Terra Invicta
WISHLIST MORE HOODED HORSE STRATEGY GAMES
the GameAn extraterrestrial probe is detected approaching Earth. Unknown to humanity, an alien force has arrived in the far reaches of the icy Kuiper Belt and has begun mining a dwarf planet to prepare for an invasion.
With Earth’s nations unable to unite to address the alien arrival, transnational groups of like-minded political, military, and scientific leaders develop covert channels to coordinate a response. With the aliens’ motives uncertain, factions emerge, driven by hope, fear, or greed.
You will control one of these factions.
- The Resistance works to form an alliance of nations to mount a coordinated defense
- Humanity First vows to exterminate the aliens alongside any who sympathize with them
- The Servants worship the aliens and believe they will solve all the troubles of the world
- The Protectorate advocates negotiated surrender as the only means to avoid annihilation
- The Academy hopes the alien arrival heralds the opportunity to form an interstellar alliance
- The Initiative seeks to profit from the chaos and destruction
- Project Exodus plans to build a massive starship and flee the Solar System
A distant anomaly, a mysterious crash site, and a spike in reported disappearances. Could this truly be humanity’s first contact with extraterrestrial lifeforms? As your field agents investigate sightings and your scientists race to explore new fields of research, you will slowly learn the truth behind the alien arrival.
- From early sightings and UFO crash sites to rampaging alien megafauna and robotic armies, it will rapidly become clear that the other six human factions are not your sole competition. Throughout the game, illustrated events will present you with difficult choices as you investigate growing alien activity on Earth. Uncover the mystery of the aliens’ origins and motives – unless, of course, you are Humanity First, and all that matters to you is extermination.
- Terra Invicta has a global research system that creates opportunities for both competition and cooperation. Shared scientific advancement unlocks private engineering projects. Factions can choose to focus on private projects, at the cost of weakening Earth as a whole and ceding influence over global research direction to other factions with different priorities. Left unchecked, factions like the Servants or the Initiative may steer the world’s efforts toward developing methods of social control, rather than propulsion or weapon systems.
You begin on Earth as the head of a shadowy organization devoted to your chosen ideology. The aliens are coming – soon – but your first enemies (and perhaps allies) will be other human factions.
- Lead a faction united by ideology, rather than a nation defined by territory. This is a stark change from most strategy games – in Terra Invicta, you will not paint the map with the colors of some chosen nation. Instead you will rule from the shadows and compete with other factions for control points representing a region’s military, economic, and political leadership.
- Geopolitics is your sandbox – unite or break apart nations as best serves your ends, while using those under your influence to conduct proxy wars against the other six factions. Earth’s regions are modeled in detail, from educational levels and unrest to GDP and inequality. Gaining command over regions with great monetary wealth and military power can allow you to implement your will on Earth, but the war for the Solar System will not be won without also securing regions containing space launch facilities.
- Enact your will through a council of politicians, scientists, and operatives sent around the world (and even into space). The starting abilities of these councilors will improve through gaining experience and acquiring control over powerful organizations like intelligence agencies or wealthy corporations. A veteran commander may make the perfect choice to lead a tactical team under the council’s direction, while an experienced diplomat works to secure the funding needed to resist the alien invasion.
- Seek out like-minded populations and politicians and take actions to convert followers of opposing ideologies. Public opinion is modeled along multiple axes – the Servants’ alien worship and the Protectorate’s advocacy of negotiated surrender may largely align in terms of support or opposition to the aliens, but events that show the aliens can be defeated have the potential to convince followers of the Protectorate that resistance is a realistic choice.
Terra Invicta bridges the gap between our modern-day world and the vast interstellar empires of other space strategy games, asking you to take humanity’s first steps in colonizing our Solar System, where over 300 asteroids, moons, and planets in constant motion create an ever-changing strategic map.
- Take your faction beyond the confines of Earth, building space stations to act as shipyards and fuel depots, constructing mining stations to acquire advanced resources, and establishing bases to serve as research or construction facilities. Terra Invicta zooms into the strategic geography of the Solar System, presenting space not as a series of isolated stars that you order units to move to and from, but rather a rich and varied landscape of asteroids, moons, dwarf planets, gas giants, and other celestial bodies creating texture and tactical opportunities at every turn.
- The expansive map is constantly shifting as celestial bodies orbit the Sun. This means your space stations and forward operating bases are constantly moving as well, forcing you to plan accordingly and adapt to the evolving circumstances – your colonies among the Jovian moons could find that a once-distant alien military outpost or Initiative privateering base has suddenly become a close neighbor.
Terra Invicta explores what might be – how colonies on Mars might function, what plausible engines could power our spaceships, and the nature of how space colonization and warfare might proceed. Players may find themselves establishing a mining base on the asteroid 16 Psyche after noticing it is rich in metals – and then learn that in our world NASA is planning The Psyche Mission for the same reason.
- Exploring and eventually colonizing space will require access to many resources: water for life support and propellant, metals for manufacturing, fissiles for nuclear drives and weapons, and more. At the start, you’ll have no choice but to acquire such resources on Earth and suffer the high cost of using rockets to escape Earth’s gravity, but over time you’ll increasingly choose to instead rely on asteroid mining and other means of securing local supply.
- Spaceship design in Terra Invicta draws from the best of scientific speculation and hard science fiction. You can design your own ships, selecting from an array of weapons, drives, and other modules to place on a variety of hulls, ensuring each ship has the right mix of fuel capacity, maneuverability, and other capabilities.
- Tactical combat is built around a realistic simulation of Newtonian physics, where momentum and maneuver in 3D space are just as important as the firepower your ships carry. Fire missiles and use point defense cannons to destroy incoming projectiles; build up momentum then swing hard to bring the enemy into your firing arcs; or grapple with the difficult decision to retract radiators and sacrifice heat dissipation to achieve better armor against an incoming enemy barrage.
Terra Invicta is built with modding support in mind, and much of the game is accessible to modders without a coding background. We hope that the Solar System setting and geopolitics simulation will provide a useful framework for modders to realize their own creative visions.
Game Discussion
Steam User 125
This game has a level of mechanical complexity and emergent strategy that I have not seen rivaled by any other game. It is essentially an illuminati 4x, space colonization, and space combat sim stapled together.
This game's learning curve is incredibly steep, and a playthrough can run up to 100 hours to completion.
That kind of commitment isn't for everyone, but if you're on board for that it is an incredible experience.
My one critique: Devs, you have got to drop the war with minmaxxers. When you nerf techs and councilor actions in response to the most fine-tuned, 1000+ hour player time players, you are simply gimping the experience for everyone else.
Don't be like EU4 where entire mechanics are simply not worth engaging with because they have less than 5-10% chance to do anything.
Minmaxxers will ALWAYS find a new cheese, the only thing you are NERFING long term is the FLAVOR of the game.
Steam User 118
Good god where do I even begin?
Terra Invicta is nothing short of a work of art. It stands as the single most in-depth strategy game I've played in a very long time, and there's so many positives about the game. The game is DENSE. I read a ton of guides after my first couple of failed runs and wound up super cautious (I think I missed my window to end the game earlier as a result) and it took me until 2079. But god if I didn't love every second of it and I'm sitting here shell-shocked over what I just went through.
The game is broadly broken up into 3 stages. Earth phase, early space/building strength phase, and loud phase. Similarly, the game is broken up by turn and real-time based play. You spend the Earth phase vying for control over the various countries on earth and generally building your foundation to go to space. As soon as you're in space, that becomes more the concern as you consolidate your power on earth while building the beginnings of a wartime economy. Then, once you're fully at war in space, Earth becomes almost an afterthought, mostly spending time on it trying to do fun things like reverse global warming, or paint the world while you coordinate the absolute behemoth that is your spacetime economy.
Space travel is slow, realistic, only becoming faster as you reach the upper echelons of drive tech. What this means is it's very easy to get attached to particular fleets as you set them in motion years in advance and watch them grow over time, adding officers as they win battles and becoming more veteran. There were many instances where I set things in motion months if not years in advance, waiting for the right time to come. I came out of this feeling like I just witnessed 50 years of history. I could write wikipedia articles about the Resistance Wars, the battles the Eurasian Armada fought, and the offshoot of veterans who fought a final battle at Neptune to close that front and retire above its blue surface.
Ultimately, the biggest reason why Terra Invicta stands out and hooked me so hard for 200 hours of play is it's an incredible vehicle for storytelling. If you have even an ounce of imagination, the stories that come out of this game are like nothing else. Many of the councilors I started with were the ones I beat the game with, relentlessly focusing on tech to keep them alive at all costs. But I remember the ones that died of old age too, and what they'd done to build the resistance.
I spent all of my time on experimental and one of the big things that sold me was the devs. I joined the discord and the first time I experienced an easily reproduceable crash, I posted about it in the discord--not thinking about it much just kinda hoping they'd do something. Y'all, it was fixed and pushed within 12 hours. I have gone to them numerous times with crashes and every single time they've responded and, if able to reproduce, have fixed it. The devs deserve every bit of support they get, they are by far the most responsive team I've ever encountered.
Terra Invicta, you were a dream. I can't wait to see you again on full release.
Steam User 173
Find Xcom's tactical battles repetitive and boring after a while? Wish you could focus on research and grand strategy without stopping to clear out your 250th crashed UFO?
This is the game for you.
Imagine if you could zoom out of Xcom's groescape and interact with the whole solar system. Build orbital stations, asteroid/planetary bases, and fleets of ships that adhere to Newtonian physics.
Pull the strings and manipulate nations from the shadows. Assassinate or imprison rivals. Direct armies. Launch nukes. And somehow find the time and resources to resist the aliens. Or capitulate to them. Or betray humanity and help them.
Steam User 97
Perfect game if you are:
- Looking for a deep, deep strategy game.
- a fan of Xcom: Long War, Stellaris, Civ etc. looking for a new game to sink hundred of hours into
- Looking for a sci-fi strategy game.
Just be warned, only go into this if you have a lot of time to spare / willing to forego all responsibilities in the real world for a couple of months!
Steam User 93
Crusader Kings with an X-Com skin.
---
The game play is heavily rooted in the grand strategy model, while the story is an X-Com derivative influenced by Hearts of iron politics.
Overall I have to say the game feels like it was made in 2006 and not 2026. I don't mean it in a bad way, but that it's actually more substance over style. Rather than flashier games that may be style over substance. They didn't shy away from deep mechanics or overly complex interfaces. You can get lost in menus and claw your way through the codex trying to find your next move. Meanwhile the alien invasion looms in the background waiting for you to make a decision.
The decision process comes off as turn based, despite trying to hide it behind wait times. The globe and time scale rush by while you really only get to make meaningful decisions at fixed intervals. It's a game firmly rooted in the strategy side of the story in contrast to X-Com's wider layering of tactics.
If you've played both old and new X-Com games, the older X-coms were a blend of strategy and tactics. The newer X-Coms leaned more heavily into the tactics while minimizing the strategy layer. And Terra Invicta swings heavily in the other direction, strategy to the point where you might think you're in Crusader Kings reskinned to a modern day alien invasion.
In short: I'm trying to say the game is good, but likely for a niche audience. If you need fancy graphics, an amazing soundtrack and lots of action, you're not going to find it here. But you will find an incredibly detailed interface with a variety of meaningful choices to help you navigate through bizarre global politics during a time of international catastrophe while trying to bring humanity to finally launch itself back into space with a wider purpose.
You have choices ranging from which countries to take over and how to run their governments, down to how to build modules for starships and which asteroids to investigate for mining across the solar system. It's overwhelming, in a good way.
The minimal tutorial serves only as a basic guide to the exhaustive control set up. But don't expect it to teach you how to win. The codex can tell you what each choice does, but it can't tell you which is the right choice; because it depends on what's going on at any given time. Difficulty is as much about the choices you make as it is the random elements that might just decide to end your faction before it even gains traction. You can expect winning to take 100 hours or more, and you can expect losing to take nearly that long before you realize you screwed up 90 hours ago and can't fix your mistakes without starting over.
Expect to lose and learn from it until you come up with a strategy capable of overcoming the odds. And then do it again, as the replay value of having different factions with different goals is a nice touch.
And that's about all that's worth describing. You either enjoy the grand strategy model with many layers of menu choices or this isn't even your genre.
As an added bonus the game is relatively easy to mod and the devs are pretty responsive to community issues and bug reports.
---
Bottom line: X-Com if it were a bureaucratic nightmare instead of a tactical skirmish simulator.
---
While you are here, would you consider following my curator page?
Want to read all of my reviews and not just the curated ones?
Steam User 129
Just saw the 6 score by IGN... I strongly disagree. This is a complex game with multi-layered systems that together do a good job at representing an ambitious alien invasion / infiltration narrative that eventually turns into the beginning of a space opera RTS a la Expanse. It is hyper-ambitious and while it fails in the combination of some mechanics (particularly the transition stages) It is more of a 8/10, reaching to 9 in some aspects of gameplay.
If you like / have the time and patience for any Paradox Games this will likely be up your alley
Good luck
Steam User 72
This game is not for everyone.
In many ways it is spreadsheet gaming. Solar system is easier to navigate via lists of planetary bodies then overview. Fleets and armies are more stats then units, their orders are not point and click but menus to make them to go to certain orbits or regions. Interface in many ways is clunky, design quite outdated and a lot of obvious QoL missing.
But for those who are OK with those drawbacks, this game might just be a real treasure. It is complex, with intertwined mechanics. Some of them come online much later then others, so even if you think you figured out the beginning of the game, you'll probably still fail later.
This game is strategic. It took me 192 hours to win my first run - I had to restart and reload so many times because mistakes had consequences much later. Planning ahead is paramount, neglecting some aspects will result in lagging behind when those become really important later.
And that's on top of pure vibes. Alien invasion, the threat and the potential. A rare timeframe of modern age transitioning into realistic near future shaped by the player. Invention of better techs to become on par with aliens to finally push them back.
This game is not for everyone, but it is very rewarding for those, who are ok with mid UX and are interested in setting. Tens of hours of melancholic solar system domination.
Be wary of losing your family while contesting Jupiter.
P.S. Devs themselves seem to be cool guys. During Early Access I had broken game state that crushed my game. Made a bug report, devs asked for more savefiles to figure out the issue, and then even sent me back a fixed savefile. Good stuff!