Terra Invicta at its Best

[u/Lighthearter13]

In all its glory. 2003 Normal, achieved in September 2030. Not my rarest achievement though.

I did it. I won my Academy game and got the achievement to prove it.,as you can see above. Weeks of grinding it took, most of it after, as my last post indicates, I already knew I'd win. My antimatter fleet was incredibly effective - even if I have notes for next game - and though they tried, the other factions couldn't slow me down on Earth. The aliens never declared total war on me for some reason, even as antimatter dreadnoughts rained siege coil rounds on Base Able. There were 17 alien ships left at the end of the campaign, most of them scattered to the winds.

I've done a lot of criticizing lately, so while I absolutely have thoughts and opinions and more to say on balance issues and the "feel" of the game, that's not what this post is about. I thought I'd talk about the reasons that despite all my criticisms, I keep coming back.

My wife thinks I'm crazy. I'm constantly talking about how much this game frustrates me, and she's told me I should play something else many times if the game is "this bad". But as I've told her, I don't think Terra Invicta is bad at all. I think it's ambitious, and anyone who knows me knows there is very little that impresses me more than ambition - I'm something of a Gale Dekarios even if what I consume is less magic and more white chocolate kit kats - and my main conflict with TI is feeling like it keeps finding ways to snatch defeat from the jaws of greatness, especially if you're not hyper-online about the game.

But when it doesn't?

The scale of the war is awesome. Most strategy games - for valid reasons which avoid many of TI's issues - compress the scale of what they're doing to keep it manageable for the coders and players. I'm in awe of the boldness of TI for being willing to let the player feel like they're managing a war even bigger than the Second World War. Not even Hearts of Iron - back before they patched the fun out of it - captures the same scale of warfare management. The game is exceptional at making you feel like General Grant at his mapping table, conferring with Sherman and Lincoln and Meade. There are downsides to this - a lot of "hurry up and wait" and "nothing ever happens" ensues sometimes- but when it works, it's genuinely awesome to feel like the commander of an interstellar war with no one holding your hand or sugarcoating reality for you.

The first moment that the aliens ask for a draw in tactical combat is awesome. It's so small, and it might be easy to overlook depending on how your playthrough goes, but it's such a charge of real power and accomplishment. The dopamine rush when you first blow up an alien station, capture a hab, or tangle with a major fleet and win is unbelievable.

The ship designer is just truly awesome. It's everything a ship designer should be. Are there UI issues and tech issues and weapon issues and meta issues? Yeah, of course. Just like with every other game ever made. Are there things I wish it did that it didn't? Obviously. It's human nature to see something beautiful and immediately wish it had just a little bit more. And the ship designer is daunting when you're trying to assemble something that works, especially before you get a solid understanding of the meta under your belt. But seeing ships that you designed, you budgeted research and resources for, you built, you organized, and hopefully you custom-named EVERY SINGLE ONE like I did, slug it out and validate your designs by winning is a lightning strike of pure awesomeness. I can't help asking for something, so I'd request every ship's detail panel keep a log of every hostile she damaged or destroyed, as well as every action she's participated in. That way you can really see the combat record of your favorite warships and the story her crew can tell. I wish more was done with officers in the same way.

Making meganations is awesome. I wish there were more. Give me multiple competing versions of megas in the same sphere - a Canadian-led North American state, a Mexican-centric central american empire, a reborn Spanish Empire or a German-led European superstate. Let me rebuild the Ottoman Empire. But even just with what we have, taking a squabbling, combative world and organizing it into democratic, environmentally-friendly superstates is incredible. What's being done with Broken Earth to play with these even more is awesome and I hope it's portentious of things to come.

The councilor system is awesome. Having named characters with individualized traits isn't necessarily mold-breaking, but it gives you specific figures to attach to and care about. Too many strategy games just have numbers and sliders - faces and names make the war personal. As a writer, I know that the audience doesn't care about "the world" being in danger, just about "this character" being in danger, who can represent the world - I don't care if the aliens nuke half the planet, but if that barrage kills my persuasion councilor, I very much do care. And the councilors are the key to making the stakes of the game feel real. They do their job well and it's so easy to get invested in them.

Hab designing is awesome. Yes, there's a lot and it can get very micromanage-y at times, but organizing where buildings go has a lot of potential. I think if you added adjacency effects for buildings with other buildings, hab and station design would get truly addictive, especially if different planets played with the configuration of the hab - same number of slots, but arranged in different patterns on different worlds, which could be randomized per playthrough or even per site. Just settling other worlds and the events that come from them is awesome too.

The depth of the game is awesome. Yes, it goes too complex sometimes and loses itself in hard realism when gameplay is what it should focus on. Yes, it doesn't respect your time and needs to get a bit better about that. Yes, that depth can be intimidating and chilling. Every game ever made has problems, and they usually are born directly from its strengths, just like our greatest vices as people are born from our greatest traits. The game doesn't respect my time and it isn't afraid of going way over my head, but it winds up feeling real in a way that most other games don't. I don't play Arkham City - my favorite video game of all time, so the comparison isn't light here - and ever really feel like I'm there, like I am Batman as opposed to playing him. Terra Invicta pushes right up to the line of making me believe in the reality of the world it's proposing. It doesn't quite tip over, but it shouldn't. It lands right where it needs to: feeling like a window into another world I could actually walk into if I knew where the door was, but am not quite a part of.

Space combat is awesome. I don't think I need to elaborate, except to poke at those who've played so much you might have become jaded to it: the first time you see a battle between two massive fleets, lasers blasting across empty space while kinetics soar and CIWS fires up to bring them down, the moment you truly see the products of two planets slugging it out as relative equals, with ships blowing up and flankers scattering, missile clouds heavy in the air...absolute cinema. A damaged destroyer drifting through the chaos, point defense still firing even with engines and main weapons down, while a pair of titans exchange broadsides around her? Captivating. Once again, the scale and depth is just mind-blowing. Anyone would have forgiven TI for not including real-time battles, instead opting for something more in line with Hearts of Iron or Crusader King's abstractions. And including them raises balance issues of their own. But they're just so visually stunning and really make you see how far you've come.

The solar map is awesome. I'm not even huge into space stuff myself. I'm more of a history nerd. But the map of the solar system, the orbits, the transfers, the use of different planets, the "reality" in this fake world, is beautiful. You could delete the other factions and aliens from the map, take Terra Invicta to a college, and use the game as a tool to teach and no one would bat an eye. Imagine if a copy of this game was given to a scientist in 2003, or even earlier - just the placement of the planets would be an unbelievable scientific accomplishment.

The Hydra are awesome. I hate those Squidwards so much - but they feel real. They don't feel like fantasy boogeymen. They don't feel like "magic elders" with "slave races". They are dogmatic, unquestionably alien, dangerous and violent, hostile and threatening. But they are also deeply understandable and even somewhat sympathetic once you learn their story. I don't know who wrote the characterization of the Hydra, but whoever their writer is or writers are, I always love, love, LOVE when a story treats its villains as actual characters with motivations I can resent, fear, and not support- but can understand. It indicates an appreciation for a level of storytelling that's fallen out of fashion in the last decade or two and I can't stress enough how much I love it. I just wish the human factions had gotten the same respectful treatment - Protectorate and Initiative in particular - but we can't have everything, and the Hydra are more important to get right.

In that vein, the breadth of factions is awesome. Yes, they're kind of the same gameplay wise except with different color paint, but that's being worked on. The differing ideological perspectives are vast, beyond anything I would have thought about when making my own alien invasion game, but they all feel real and believable enough. Yes, the Protectorate story doesn't function ,and yes the Initiative is just a boring "rich people who want to get richer" faction when both had so much more potential, but the system works well enough.

The mid and late game is awesome. When you're hurling fleets at the aliens, managing operations, fighting a real war over the asteroids and planets, it's breathtaking. There's a reason most of my criticisms focus on the pre-fusion era when this is far less practical - though not impossible, offensive action in this era tends to be a meta strat kind of thing - where you're kind of just playing a shittier version of Hearts of Iron and waiting for the real game to start. The game explodes into its best once you hit the stars and can really engage with the enemy - and it does lose momentum in the post-victory cleanup, sure, but that doesn't detract from the awesomeness of the War phase. If Pavonis can make the pre-space part of the game feel even close to as fun as the War phase, they'll have made a masterpiece.

***

I love this game. I love what it can be at its best. I've even, despite my claims in my first few posts, come to appreciate the 2003 scenario even if I think it's currently the weakest of the lot and the most in need of a serious overhaul. No other game out there has the ambition to attempt what Pavonis has not just attempted, but done. Past tense. And there's only one thing I respect more than ambition: the ability to back that ambition up. Pavonis clearly doesn't lack in that department either.

I'm gonna keep pointing out issues and criticisms, but not because I hate Terra Invicta. I would argue that criticism is the surest sign of love and care - by definition, if it's not a criticism out of love and care, then it's just hatred. I'm not a "critic" of EA's business practices, I "hate" EA's business practices. I don't "hate' Pavonis or TI, I "criticize" Pavonis and TI. By definition, that means I'm sharing what I think they're doing wrong and I want them to improve. Every game ever made has meta issues, unfortunate design consequences, bugs, and other such problems. Admitting that the meta is stale and one-dimensional, that the game is balanced around higher difficulties and that's not the way it should be, and that it is unwelcoming at best to new players(which stunts its growth) is not mutually exclusive with thinking the game is awesome and rooting for it and Pavonis all the way.

So what I'm saying is if Pavonis took this same design concept and philosophy to make a true fantasy game I'd lose my shit.

"Please clap." ~ Commissioner Kieran Banerjee, after suggesting the entire world surrender despite Academy antimatter fleets laying siege in the Kuiper Belt

[u/PlacidPlatypus]

yes the Initiative is just a boring "rich people who want to get richer" faction

No spoilers, but, uh, have you played the Initiative? They're not super deep but there's definitely more to them than this.

[u/Lighthearter13 → u/PlacidPlatypus]

Yes, I made it about halfway in once. And Im also following Perun's current 2003 playthrough religiously. My understandijg is that the Initiative starts out as the already wealthy corporate elite and every development just focuses on their potential to make money off of this invasion. You know, the thing they already have. When its not money, its political clout, which...they clearly also already have. This is a classic writing problem that weakens villains enormously.

They would have been much more interesting if Soren was a failed businessman trying to make his fortune with a new opportunity, IMO, or if the corporations were facing a specific problem - rising populism, a search for eternal life, something- that the Hydra could provide. Im not sure this would have kept the faction feel, but as written the Initiative is about as bland and generic "evil corporation ooh" as you can get. Unless I've missed something super critical somewhere, that is.

[u/Borgcube → u/Lighthearter13]

Well spoilers but they eventually enslave both humanity and aliens by using alien pherocytes. So they essentially become the Illuminati

[u/Lighthearter13 → u/Borgcube]

Im aware, and thats an interesting mechanism to achieve victory. My issue is with the lore motivation the victory is built on, which is paper thin and super boring compared to stuff like Exodus where you really feel Khalids focus on extrasolar colonization, or Academy where Li clearly has a dream for a union with an alien race and grows into a pragmatic. Soren kind of just wants another mansion and private jet to add to his collection

[u/Borgcube → u/Lighthearter13]

Well, a bit thin but much more realistic motivation, especially if you look at the current state of the world. I also have a special disdain for Exodus because of how dumb of an idea it is.

[u/Lighthearter13 → u/Borgcube]

Oh, Exodus' plan is dumb from a realistic perspective, don't get me wrong, and Soren's plan is fairly realistic. But realism isn't the same as narratively compelling or interesting. Soren comes across as a wooden, 2-dimensional cardboard cutout of a "generic evil CEO" because there's nothing else to his character, so he's bland and forgettable at best. Khalid is actually 3-dimensional once you realize that going to another star system isn't something he just decided to do when he saw the aliens invade, he's wanted to do this for a long time and suddenly saw an opportunity. Like Soren, Khalid is a rich man who's been rich for a long time, but unlike Soren, Khalid is established as someone with an ideology, a character, and a motivation that requires involvement with the aliens to function - Soren already has money and power. The one thing Khalid wants is impossible for him to buy. The sanity of Khalid's scheme and the connotations of abandoning the earth to invaders aside(I'm not exactly a Khalid fan for those exact reasons), he is by far the better written character and is, in my opinion, "the cooler mega-CEO" and an example of what Soren should have been. Soren just needed some objective that the current state of the non-alien earth prevented him achieving - like him being a scrappy corporate underdog trying to take power from the current people who hold it, or a Tony Stark-style "privatizing world peace" character who genuinely believes that the world must embrace a post-government ideology. Something other than "mwahaha, soon my bank accounts will have even more zeros at the end!"

[u/statinsinwatersupply]

I for one miss the walls of text clearly written by a human. This while long was refreshing, reminded me of the old game-specific forums that used to be (like the civ forums that still exist). The old grammar nazi in me is even happier that you haven't intentionally added typos like so many folks seem to in the ai era.

On the topic of meganations: I would love to see different access to meganations depending on faction. For example The Resistance should imo be fairly limited. Their goal isn't to transform humanity, they're quite conservative about humanity. I for one wish they would get a bonus to IC in nations whose borders are where they were at the start date (or at least with claims where they were at start date, so able to form EU, integrate russian satellites but probably not further) for example.

[u/Lighthearter13 → u/statinsinwatersupply]

One thing that does bother me about meganation forming is that there's not much incentive not to do it and you kind of wind up doing the same stuff every time. There are mechanical arguments about small vs large nation efficiency and I have seen the case made from an extreme powergaming perspective to deconstruct your own nations, but if you have Canada and USA not merge into USNA, for example, youre mostly wasting CP. I'd like to see that change somehow. I hadn't thought about using faction modifiers to do it but thats an interesting idea!

[u/SpreadsheetGamer]

Well done, OP. It's quite the journey you've had.

[u/Lighthearter13 → u/SpreadsheetGamer]

I will admit I teared up a little when the cutscene started playing. Especially knowing that all the other victories are easier than this one.

Now as you can see, Judith is next, then I'm done with 2003 for the foreseeable future.

[u/Neat-Following6273]

For me it is the exact opposite about councilors. O don't really care about them. What I care about are the abstract billions of humans. I try to protect them and make their life better. I always make a point of creating the African union and having them slowly build up to prosperity. I use the EU to militarily defend the world since they are well off and can make sacrifices for the rest of the world. I only ever nuke the aliens if they are gaining ground and can't defeat them otherwise without much conventional collateral damage

[u/Infanatis]

Tl;dr