Terra Invicta

Me too.

Just got my backer's code for Steam! Activates 11am Eastern on Monday.

Woo!

I’ll be in for Early Access. I’ve been so curious about this game, for so long, that I have to see it with my own eyes.

EA coverage:

Leana Hafer at PC Gamer: https://www.pcgamer.com/xcoms-best-m...
Jon Bolding at IGN (haven’t watched this yet): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZWZ...
Jonathan Brown at Finger Guns: https://fingerguns.net/games/2022/09...

Love to hear how this goes, isn't this from the Pavonis Interactive (XCOM Long War fame)?

It is indeed.

I hope they improved the UI since the demo. It was a mess.

I'm excited to hear folks' experience of this is but I'mma hold off a while until it's a bit more baked.

The Jon Bolding video makes the game sound fascinating, but I'm worried it'll be too complex for me to find the fun. And, oof, that interface.

I think I'll wait, but it really does sound interesting.

I think people forget that the Long War was quite involved and, well, long.

I have no idea what I'm doing except for taking over countries through subversion. In that you just send operatives to the country and give them the resources for a good chance at success. There is stuff for building fleets and stations but I have no idea how to do it or how to get there.

Apparently that's the first stage of the game. When you get enough "Boost", you can then progress to designing and building spacecraft to mine the solar system, which allows you to construct warships at much lower cost than boosting the parts into space. At this point, the aliens should be attacking Earth. Then, once you start getting ships and fleets only, you move to direct combat with the alien fleet.

This is Crusader Kings or, yes, Long War level stuff. Kinda surprised Paradox did not pick them up as a publisher. If it works, it'll be Civ-like in its effect on the strategy world.

Robear wrote:

This is Crusader Kings or, yes, Long War level stuff. Kinda surprised Paradox did not pick them up as a publisher. If it works, it'll be Civ-like in its effect on the strategy world. :-)

What I WANT this game to be is halfway between XCOM and Crusader Kings.

What I'm probably going to get is Crusader Kings in Space (With Even More Systems).

Gonna have fun finding out lol

Whoa.... The UI is basically "Do this in this menu" but it does not tell you which buttons to click in what sequence to do it. So there is a *ton* of old school "figure it out before we let you move on" going on.

There's also no guidance on how to create your *first* control point, so I decided to try to take over a country that seemed, I dunno, plausible, given its support for my faction. We'll see. 15% chance so it'll fail at first.

There are UI elements you need to click to confirm actions, that look like title bars (and are) but you need to click them to confirm the action. So try that when you are stuck.

Lots of information in the screens but little on how to play.

Game elements don't seem disconnected or make-work, they just need to be introduced with more "go here, push this button, close the window" tutorial bits. For example, it's easy to select a counselor to investigate an alien crash (your first tutorial mission, not a spoiler). But in order to get them to do the mission, you can't click in his info screen. You have to go to the crash location (which is reasonably well-marked) and right click on it, and a nice menu comes up that lets you choose the qualified counselor you want to work on it. Then, another menu comes up, and you confirm your choice and click on the title to finish.

We will see how all this complexity pays off. I suspect we'll see UI revamps for months to come. I hope so.

This is very near the top of my wishlist, but yeah, I prefer to wait either until release or when the majority of players consider the game ready for release.

A friend just told me about this game, quite interesting! I'm looking forward to hearing impressions!

It seems weird to me that factions don't start with at least one control point. Still confused by that.

Potato (of Civ streaming fame) has high praise for the game in one of his latest videos.

I played the skirmish mode and realized I was way out of my depth, especially since I wasn't playing the tutorial. So I set it to allow the AI to play. The combat seems like something right out of The Expanse, except we don't have the benefit of knowing orbital mechanics or having advanced AI help us out.

Okay, really good news for anyone struggling with the mechanics of the game. There is a key understanding that I've just gotten to after Perun mentioned it offhand in one of his videos. It really, really, opens up the game and helps frame all the actions in the game.

It is a pauseable realtime game, but with turns.

That's right. It *looks* like a game where you can do anything at any time, but it's not. I got very frustrated deciding on an action and trying to get the Councillors action menu to come up, but nothing happened. I asked in the Discord group and everyone said "Wait for the next Action Phase" or whatever it's called. Okay, but how do I know when that is?

Then, listening to a Perun video, he mentioned that in the first 15 months or so of the game, there are action phases every week. Then, after the initial scramble for countries, it drops to once every 2 weeks.

Once the game is framed this way, it becomes crystal clear and an exciting pleasure to play. The main play loop is to set the game to a reasonably high speed, then hit the space bar to get it to run. If an event comes up, it will automatically pause and inform you so you can deal with it. Otherwise, it will eventually run out the week and pause. AT THAT TIME, you are informed that you can assign your Councillors to tasks. Once that is done, you hit space and you are back into the loop.

That's right... This is a turn-based pauseable real-time game. Mind blown.

The game has now shifted for me to a fast-paced, exciting, UNDERSTANDABLE game and I'm off to the races folks.

Has anyone been playing the Early Access of this?

I've been watching PotatoMcWhiskey's YouTube campaign and it's broadly fascinating.

However I'm also painfully aware I have neither the time nor inclination to learn how to play this game in it's current state from everything I've seen so far. It will be very interesting to see what they do during EA to further refine the game and make the improvements I rather think it needs.

EDIT: even though I thought I had previously posted to this thread, it would appear I haven't. Hence me repeating what's been said above. Wooops.

Did you read the post I made just before yours, Sorb? maybe that will be of assistance.

I realized the same thing as Robear from the demo after a few tries. Just running the game at high speed and waiting for events to trigger works well.

I also tried the demo with cheats and that was very enlightening as well. Let me experiment with features and see what they do.

Still haven't bought it yet. Going to wait until it has a bit more polish.

Yeah, I figured out the turn thing. It's kind of like being able to do things during a certain time of year, or, maybe think of budgeting in regards to a fiscal year. You have money now, so you can do things.

It doesn't help with the confusing mess of the interface. For anyone who has tried the skirmish mode (since I don't believe anyone has gotten to the point in the campaign where they can build ships), it seems very realistic in all the ways that aren't fun.

I still haven't gotten my key yet.

Contact them. They went out about 2 weeks ago...

Some random thoughts:

There's a setting to make the game run after hitting "Confirm Councilor Actions" which is good to set. When I get home I will edit this with what the setting is. But basically, the game flow with this setting is: assign all your councilors to missions, hit "Confirm", wait (unless something comes up), then deal with the aftermath. Rinse, repeat.

Speed 1 appears to be real time. LOL. Go to Speed 5 unless things get squirrely like fighting a war where you need to watch things more closely and potentially intervene.

You can pause any time which is useful when saving up to buy an organization and you want it as soon as you can afford it, for instance.

Failing an 81% chance for success with a roll of 81.354 is maddening, moreso than X-Com ever was.

This guide looks to be useful but I am still reading through it, so cannot vouch for it 100%: (Guide) How to Defeat an Alien Invasion in 10 Easy Steps - Step 0.. For those who prefer to read or like to supplement watching with reading.

The Servants are dicks.

Robear wrote:

The game has now shifted for me to a fast-paced, exciting, UNDERSTANDABLE game and I'm off to the races folks.

It is still really opaque to me. There's a lot going on, whenever I wrap my mind around one thing, three more things come up that are seemingly incomprehensible.

I am still enjoying my time with it so far.

Just watch Perun play and be enlightened. I'm only on his second video and already things are sooo much more clear. For example, a big part of the game is knowing who to hire for which upcoming tasks, and when to let them go. I did not get that thinking about your councillors skills was not just min-maxing (which I don't enjoy), but essential, even if it's just a simple pass rather than a deep dive.

So much going on. This is, as one reviewer put it, going to change 4X games forever. You know how we've all wanted something to change the Civ formula for these games? This does that.

The Explorminate Podcast did a really good deep dive on Terra Invicta. Perun was one of the guests.

Okay, this game is zooming up my personal charts for the year. Amazing. The depth...

The dev team is primarily working on UI and ease of learning/play at this time. The game itself has been through years of testing and the systems work well, judging from the conversations in the Discord chat more than my own limited experience. So if you were worried that they were still bolting on new gameplay elements, I don't think that's true. I think it's feature-complete and just being polished.

And damn is it good.