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 96
Many games pride themselves on being a title where 'choices matter', but none truly embody the concept as ambitiously as Terra Invicta does.
Terra Invicta isn't just a game, but rather it's the most lovingly crafted macroscopic alien invasion simulator ever created. Choices matter more than you can imagine: Terra Invicta asks you what you believe humanity's response should be in the face of existential adversity, and then it challenges you to accomplish the goal you've set for yourself and for humanity.
You face not only an alien threat, but also many cameos from the friends we already know: geopolitical rivalries, climate change, mutually assured destruction, and generalised difficulties that come with running a shadow organisation competing against various other ideologies in light of an alient invasion.
Terra Invicta will not hold your hand, but rather it is a game that gives you a whole toolbox of mechanics and expects you to make the right decisions to drag humanity kicking and screaming toward the bright or dark future ahead.
This is a game where the devil is always in the details, and when I say details... boy do I mean details. This is a game that tracks daily global emissions of CO2, CH4, N2O and factors the global atmospheric composition into global temperature change and cognitive effects on humans based on known cognitive risks of elevated CO2 exposure. This is a game that calculates positions of orbital bodies and the gravitational effects they have on each other to affect the optimal flight paths for your spacecraft. This is a game where the velocity of your spacecraft along with the momentum delta between combatant craft gets factored into the effectiveness of kinetic weaponry in space.
There is so much shit to learn about this game that you will never be finished learning. So if you're the kind of person who wants to spend several months of your life playing at least three games in a trenchcoat and losing your sense of self learning to operate a shadow organisation manipulating the future of humanity, then buckle up and give Terra Invicta a shot.
Positives
- So much lovingly crafted gameplay. The enjoyment cost per hour for this game is so incredibly worth it, even if you "only" play for like fifty hours before getting bored.
- The attention to detail is truly astounding. You will play this game for hundreds of hours and still continue to find little interactions and details that the devs snuck in or very obviously thought about when making this game. It's the little things, stuff that you might not even pay attention to-- like how the personal wealth stat of individual councillors changes whether the airpline model used to show them flying around the map is a commercial airliner or a private jet.
- The writing is incredible. Just really, really well considered and thoughtful exposition. The fluff text and dedication to the research put into writing it all is honestly the best part of this entire game. Pavonis really outdid themselves with the slow-burn storytelling letting you dig out and uncover the story behind the alien invaders. It's also cool that the perspective and the specific details you get change depending on which ideological faction you're playing as.
- There are three sort of "core" gameplay parts to this game: a somewhat traditional HOI-style map painter geopolitics game on Terra, a space 4x strategy simulation at the solar system level, and a real-time tactical space battle simulator for individual space battles. All of these mechanics are pretty fully fleshed out and offer hundreds of hours of game time learning fully how they work.
- The AI does not cheat. The aliens and other factions have their own missions which use the exact same diceroll mechanics as you do on normal difficulty. That being said, the aliens *are* an asymmetrical enemy, so some of the stuff they're capable of doing will absolutely feel like cheating, even though it's not. Make sure to give them a taste of their own medicine once you get the ability to do so later on.
Negatives
- To be honest, this game feels pretty much perfect for the first hundred hours or so. The flaws only start to surface once you've been playing for an extended period of time and enter the later stages of the game.
- The menus are nightmarish to navigate, especially later in the game. It's not too bad when you start out just on Earth, but as you become more and more proficient with the game's systems, you start to realise just how much unnecessary clicking and camera snapping you have to do to accomplish basically anything.
- The AI factions are great on Earth and in the early space game, but they quickly lose steam in the late midgame and become more of an annoyance than anything. There's a running joke that any AI-controlled countries will run themselves into the ground, and the human faction AI will not build enough ships or perform missions to meaningfully complete their space objectives (for the factions that have those). This one is going to be incredibly tricky for the devs to solve because if they made the human AI factions more powerful, it could easily make it basically impossible to actually fight the aliens because you'd be too busy fighting the other humans.
- The game becomes a real slog after you reach Jupiter and need to work your way to the outer planets. The aliens will continue building an infinite number of ships for you to destroy, and the outer planets are all so far apart that it takes forever to reach them. It can take a decade or two of just pumping your own fleets out and playing whack-a-mole to get the alien fleet numbers down low enough to win the game as any faction that has to kill aliens. This may be realistic in terms of astronomical distances, but it gets pretty boring because at this point in the game you won't really have anything left to research and you'll already have all the countries you could want on Earth. So you'll spend an anticlimactic ~20-30 hours real time at the end of the game clicking the fast-forward button and micromanaging Defend Interests and event popups or whatever as your ships build.
- This game takes a really long time to beat. It took me ~300 hours of playing the game here than there for seven months of real world time to get through it. Near the end, I was sort of longing for my freedom. This game really isn't for the faint of heart and it's incredibly difficult to play to completion if you're employed full time.
Other things to note
- Not really a negative or a positive, but this game is incredibly slow-paced and slow-burn, even for a strategy game. Don't pick up this game if you're expecting an action-packed adventure. Pavonis are also the creators of the critically-acclaimed Long War mod for XCOM Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2, so go check out those games if you're looking for a faster-paced title.
- The space combat is really realistic, which makes it sort of unintuitive. It can easily take a year or so of in-game time for an assault fleet to arrive at its destination. So both you and the aliens have an incredible amount of heads-up time to know when you're going to get attacked. But the flip side of this is that it takes a very long time to build up fleetsor infrastructure to support those fleets, so the decisions you made hours ago in real-life time will come back to haunt you regularly. And there are frequently times when you run into situations where you get to know that you're just kind of screwed in a bit and are aware of this long before a bad thing happens that you know you can't prevent. I think this makes for some truly unique pacing in this game, but some people might be turned off by this.
This post sponsored by the Academy. Friendship is Mandatory.
Steam User 63
Summary: The short opinion of this game is that it is extremely bold and should be rewarded for a certain "crank" feel despite being well put together.
Startling in its ambition, raw arrogance, and bold decisions. It is neither a small game, nor a simple game, nor a game meant for anyone with less than a hundred hours to give. When I first played the game I was mixed on it, and I saw it as unusual and strange. It seemed confused and disjointed. However, as I played it I found myself more and more compelled to play more and more and engage with the bewildering combination of subsystems and technical complexity. It is as at times so complex that I lose track, and it at some level I feel it loses itself in the pure and utter complexity.
It reminds me of Dwarf Fortress, in that way. But Dwarf Fortress feels more coherent, focused. Terra is....it feels more strung together.
This is not bad. It just is experimental, and in being experimental it is bold. I would suggest this game to people who are interested in engaging with immensely complex, almost nightmarishly complex, systems that aren't properly documented and at points don't seem excessively concerned with the user experience.
This game reminds me of an unholy chimera of the following games:
-- Xcom
-- Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri
-- Victoria 2
-- Empire: Total War
Good:
-- Most things about the game.
Things that seem to be not very good:
-- Voice acting is not compelling.
-- Tutorials and explanations for subsystems seems vague.
-- AI seems to cheat or behave arbitrarily.
-- Game feels disjointed and slipstreaming to different modes of play is...hard to conceptualize sometimes.
-- Some interface problems and difficult managing facilities and increasing bloat.
Grand Summary: I would speak highly of this game, as it seems to be made by insane people who have simply trampled over any resistance in development that have told them 'no'. This may not strike people as agreeable.
Steam User 51
This game has some awesome mechanics and a lot of potential. Like holy crap some of the stuff like space mechanics and viewing the map/travelling is just awesome. It is worth playing through once, MAYBE twice. But it suffers from a severe problem.
It simply does not respect the players time at all. If I try to play this game it kinda absorbs my life, but a couple hrs a day would progress you so slowly you wished you did something else with your time. It can be very frustrating, not because it is difficult, but because you can play for 3 hours, look back and wonder if you achieved anything at all.
You progressed some necessary numbers required to progress another stage of the game slightly maybe. You will spend a lot of the game repeating actions, going back and forth or countering random losses from the enemies that take your full effort to counter, with little effort on their part.
It is additionally somewhat dependant on RNG, random atrocities you could not counter or certain skills required of your characters to do certain things. I've started new games and went for over a year without seeing a single character I needed in some cases, or an org I could take to do the same. There is also a clear 'meta' for playing the earth game, with some strategies just being plain worse. It is always a winning strat to conquer the world with the US. Playing the Academy, you might think it a good idea to go for the countries which you have a high opinion in, such as china, only for you to 'randomly' lose any progress and AI able to take your gains easily. Once they take them, its almost impossible to take it back. You'd need to have forward/meta knowledge of what is going to happen to counter this. There are strategies around this, but again, if you didn't know what was happening you might have spent 5hrs to find out you wasted your time with a bad strat.
Some experienced players might have some ultra optimised builds that zoom past some time periods, but most players I suspect will not be in this category. Thus I rate this as not a game for someone who has to work and take care of any home responsibilities. They recently added a 'quicker' game mode, but the game was designed around the other style, I'd have to try it to comment as it is a new addition.
But then again the combat is completely revolutionary, the map managing pretty fun and the somewhat accurate politics/orgs are great. Although there is clear bias in some cases. It is a game after all use your brain and don't rely on games to teach you about reality.
Edit from 10/9/2024
So I played a 'fast' campaign and tried the new balance of the game since updating. The game has improved in several areas but still has glaring weaknesses. Most of these issues are mid game and beyond. Whilst the addition of round number way points around ships makes it possible to move them at low speeds now, ship combat still has flaws. You can't trust the 'stop' moving function as it will make your ships move back and forth without actually stopping, rotating the entire time. You can't use the 'match velocity' button, as it doesn't work properly, at least on allied ships.
It still suffers in ship balance. Plasma used to be the go to powerful weapon, but now it is completely non viable despite needing the most research. Siege coils are ridiculously op and actually have low ship power, meaning it baits others to fight them.
And this is just ships. Lets say you formed the merged nation of the African Union. If you somehow lost a node in the nation, you only have a 1% chance with a max level character using max influence (512) and 90% public support to take a node back/crackdown. Your best bet in this situation is to save scum 100 times, no strategy will reduce the pain.
Issues like these still prevent the game from being legendary but I still have hope it will get there. If the game continues to be developed, scenarios are added and possibly mods later on, this could be one of the best games of all time. But it isn't there yet, still worth buying.
Steam User 64
Simply the best 4X game on the market. Campaigns take a LONG time to complete--this is a hobby more than a game. The tech tree is enormous, with potentially fatal consequences if you don't navigate it deftly. Space combat is good, but can be frustratingly challenging. Something to consider is that you are essentially partaking in a naval arms race in space in which you will likely have two or more rivals, and you can't always anticipate what tech and design decisions they will make--you may follow the wrong research paths and have a sub-optimal fleet composition when the battle is joined.
Gameplay has you overseeing a faction of a shadow government/secret society that is resisting (or supporting) an alien invasion of our solar system. The game has a fantastic model for global and national economics, politics, climate change, and a satisfactory model for terrestrial warfare. You will explore the solar system and develop a mining empire to support your space habitats and fleet operations.
The developers are doing a great job and have already expanded greatly on what already felt like a complete game more than a year ago. The AI has come a long way and is very capable. Replay value is basically unlimited. I strongly recommend this game.
Steam User 23
This is an incredible game with a huuuuuge pacing problem. I watched a couple of streamers before I bought it who made this evaluation, and was still convinced that the game looked awesome enough to give it a go. At first I thought they were wrong. The game was enthralling and I was hooked and engrossed. But as the game develops, it gets slower and slower. And I'm not just talking about the late game slow down. Everything takes forever, and your needs compound, which means taking more time to do things.
Want to build a titan (biggest ship), nearly a year of in game time (which is maybe 30 mins real time in the late game). Ok you're building the fleet, oh shit, you're out of resources... ok, let's build some more automated stations to mine them. Oh shit, now I don't have enough mission control, let's build some ring stations with mission control centres, that's going to take a full year. And you better hope you have some local defense fleets, or they're likely to get blown up and you've gotta start over again. If you manage to defend them and get them online, they're going to suck down resources, requiring yet more mines and yet more stations...
In essence, everything has a complicated supply chain, which is great! But every part of that supply chain requires sooooo much real life time that you can sit down for a few hours and barely feel like you've achieved anything at all. And it's not just a perception, you have barely achieved anything. To set something up properly can take a decade of in game time, and that is hours and hours of real life time, and if you make a mistake, you can have started a death spiral that it's impossible to come back from. I sunk a good 30 hours into my first game before I realised that I was in an unwinnable position and had to start over. Using my new knowledge of the game, I got it into a win state where I was utterly dominant on earth, had huge resource income, and the biggest fleets, even bigger than the aliens...
This should be a fun point right? Time to crush my enemies... well yeah, but again, the pacing problem hits you in the face. Want to go take out an alien base? Your fleet, with the best engine in the game, is still going to take 10 weeks to get there. And once you do, you destroy the alien fleet there and its bases, and then you have no fuel left. So you have to build a hab in orbit to refuel and repair... which of course, is going to take a full year. And in that time, the aliens are still out there rebuilding, creating new bases, new ships etc. Ok, maybe we just go straight for the victory... ok, I need to fly to their main base at the farthest reaches of the solar system and take it over. Too easy, destroyed their fleet and took over the base - but for some reason you can't trigger the final mission until enemy forces only total 25% of the total fleet power. So no, you need to tediously hunt down all their ships.
That broke it for me. I googled how to cheat and went around nuking their ships with the console so I could finally trigger the mission. I hate to cheat, I avoid it at all costs, but I could easily defeat any alien fleet and base with absolute minimal casualties. This wasn't challenging at this point, it was just tedium. Micromanaging, waiting, tedium. That was the end game.
I know this sounds really negative, but I will stress this is an incredible game, I am so glad that there are games like this being made, and there was a lot of fun that I had in playing it. I say these things not with the intention of bringing the game down, but with the hope the developer will fix them in this or future titles. Please do play this game, there are many detailed and incredible mechanics, and more like this needs to be made!
NB: There is an accelerated campaign option, which I have not tried. I didn't choose it because normally I love a long game. Perhaps one day I will return to try the accelerated one, but for now I am done.
Steam User 50
Love this game. It's the Expanse meets XCOM. You start out playing what is essentially a grand strategy game on Earth, competing with 6 other factions to control countries and decide a response to the aliens' arrival, while either interfering with or aiding alien operations on Earth depending on your faction. This part of the game looks simple from the outside, but it's actually a fairly sophisticated little international relations/country management sim, where you're directing the spending of foreign policy of the nations you control via your counselors (read: agents). The council system gives me SCP vibes, feels very much like I'm sending the members of my little 05 council out to advance my interests.
As the game progresses, you get into the space layer. IMO, this is the strongest part of the game. You leapfrog outwards, starting by mining the moon, then Mars etc, all while desperately trying to advance technology to the point that you can challenge the aliens militarily and playing a delicate balancing act where if you build too much too early, the aliens will decide you're a threat and start bombing the hell out of your space infrastructure. Once you have some reasonably good techs, the space combat feels great. One of the more believable space combat systems I've seen, and it's definitely where the expanse comparisons come in. Your ships have to manage heat, fuel, delta-v, and ammunition supplies. Both the quality of your ship designs AND your tactical skill are critical to success here, and when you get things right there are few things quite so satisfying as watching your first alien mothership go up in flames after decades of preparation. Or, I guess, you could be a filthy xeno-lover and play the Servants, in which case your satisfaction comes from STABBING MANKIND IN THE BACK like the COWARDS you are.
On the technical side, I've had a bug here and there, but nothing game-breaking. Graphics are good, space combat and the ship designs are all really cool, the simulation of the solar system is actually really complex, but still runs great on both my old PC and my current machine. UI is a little...clunky? It works, and you can see where everything is, but some of the menus are nested in weird ways, and I kind of think the menu/popup windows just feel kinda dated. The devs are still actively supporting the game, and I've seen marked improvement in AI and performance every time they patch, to the point that the AI actually still really challenges me even after 200 hours in game. I have a feeling this game is someone's labor of love, and I think it shows in the finished product.
Overall, this has become one of my favorite games, I'm nowhere close to doing all the stuff I want to do in it, and I would rate it a solid 9/10 strategy game. Highly recommend if you don't mind a bit of a steep learning curve.
PS: if you're struggling to learn the game, check out PerunGaming on YT. I found the game through his channel, and he has some good guides up that walk through some of the more obtuse parts of the game.
Steam User 18
I really bloody like this game.
I'm terrible at maths/science/physics so the tech tree (specifically the ship engines and reactors) was daunting at first but the ship builder menu is really easy to understand, and the tech tree makes more sense when you get to terms with the idea that you need to compromise and can't instantly make fast ships with massive guns and super armour. I'd argue there are too many useless drives at the start of the tech tree at the moment but equally you could say that's because I don't like to build ships until the mid-game starts.
I'd say there are too many torpedoes/missiles but that could be because I just beeline to the biggest nukes I can get.
Compromise is kind of what the game is about, you have pretty limited resources until the mid-game so you need to tread carefully against the Ayys so they don't send a fleet to Earth before you even have a single ship ready. The same goes for if you're a heretic and you anger too many Humans before you're ready and end up getting dogpiled by Resistance and HF chads and end up having to nuke half of Asia just to keep your money flowing.
Compromising your priorities and conserving your materials mean you need to be a pretty patient game to really get in to this game - Some people can get entire runs done in a few tens of hours (partly by meta-gaming, partly by just being smart) but in my 525 hours of proper gameplay (sometimes i fell asleep with the game running...) I've not finished a run.
Not finishing a run didn't mean I didn't have fun, however - Assassinating other councillors is really fun, trying to maintain peace with other factions while also trying to steal the countries they run while also trying to not fuck them over so hard they couldn't fight the Ayys themselves meant things stayed interesting.
Actual countries can feel a bit lifeless at times - Running the EU looks and feels the same as running the USA or uniting and running the African Union does, except they give off different amounts of resources. Maybe you Councillors should get tophats if you re-unite the British Empire?
The factions weren't lifeless though - Having quite a lot of voiced dialogue helped keep me immersed in the struggles of my terribly run and ineffecient Resistance.
I have recommended this game to a bunch of my mates but if you don't like buying Early Access titles I don't think you'd miss out by waiting for the game to be released. It's really good but there are a few bugs and weird UI bits that are slowly being ironed out, and there aren't many mods (not that you need any, except for the one that adds the New California Republic!).
I was playing on a Large scale solar system and experienced very little lag at pretty much any time. Loading in to a save took around 60 seconds at times, and I have a 2070S and a 3600x.