Series: Terra Invicta

Terra Invicta is the game I’ve wanted for years. Currently in Early Access, it is a hard science fiction exploration of first contact with aliens, humanity’s response, and our subsequent expansion into the Solar System. It will not be to everyone’s taste. I find it remarkable, and I think it’s worth a look if you, like me, are its target audience.

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At its heart, TI will appeal to players who:

• Enjoy complex, simulationist strategy games, such as grand strategy games
• Are interested in real-world and near-future space travel
• Don’t mind ambitious, slow-burning, and occasionally rough games

I could best describe TI as two games in one — the first on Earth and the second in space. On Earth, humanity has split into seven factions, each advocating a different response to the aliens — from resistance through to an alien-worshipping doomsday cult. As the leader of one faction, you send out agents to rally countries to your cause, mobilise their resources, and build up their space programs. In space, you develop bases on other planets, moons, and asteroids, mine them for resources, and build stations and spacecraft.

What links the two layers is the economy. Lofting resources and equipment from Earth to space costs “Boost”, an abstraction of your supporting countries’ space launch capabilities. Building directly in space saves on Boost, but requires offworld mines to supply the necessary resources. Spacecraft and bases, especially large ones, need money and “Mission Control” to maintain; early on, these come from Earth.

How does this play out? Here’s an example, from early in my game. I chose France as my first country to recruit — it’s large enough to contribute to the cause, small enough to be achievable at the start, and home to the Guiana Space Centre. Countries with space programs or launch sites in real life begin with Boost in-game ¹:

From there, I moved into Canada, the Czech Republic, and the US. Offworld, I began with a mining base on the moon, which supplied water and ores. I then used those resources to start mining Mars:

Now, the year is 2031. I’m ahead on Earth. In space, I plan to use Mercury’s abundant solar energy to fuel command centres and nano-factories², while mines on Mars and Ceres feed the eventual shipyards.

The missing part is space technology. My early spacecraft are good enough to putter around Earth or Mars orbit and bully the other human factions. They are nowhere near good enough to challenge the aliens.

As this suggests, TI is a slow burn:

• In-game, long lead times make it necessary to plan ahead. Just starting a Mars base, for example, takes about a year of in-game travel time with early tech.
• Out of game, it’s taken me about a week to reach this point — and I suspect I’m only in the midgame. I could probably have finished a shorter 4X game in that time.

It’s also large and complex. There are hundreds of individual locations in the game — regions on Earth and celestial bodies in space. There are many sub-systems: the Earth and space economies, cloak-and-dagger conflict and outright wars on Earth, spacecraft design, research, and more. The tech tree is really a forest. At a design level, this will appeal to some players more than others.

Moving from design to execution, some of TI’s issues are what I’d expect from an Early Access game, such as buggy tooltips and values that need to be tweaked. I’m not worried about these. The developers have already started fine-tuning the game based on player experience; for example, it’s now tougher to subvert space stations.

I think the biggest area for improvement is the way the game presents information. The worst culprit is research. Here is an example:

In this case, I can see that researching “Nuclear Fusion in Space” will allow me to develop muon spikers and fusion piles. But is that a good idea, or not? What are their advantages? What do they even do? Will it help me reach my goal of developing better spacecraft drives? I have to look up out-of-game information — for example, this guide on Steam — to get a better idea. It would be much easier if I could check the details in advance.

Another example is simpler — it would be really helpful if in-game lists had some of the same features as real-life spreadsheets. Here is a list of all the space habitats (stations and planetary bases) I control. I can filter by location and faction control (in this case, me), but I’d love a way to sort it by resource production:

TI does let me sort the “Prospecting” screen. But I can’t filter it:

A final example is the events log — the vertical list of icons on the left-hand side of the screen. As is, it’s not very useful. The icons are cryptic and I have to mouse-over each one to bring up a tooltip in tiny font. As such, I think the developers have scope to improve the clarity of the game’s interface before a full release.

Ultimately, I think a decent litmus test of whether you’d enjoy Terra Invicta is whether you like similarly complex, ambitious games such as Shadow Empire, Dominions 5, or even X4: Foundations. I love its premise, I admire its uniqueness, and, even as is, I enjoy its execution. While it won’t be for everyone, it may well turn out to be one of my all-time strategy greats.

In September 2022, in the Terra Invicta timeline, humanity made first contact with aliens.

A decade later, in the 2030s, the aliens landed ground troops on Earth. They cut a swathe of destruction through Earth’s armies before succumbing to superior human numbers. A second wave landed in 2036, attacked several world capitals, and fell prey to the computer players’ nuclear weapons — after I reloaded.

On 25 November 2047, alien fleet Victor-104 swept into its usual hunting grounds, low Earth orbit, and prepared to swat the newly built Oliver Hazard Perry Station out of the sky. Instead, they met the eleven human spacecraft of Earth Command — seven battleships and four armed troop transports. When the dust settled, Earth Command did not lose a single spacecraft. Victor-104 took nearly 100% losses.

On 25 November 2057, exactly ten years later, humanity’s larger, more technologically sophisticated Second Expeditionary Fleet destroyed the aliens’ main fleet in orbit of Makemake, in the Kuiper Belt. And several weeks later, on 1 January 2058, humanity ended the alien threat once and for all.

I previously wrote about Terra Invicta about a week into Early Access. Now that I’ve finished my campaign, I’m very glad I took a chance on the Early Access release. I like how the game proceeds through distinct phases, and how it conveys the feel of an ebbing, flowing war, rather than a diagonal line up and to the right. At the same time, there is room to improve challenge & pacing in the late game. Overall, I think the game is very well placed to fulfill its potential once it comes out of Early Access.

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Game progression: through struggle, to the stars

My game progressed through many phases. My earlier post covered the first two:

• Getting started on Earth
• The early race into space, when I established bases on the Moon, Mars, and Mercury in the 2020s

• Fending off the alien ground invasions in the 2030s one timeline (in another, abortive timeline, the aliens captured the Russian nuclear arsenal, making it impossible to completely clear them off Earth. Unable to find a solution, I eventually reloaded)

• The long, painful contest of endurance in the 2030s and 2040s. The aliens waged a bombardment campaign against my offworld stations and mining bases. I slowly researched the fusion drive technology that would form the backbone of my space fleet, while fighting constant wars on Earth as alien infiltrators subverted world governments

• Turning the tide in the 2040s, first tentatively committing my new fleet and then going all-in over Earth in 2047

• Going on the offensive, first in the asteroid belt in 2049, and then pushing the aliens off the moons of Jupiter at the start of the 2050s

• Finally, fielding antimatter-powered fleets for the push into the outer Solar System in the 2050s

In-game, one of my starting characters died of old age, Earth’s political map changed as I unified swathes of the planet, humanity became a multi-planet species, and technologies such as fusion power and genetic engineering would presumably have transformed life on Earth.

In real life, this unfolded over months since the game’s initial early access release in September. The developers released numerous updates for the game, which fixed bugs, tweaked balance, and improved quality of life. I upgraded my PC, which drastically improved performance — a previous bugbear.

What the game did well

The long game highlighted two strengths of Terra Invicta.

First, the phases of the game felt distinct and interesting. In the early game, alien fleets felt like an invincible force of nature. In the middle, they were destructive and dangerous, but I could bleed them white. By the end, they were pests to swat. The Moon went from a crucial first step into space to a backwater. Flying from Earth to Mars went from a major undertaking to a routine patrol. Resources that were in short supply become abundant once I secured the Jovian moons.

Second, Terra Invicta made it enjoyable to play through ups and downs. This is a Solar System-wide war where losing fleets, bases, armies, and countries is inevitable — the trick is recovering afterwards.

Here, the game does better than most of the genre. Strategy games can suffer from a cascading effect where defeat tips the player into a death spiral — losing experienced characters in Firaxis’s XCOM is a good example.

In contrast, Terra Invicta is generally good at giving the player tools to deal with setbacks (the main exception being the nuclear-armed alien administration on Earth), while the sheer scale of the game provides players with strategic depth. There’s even a Steam achievement for winning as the Resistance, Terra Invicta’s XCOM equivalent, after one of the pro-alien factions has already won.

What could be better

Terra Invicta has room to improve its late game, which is lengthy and exhibits the same inverted difficulty curve as XCOM. Once I went on the offensive, the outcome became a foregone conclusion, yet I still had to go a long way before I won.

The issues are solvable — I’d put them into two major categories:

1. High threshold to win

This is easy to solve. I had a unique story objective, which was fine. However, most of the work came from a quantitative victory condition —  reducing the relative strength of the alien fleet below a percentage threshold. The solution is, reduce or allow players to customise these quantitative objectives.

This would probably be even more helpful for other factions in the game, some of whom have very grindy objectives.

2. The aliens can’t keep up in the late game

There are several sub-issues here:

2a. Do the aliens need more late-game tools?

Alien capabilities reach a plateau long before humans reach the end of the technology tree. This is tricky to solve: it’s a design issue and probably thematic. But perhaps the aliens would benefit from additional technologies or equipment tiers, unlocked once they take humans seriously. Or, since going to “total war” mode already raises the cap on the number of alien bases, perhaps the increase could be larger.

2b. AI tweaks

A stronger AI would keep the alien fleets competitive for longer. Some of these fixes, I think, would be relatively simple:

• Stay in formation instead of breaking formation at the start of every battle
• Increase the amount of armour on ship designs
• Move away from easily-countered missile spam to plasma weapons
• Mass fleets in friendly territory and commit them en masse, instead of dribbling reinforcements in piecemeal. This was the mistake the aliens made after I wrested away the Jovian moons — they wanted to counterattack but came in dribs and drabs

Conclusions

Several months ago, I wrote that Terra Invicta ”may well turn out to be one of my all-time strategy greats”. Now that I’ve finished the game, I’ll go further and say it may become one of the all-time strategy greats, up there with the pantheon of the 1990s. It is not perfect, and it remains a work in progress. But in a few months of Early Access, the game has already taken great strides, and I’m confident it will be even better by the time it reaches its 1.0 release.

Would I replay it? Given the time required, I can’t see myself playing another grand campaign. But if the developers add shorter scenarios, I might return to the fray.

I recently replayed Terra Invicta, a game I loved and covered extensively when it launched in Early Access in late 2022.

Two years on, it’s still recognisably the same game, and still does the same things well. What has changed are the AI’s competence (and the level of challenge), as well as the game’s quality of life and polish.

What do I like, two years on, and how did my game unfold?

Borrowing a concept from Jesse Schell, I like to characterise strategy games as either:

• A “game” — a structured, rules-based challenge where the goal is to win (e.g. Civilization, Master of Orion II or Stars in Shadow, most real-time strategy games); or
• A more aimless “toy” or “interactive narrative generator” (e.g. Crusader Kings, Stellaris).

The beauty of Terra Invicta is that it succeeds on both levels:

• It’s a game with a defined objective — defeating an alien invasion — and a very high skill ceiling. Both times I’ve won, it took me until the 2050s. The best players do it in the 2030s!
• And it’s also an simulator or narrative generator about the world responding to that invasion. On Earth, countries crash-industrialise, invest in science, and redraw their borders in response to the alien threat. In space, we go from recognisable near-future projects (returning to the Moon) to the furthest reaches of the solar system.

This playthrough became a test of how replayable the game is. I changed many things from my first run:

• Chose a different faction (Project Exodus, which aims to build an interstellar colony ship, instead of the XCOM-like Resistance);
• Increased the difficulty (from Normal to Veteran);
• Played on the “Accelerated Campaign” mode, which significantly speeds up variables such as research speed (and almost certainly made the game harder, as the aliens benefit from the bonuses as well); and
• Chose a different starting strategy (prioritising Asia ahead of Europe and North America).

And while the flow of the game remained the same, the details unfolded differently. The results were humbling. The normal progression of a Terra Invicta game looks like this:

• The first order of business is winning support from countries on Earth, then using their space programs to establish early outposts on the Moon and Mars.
• Over time, scientific research and the resources from those early mines provide the springboard to expand throughout the solar system: Mercury, the asteroid belt, and the moons of Jupiter.
• Eventually, players have the resources and technology to build a fleet that can challenge the aliens.
• Good players can establish a commanding lead at the start, get into space early, aggressively challenge the aliens and deny them access to the Belt’s resources, and then snowball from there. The best players can even beat the aliens to Jupiter.

So how did I do?

• I was too slow on Earth (and hence to the Moon and Mars), got blasted out of Mercury orbit (twice!) before finally managing to secure it, and never succeeded in seizing the initiative. The furthest I made it was Io, the Jovian moon.
• Left mostly to their devices, the aliens amassed large, powerful fleets and repeatedly sent them against the inner planets.
• To win the game, I had to farm a stupendous quantity of resources by destroying alien fleets, which I mostly did on the defensive. This always felt slightly touch and go — even though my late game spacecraft were powerful and could win against several times their number, I never had the resources to build as many as I wanted, and they certainly weren’t expendable. Committing my fleets always felt like a risk.

This points to one more thing the game does well — encouraging players to be resilient. Strategy games tend to impose an “up and to the right” mindset — partly because setbacks, such as losing veteran soldiers in XCOM, can be so devastating, and partly because losing progress is often frustrating rather than fun. Here, perseverance pays off.

Tougher…

After I won my first game, I suggested several possible changes that might keep the game challenging, such as a better AI and new late-game alien tools. Nearly every item on my wish list is now in the game:

• The aliens stay in formation, use much heavier armour, and are less prone to squandering resources on bombarding well-defended targets, negating several of their weaknesses at launch. (In that last example, the pendulum might have swung too far — now they’re probably too cautious about bombardment.)
• They mass their forces into terrifyingly large doom stacks instead of allowing themselves to be defeated in detail. At first, having to fight alien fleets of 80-100 ships was daunting. When I beat the 100-ship fleets, the aliens combined their forces into 200-ship fleets. After I beat a 200-ship fleet, I saw a 300-ship fleet. At that point, instead of fighting the 300-ship fleet, I just sent up unmanned decoys to distract it…
• On top of their better AI, the aliens now field more advanced weapons over time. At launch, it was trivial for a late-game fleet to shoot down a barrage of incoming alien missiles. Not any more!
• Even the AI for the other terrestrial factions seems to have improved. They are more aggressive and, on rare occasions, could defeat small alien fleets.

Those changes worked. Right to the end of my latest game, I never felt I was running away with things. While I brought Earth mostly back under control, the aliens remained a lethal threat in space.

While there is still room to improve, particularly for the other human factions, the game has already come a long way.

… but still fair

Despite its high skill ceiling and learning curve, Terra Invicta is also surprisingly forgiving, or at least more forgiving than it looks:

• I was massively overconfident in my ability to jump back in at a higher difficulty level, despite not having played in around 18 months.
• I horrifically botched the early game, exacerbated by not doing what worked the first time.
• I compounded my mistakes by angering the aliens and their sympathisers well before I was ready. Instead, I should probably have played to my faction’s strength, the ability to stay fairly neutral early on.
• And yet, I still won.

Quality of life is improving

The game’s interface and user-friendliness have also improved since launch. For example, players can now:

• Automate characters on Earth;
• Set characters’ orders to repeat;
• Sort bases by their resource income — also useful when looking for targets to grab;
• Rally newly built fleets; and
• Batch move armies.

These add up to a better, less painful experience, although again, there is still room to improve. For instance, I’d love to be able to automatically set characters to hide when detected by enemies. The upcoming patch is set to address another weakness, the clunky tech tree interface.

Conclusions

Terra Invicta has come a long way from launch. Back then, I said that it “may become one of the all-time strategy greats”. Two years on, it’s well on its way towards that goal, thanks to a more competent AI, more challenging late game, and better QoL.

More improvements — and new game mechanics — are on their way in the upcoming 0.4.42 patch, which the developers have been working on for some months.

If Terra Invicta continues on this trajectory, I think it can fulfil its promise by the time version 1.0 rolls around.