurately I climb the hill and then there are two more, taller hills that randomly change shape, like that dream I have where I’m on Legends of the Hidden Temple and I have to climb the Agrocrag.

So is Terra Invicta worth playing? Absolutely. Rarely is a game this detailed and interesting, and rarely is a review for a game that I’ve spent so much time playing over a short amount of time so negative when I enjoyed most of my time playing it.

My complaints in this review come from a place of love for Terra Invicta, and what it’s trying to be, but it isn’t there yet. You have to make some compromises between gameplay and realism, and compromise is nowhere to be found in Terra Invicta.

Quality of Life is a completely foreign concept, the UI sucks donkey balls, and balance is questionable at best. Clunky, often times annoying, and way too much clicking to do the simplest of actions that you *will* have to mindlessly repeat with your councilor from beginning to end of the game.

BUT. This is still one of the most engaging grand strategy games I've played in a while. The RNG, fairly damn good AI, and the 1-step separation of being a shadow cabal as opposed to a nation or leader really keeps things fresh, and it's all set to a neat backdrop. The game holds a lot of potential, so long as the devs can make it more intuitive.

What if Paradox made an xcom game and the lore and mechanics were based on highly realistic scifi near future fiction like that found in the expanse.

That is Terra Invicta in a sentence and it is glorious.

Be warned, the UI is unpolished, the concepts complicated, and the learning curve steep but holy moly the gameplay is as deep as the solar system itself. By the time you figure out how to get off planet the scope of this "early access" title will floor you. If you are a fan of stellaris, of hard scifi, of the expanse of games that will be considered classic in a decade then you should get this game and suffer the entry cost of making a mistake and having to start a new playthrough or two before you get the mechanics down.

I think this is going to be one of my favorite games of this year.

This is a really good game.

Lots of the negative reviews centre around two things - the UI and the alien hate mechanic. Both are understandable criticisms.

The hate mechanic, if not properly managed, will end your campaign 50 hours in and leave the player confused and frustrated. This is because TI is not a typical 4x game. In one of those you are basically always expanding to the limits of your resources, reach a point in the midgame where you have eclipsed the AI and are trying to meet your victory conditions. This is not how TI works. You will not surpass the Aliens until basically the very end of the game, and if you try and snowball too early they will get angry and rip you apart.

The midgame here is supposed to be a delicate game of cat and mouse, in which you carefully husband your resources and develop the technologies you will need to face the Aliens head on. It requires a lot of patience and knowledge on the part of the player to achieve, and comes at a point where you will feel that you are finally starting to understand the game.

A lot of people fall off here because they have come a long way, and restarting is incredibly unpalatable, especially if you don’t really understand what you did wrong to suddenly invite massive retaliation.

The main failing on the game’s part is giving the player that understanding - there is a small, vague and easily missed message on the side of the screen that warns you about alien hate, but my feeling is that players will often not notice that, or disregard it because it isn’t made out to be that important.

I would change that to be an actual news/event popup that pauses the game and makes the player read and click through the warning message, and maybe include a little detail as to what is causing the rise in danger. This would be a relatively easy change to make and not impact the overall difficulty of the game, but would massively improve understanding of the mechanic and its consequences.

A lot of players use words like “random” or “inexplicable” when describing the sudden change in the behaviour of the AI, but mechanically this change is neither. It does however require a fairly deep understanding of the hate mechanic to not feel random, and I don’t think the developers should rely on the player to figure this out through trial and error, especially when just playing a campaign to the point where it matters takes between 20 and 40 hours for the average player.

That being said this game is easily one of the best strategy games I’ve ever played. Even once you understand all the systems at play it is extremely challenging, and beating that challenge is one of the most satisfying experiences I’ve ever had in any game. The odds feel so insurmountable at the beginning and in the middle of a campaign that overcoming them gives a sense of achievement that’s unmatched in the genre.

This game is easily a 9/10. It would be a 10 if the UI were just a little better. I understand that a game this complex is always going to have a lot going on and to keep track of, but it can sometimes be difficult/tedious to do what you want to do even if you know exactly what that is and how to do it. Some way to mass-upgrade ships and stations would be good for example, and the tech tree can be difficult to navigate since it’s very busy - it would be good to be able to filter out certain techs or tech-types to make it easier to find what you’re looking for in there. But there have already been huge improvements made there - I first played on release and have returned a full year later to find the game a lot more playable than it was a year ago, and I expect this trend will continue.

Terra Invicta!

I've noticed that almost all of the negative reviews are from people with less than 10 hours played, and mostly seem to complain that they don't understand how to play the game. As someone who's played extensively during the closed beta, hopefully I can provide a more informed opinion on whether or not you should buy Terra Invicta.

First of all, the tutorial and UX definitely need work, and this is by far the weakest aspect of the game. I understand how someone could buy the game, launch it for the first time, and be completely overwhelmed. Hopefully this is improved soon, but in the meantime I would recommend watching Perungamingau's let's play to see how an experienced player approaches TI. You can also ask around in the official discord if you need help with something specific.

This brings me to the question of whether this game is worth both the price and the learning curve. In my opinion, the answer is yes if any of the following describe you:

• You enjoy XCOM and the Long War mod (this game is made by the developers of said mod).
  
• You enjoy The Expanse, and wish there was a game that captured the space combat of that setting.
  
• You enjoy grand strategy games, but want something with more depth than the typical map painter.
  
• You like the space exploration of Kerbal Space Program, but you want to blow up alien ships instead of just your own.
  
• You're not afraid of a game that is challenging, complex, and doesn't hold your hand.

Terra Invicta isn't a game for everyone, but if this sounds like something you'd enjoy and you're willing to learn how to play, you're going to have a blast.

EA Review from 40ish hours in:

TL;DR: Rough around the edges, clunky ui, but very playable and engaging

Terra Invicta is a game about aliens coming to our solar system and humanities reaction to it. You play as one of 8 factions representing the different reactions to this first contact and your objective in the game is related to your faction. Some want to fight alien invasion (classic Independence Day style resistance movement), others want to submit to them, some want to escape the solar system to get away from them etc. The other factions are your frenemies throughout the rest of the game.

But how does it play? The game is, broadly speaking, broken up into 2 parts. In the beginning you are trying to gain control of various nation states of the world in an espionage heavy way. Since you play as an illuminati-style secret society/ ideology with no defined borders or headquarters, you play through agents that are aligned with you that you can send on different tasks throughout the world in order to gain more power for your faction and to hinder other factions. For example you might be couping a country to gain access to its resources, attempting to arrest an agent of another faction, spreading propaganda for your cause etc all on one turn. This feels very similar to games like Twilight Struggle and other cold-war espionage games. And while this is happening the aliens are doing mysterious things on Earth and in orbit which you've gotta keep an eye on.

Once you gain enough power and resources to send material into space the game evolves into its second phase. You begin to prospect different planetary bodies for resources, found orbital stations, and found outposts on other worlds to get their resources. You cant get everything you need on Earth to create a space navy (at least not cheaply) so you need to mine and defend outposts all over the solar system so that you have the resources needed to have a presence in space.

The space naval system is very hard sci-fi; ships have a limited amount of fuel (noted in kps/deltaV for you ksp fans) which is used both to transfer between different stellar bodies AND maneuver in combat. If you use all your fuel in combat you can be stuck floating in space and vice versa. In order to keep your navy operational all over the system you NEED supply depots to refuel/resupply. Consider that it can take 2+ years for a ship to travel between just Earth and Mars (especially if you are trying to save fuel with a good transfer window) and this process can become quite complex.

So whats the bad news? First off the game is very early access; menus are clunky/intuitive, balance/ pacing feel very strange (overall the game is very slow, expect to spend roughly 1 IRL hour per ingame year. Latest I have gotten is just before 2040, which feels about at the midgame), the tech tree lags the game when its open for some reason, the perspective on different astral bodies in the solar system mode is impossible to visually gauge relative distance/position to one another (similar to looking at a constellation map all bodies all appear to be on a flat dome), and other associated QoL gripes.

With the above complaining over, what are the best parts of the game?
- The espionage system is VERY fun, honestly it could be an entire game on its own if you took the aliens out
- The space combat is very cool. Very steep learning curve for creating an effective space navy
- Space logistics is deeply engaging. Having the right ships, in the right place, at the right time, with the right stuff, will be an enduring challenge in this game
- The writing. Every faction has unique flavor text for alien encounters and every tech has some voice acting and a ton of writing associated with it that helps the world come alive

This game has incredible potential, and I really love the way it develops over the course of a campaign. In my opinion it does this better than any other Strategy game I've played. The nation control aspect is an interesting early game, the space transfers and combat are genuinely excellent, and the focus on realism is noticeable, and appreciated, throughout.

Unfortunately, the game is plagued by a variety of issues that make me unable to recommend it.

#1 The UI is the laggiest I've ever seen in any game. There's noticeable delay any time you open any screen, click on anything and have the screen move, select units, etc. It's an awful experience and imo the devs should be ashamed to put something out there (even in early access) that just feels so bad. Certain screens take up to 10 seconds to load and they're not cached so when I wanted to compare two things I took a screenshot and put it on my other monitor rather than deal with the lag of switching back and forth. This is also the main reason I can't really praise the research system, interacting with it is such a laggy mess that it takes all the fun out of it.

#2 The councilors are really cool at the start, but they quickly become a mental energy drain. By the late 20s you'll definitely have your center of power set up and be focusing on space expansion and research, at that point having to stop twice a month to just do some stuff feels like busywork and really frustrating.

#3 The Mission Control alien hate mechanic is weird, basically it caps you from building anything but the essentials for a while until at one point you just build a large enough fleet to wipe out the aliens from around Mars, Mercury and Earth and at that point you can get as much Mission Control as you'd like from Mercury and now you actually get to enjoy space exploration and having bases all over the place, but the game is also trivial because with Mercury you'll get hundreds of MC cap which you can use to squash the aliens.

Basically, by the mid-late game, everything feels like it just drags on, and it doesn't feel fun anymore. I really hope the devs fix it because this game has incredible potential. Please just fix the UI lag.

For me, this is one of those games that as soon as I started playing I realised it was a game I'd been waiting for my whole life. I think the genius lies in how it opens up modern geopolitics for dynamic gameplay by giving an impetus for rapid change. Aliens.

But within that is the starting point for a whole genre of science fiction that I've never encountered before but actually blows my mind. Which is the idea that any new species that arrived in our solar system likely wouldn't bring all the resources they needed for an invasion with them. When the Americas were colonised, the invaders didn't arrive with a fleet of a thousand ships, loaded with weapons and supplies. That would have been a logistical nightmare. Nah. They arrived slowly, extracted local resources, and used those resources to push outwards.

That's what the aliens do in this game and it's way more interesting than those overpaid, fancy-pants aliens in the movies.

I'm 10 hours in and totally hooked. Love the system, love the gameplay, love the pacing, love the graphics. Can't wait to see what the developers do with it.