Terra Invicta

If you've played games like Stellaris, Civilization, Rimworld, or the like and thought to yourself, these games are far too simplistic, easy to understand, and a UI that basically plays the game for you, then this incredible gem will be right up your alley. The spiritual child of XCOM's long war, this game is like if you took a game of Risk, blew out it's complexity, and then said, wait, HAH, turns out that earth is literally just a jumping off point for solar domination to rebuff the looming alien invasion. This game is incredibly rewarding, has an incredibly addictive gameplay loop, and is an armchair strategists dream. But, be warned, this game will make you work for it. Many elements of the simulation approximate real world challenges (e.g. there are many, many, many researchable rocket drive lines, and many of them are only useful temporarily or end up being complete dead ends). You may be trying to fend off an alien invasion, but, brother, this is a simulation of the world in 2026, and guess what else is happening - that's right, ice shelf collapse! The UI, while serviceable, cannot be described as friendly. All the information is available, but you may find yourself constantly opening and closing two different screens because you forgot the damn name of the asteroid you were trying to mine (because the asteroid and the outpost locations have different names). The attention and care that was put into the simulation is top notch and is the epitome of "one more turn." If this style/genre of game is your cup of tea, then I highly recommended Terra Invicta.

First playthrough, tried and failed to get a foothold in China. Fell behind the other factions, got my teeth kicked in. Second playthrough, consolidated the EU, overextended mission control, saw all my space assets fall apart, got my teeth kicked in. Third playthrough, started doing well, upset the aliens too early, got my teeth kicked in. Fantastic game. I will continue playing and getting my teeth kicked in in new and creative ways.

Bloody well done game. The game is polished and made with love. I strongly suggest if you ever start playing this to: 1. Play on the easiest difficulty. It isn't easy and don't be ashamed, It will be a long campaign and you need this. Unless you are unemployed and have nothing better to do than play this 8 hours a day for a couple of weeks. 2. Don't think of it as a campaign to only defeat the aliens. Think of it more as a sandbox. Build up and colonize. Defend your stuff, etc. 3. Why wage guerilla war early with aliens? Because when they do surveillance they get significant advantage over time. And it really really really hurts them in the long run. Building up a missile fleet until you have MK3 weapons like railguns, lasers and coilguns. Where you can use something more... sustainable for long term fighting 5. save scum :) 6. Profit It's a long ass campaign.

Has potential. Things move very, VERY slow. I find that most of the game is this sort of circular activity of defending a nation, losing a nation, getting it back. Spinning wheels and not really getting anywhere.

Possibly one of the worst game starts and tutorials in gaming history. I started the tutorial, and the girl tells me to investigate the UFO crash landing site, but gives absolutely zero instruction on how to actually do it. After roughly 10 minutes of clicking every active button on the screen and digging through the in-game "help" page, I still had no clue what to do. I actually had to go to the internet to find an external "how-to" guide just to progress. I found it, but then I realized: if the developers cannot even be bothered to implement a functional, basic tutorial, to value my time, they simply do not deserve my money. Refunded.

I don't think devs want people to play this game. This game is not even a game, but a horribly boring and long texts written on pretty UI and extremely obnoxious AI factions which won't die out like fungi. If a seasoned strategy game player can't play the game after the so-called 'tutorial' and has to search through player community for the most basic information, it means the game and the tutorial is broke from its very foundation. I love 4x games. This is sickening perversion of its definition. There is no diplomatic solution, there is no extermination. Where's strategy when there's no real choice but frustration? Enemy won't die, can't be reasoned with.

Бессовестно детальная 4Х стратегия про вторжение пришельцев. Она как будто бы про космические бои в космическом космосе, но свой первый межпланетный катамаран вы построите на часу примерно тридцатом игры. И он будет "межпланетным" только в том плане, что он будет теоретически способен долетель до Марса, в один конец. Глубина огонь. Менеджмент ресурсов огонь, ты за пять лет видишь поезд, которым тебя переедет, если срочно не поменять стратегию. Конструктор кораблей миленький. Сами бои завораживают. Обычно тем, что твои катамараны с 122мм гаубицами наматываются на ось кораблями в три раза меньшего размера. И ты вынужден отправлять корабли, которые строил полтора года каждый, на таран, как баржи с кирпичами. Со временем технологии подтянутся, но первая дюжина моих флотилий были священным ветром. А потом я вытеснил пришельцев за Юпитер и пошла жара. Игра раскрывается слоями, с удалением от земной эклиптики.

I just finished my first playthrough of Terra Invicta after roughly 160 hours. For a while, I spent basically every free moment playing it, which makes the thumbs down look a little strange. There is a lot here that I genuinely like. Unfortunately, the further I got, the more the game's pacing, UI, AI and performance wore me down. By the credits, finishing felt less satisfying than exhausting. So, the good, the bad and the ugly: [hr][/hr] [h2]The Good[/h2] Terra Invicta has an excellent core concept. You start on Earth, building political influence and preparing for an alien invasion according to your faction's ideology. Your councilors can perform a wide variety of missions, giving you plenty of choices. The Earth game revolves around bringing nations under your influence and dealing with alien covert operations. Eventually, however, Earth becomes the foundation for the real prize: space. And space is where Terra Invicta is at its best. You build stations, colonies and fleets, design ships and command them in real-time battles. The combat reminds me of Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnought or Total War, and is probably my favorite part of the game. Weapon choice also feels meaningful. In something like Stellaris, I rarely care much about fleet composition because the AI doesn't commit hard enough to designs worth countering. Terra Invicta does this better. Lasers excel at intercepting projectiles, while torpedoes deal massive damage if they connect. Different weapons encourage different fleet designs and tactics. I also really like auto-resolve. You see the result first and can then accept it or fight the battle yourself. Results can be hilariously one-sided, but giving the player that choice is great. [hr][/hr] [h2]The Bad[/h2] Unfortunately, torpedoes feel overtuned. A few solid hits can delete even large warships, so just like in Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnought, I eventually mass-produced cheap torpedo boats and threw them at problems until those problems disappeared. The UI is functional, but filled with annoyances that become much worse over a 160-hour campaign. You can't simply select a fleet from the overview and give it orders. Instead, you click "Go to Fleet," which moves the camera there. Sending it to Earth then means navigating back to Earth yourself. The game constantly makes you move around the solar system for basic management. Country relations are similarly cumbersome. They are represented through flags, managed through faction affiliations, and lack a proper search function. Managing several countries becomes a routine of clicking and double-checking. Fleet movement is worse. Destinations are divided into categories such as Earth, Jupiter or the Inner Asteroid Belt, then subcategories and finally individual assets. Finding a station or merging two fleets can mean digging through menus, scrolling and searching repeatedly. That clutter is made worse by the human AI. The aliens are the actual threat in space. Other human factions seem incapable of organizing meaningful fleets and instead create huge numbers of tiny, often single-ship formations. They clutter the interface, hurt performance and occasionally destroy an undefended hab. Defending against this is more irritating than interesting. You cannot choose the exact placement of a hab, while early- to midgame fleet movement is expensive and slow. An enemy can reach a new station before your ships can realistically respond. Your options are to split fleets and micromanage patrols, fill valuable station slots with defenses, or destroy every hostile presence around planets where you operate. I eventually chose option three. That also summarizes the human factions pretty well. They occasionally fight each other, get wrecked by aliens or kick you while you're down. Otherwise, their thousands of tiny fleets mostly clutter the map and tank performance. [hr][/hr] [h2]The Ugly[/h2] The mechanic I dislike most is the [b]mission assignment phase[/b]. Terra Invicta seems unable to decide whether it wants to be turn-based or real-time, so it does both. Armies, fleets, resources and even councilor missions all operate in real time. Yet every few weeks, the game forcibly interrupts everything so you can assign those missions. I simply don't understand what this system adds. Take "Sway Public Opinion." One mission might improve support by only 2–3%, so you often repeat it several times. You can automate this, but there is still no obvious reason missions can only be assigned during these artificial breaks. If a mission fails or you abort it, you cannot immediately reassign that councilor. You effectively lose the rest of the cycle. "Survey Area" is even stranger. You send a councilor somewhere to locate enemy operatives, but they can simply move away after you've committed to the mission. You are effectively asked to predict where another character will be assigned to. The system adds interruption and busywork to a game that already has serious pacing problems. And that brings me to the biggest issue: [b]the grind[/b]. My faction's objective was to defeat the aliens. Once I had secured Earth and nearby space, they largely withdrew toward the outer solar system and consolidated their forces. So I had to do the same. Building an interplanetary fleet requires technology, resources, suitable drives, propellant and a lot of construction time. The journey itself can take close to a year, and depending on the design, may effectively be one-way. Lose the battle and you may have erased several in-game years and a dozen real-life hours of preparation. Win, and you build a base, build another fleet, wait again, travel to the next planet and repeat. You might think you could increase the game speed and let this happen in the background, but Terra Invicta fights you on that too. Notifications pause the game, and although configurable, not quite enough for my taste. More importantly, mission assignment phases keep returning whether you care about Earth politics anymore or not. The late game offers automation, but never enough to truly put established parts of your empire on autopilot. In my campaign, the aliens aggressively hunted my fleets after defeats, but once I removed them from the inner solar system, they never seriously returned to Earth. I had piles of obsolete ships around my early habs while the aliens sat in the outer system waiting for me. So the final war wasn't a desperate defence of humanity. It was countless hours of building fleets, waiting, sending them across the solar system, building another base and repeating until the credits appeared. By that point, a sunk cost fallacy felt like it was basically the only thing keeping me going. [hr][/hr] [h2]Performance[/h2] Finally, the technical side. I have a fairly powerful PC and an overclocked processor because I play Paradox grand strategy games, so I'm familiar with late-game slowdown. Terra Invicta becomes noticeably unresponsive around the midgame anyway. Commands have small input delays. The map stutters. Planets sometimes render at incorrect sizes while zooming. There are occasional freezes, and higher speeds make the whole presentation increasingly clunky. The simulation itself doesn't always seem dramatically slower. It feels more like the graphical side cannot keep up with what the game is doing. Despite that, I was seeing only around 30% GPU utilization. None of this made the game unplayable, but over a 160-hour campaign, the constant stuttering and sluggish interface become very noticeable.