To be fair it’s still v0.3.x and a lot of this could be fixed by a simple right-click menu on fleets in the outliner which would let you give orders without focussing the fleet and therefore changing the base game speed and making the camera go crazy. Same for armies although that is less painful.
I cannot emphasize enough how awesome it is seeing a wall of battleships cruise towards the enemy fleet, defences taking out the incoming fire while the main guns are dealing out destruction, and one by one they fall out of line and explode, hundreds of brave soldiers casualties of the fight against the alien menace, until a last few are left, out of formation and maneovering to try to take out the last couple of alien dreadnaughts, so they can return to base, having lost many comrades but ensured earth is safe for another few months…
Of course most fights are considerably more one sided…
Also am so delighted to see a game try and take inspiration from SMAC, with seven ideological factions and voiced tech quotes which try to remind you of the ideology.
Actually - game idea - reverse terra invicta - the factions are from a human colony ship arriving in an alien system and shattering into seven factions on arrival. Each faction sets up colonies in the kuiper belt, and tries to expand their infrastructure inwards while in the geopolitics map you are infiltrating/uplifting/enslaving the aliens for resources and support against the other factions.
I mean its a bit nakedly colonialist but TI isn’t afraid to take on this kind of issue head on.
I want a casualty count for your forces on the battle results screen now.
And a monthly count of how many people died to megafauna attacks. Ignoring xenofauna rampaging through Africa might be the optimal play…but a monlty notification saying “We estimate 70000 people were killed by alien megafauna this month. Another 1.2m were forced to flee their homes and become refugees” would remind you of the costs.
Put all this stuff behind a tickbox at game start. “pathos mode”. It would probably annoy some people.
This has been driving me insane, especially after I created a specialized interdiction fleet that has a different base speed than my main fleet – it’s really tough to coordinate both fleets arriving at the same time and in the right order.
Apparently the devs are going to make it so you split your fleet when you first engage. But the whole interdiction mechanic still feels like a poor solution to the problem “it’s not fun that alien ships are faster than the humans for 95% of the game”.
I’m with you but I wish there was slightly less direct inspiration. Like, the Initiative’s Van Wyk is CEO Nwabudike Morgan, minus the exceptional writing that made Morgan’s free market sociopathy almost sound reasonable.
I would love this. A lot of the “optimal” strategies people have found are ethically awful – like ransacking the third world for funds, or manipulating wars between controlled countries to shuffle territories – and it would be cool to see the game acknowledge that in some way.
Just fired this up a few minutes ago and started the tutorial. UFO crash in Kharkiv region so I scroll over. Did it bother anyone else that Crimea/Sevastopol is shown as part of Russia or is it just a me thing (not trying to turn the discussion to politics, I am just curious)?
Anyway, looking forward to diving in, was just a little offputting as the first thing I saw. :)
I think its very much a map of de facto control and not internationally recognized ownership. At going by how easy it seems to annex things in the game. I dont know if their system could even model the actual situation.
One of the developers of Terra Invicta wrote a novel, which is set in a very similar universe and has very similar concerns (space ships blowing each other up in a hard-sci-fi manner). So if you want to pre-game Terra Invicta and get immersed in its milieu before the final release you can do so for $2.99
My feeling is if you’re going to spend 500 hours playing Terra Invicta, you might as well spend another 10 hours reading the official fan fiction for it.
The reviews on Steam give me pause, on what would otherwise be a really appealing game even in early access. In particular, some reviews highlight what they say is a serious flaw in the core game structure, where to win you have to really game the system by not appearing to be winning because as soon as you get ahead of anyone the aliens attack you and you’re toast. They described the game as mostly trying to lag behind one or two other factions and let them take the hits. The reviews also noted that threat level management is frustrating because you never really know how much threat you are generating, so even if you do min/max things to avoid doing too well, you can’t be comfortable that it’s even working.
I take reviews, especially early access reviews, with a helping of NaCl, of course, but is any of this really the case?
It’s half fair. I think the mechanic is easy to navigate once you grasp it, but the game (maybe deliberately) doesn’t do a great job teaching you. It’s like a responsive difficulty system that the developers made too visible and now players are understandably focused on gaming it.
Unlike games like XCom, at the start you can’t win even minor skirmishes against the aliens. The game has a threat meter so you can still play and build stuff – the aliens ignore you until the threat meter’s full.
If you go over too early, the aliens blow up some of your stuff but the threat meter drops and they leave you alone again. If you go over when you’re ready, you’re in a shooting war for the rest of the game and threat level doesn’t matter anymore. It’s really only a concern for the first third of the game, and deliberately lagging behind other factions isn’t necessary.
What upsets the aliens is what you’d expect:
Blowing up their ships
Trying to destroy their human factions, instead of just containing them
Building an interplanetary economic war machine
I think the developers expected that players would overstretch themselves and get knocked down a couple of times. But players hate when you mess with linear progression in 4X games that take tens of hours to play.
In the game story, in canon, that’s part of the reason the humans have a chance. Maybe the game should make it more explicit. And on a faction level it makes sense too, half the game is spy vs spy faction stuff. 2 of your 8 counselors are actually other factions counselors, who are secretly deep cover agents for YOU, that you use just to screw them.
