2D xcom doesn't give any more insight into it. This was inspired more by 3d xcom.
In 3D xcom there was this shadowy council that gave you funding, something that did not exist in the 2D one. These long war mods went from there and let you play as the shadowy council instead.
It is slightly genre defying, but not by much. Honestly you just described it. An illuminati simulator that is space colony sim, all to the backdrop of aliens doing shady shit and taking over governments, so you have to do the same.
Pretty much, except that it's a divided humanity, into 7 factions, each with their separate goal, and I presume, win condition.
The exodus just has the goal to flee earth and try to survive somewhere else. Humanity first wants to eradicate the aliens. The protectorate is looking to negotiate continued existence of humanity for some loss of autonomy and so on.
You're not just fighting aliens, you're fighting (and trading and cooperating) with other humans.
So space colonization is also a bit of a competitive land grab, and the geopolitics simulator has a bunch of choices towards selfishness vs. cooperation, like how the science tree is done.
The tech tree has techs that are universal and personal. Most new technology gets unlocked by factions paying together towards it. Applications of that tech still need to be researched and only apply to the factions that research them. Since you decide how much of your research is going to mutual benefit and how much to personal benefit there are interesting trade-offs made.
Its just playing aztec and inca in other games, but with aliens instead. And has the same problem that it should be impossible to win but you can still win
Honestly I think if the way you theme factions is "potential reactions to an alien invasion" they've pretty much covered all major bases.
"Fight them off", "Exterminate them", "Profit from their arrival", "Run away from them", "Capitulate to them because Humanity is terrible", "Worship them because they're obviously divine", "Make them respect us as equals" is pretty comprehensive as far as motivations go.
If you're keeping the main factions as is, maybe the way to go would be variants or breakaways a la Alien Crossfire?
So like you could schism the Academy into peaceniks who still want to befriend the ayys after they prove hostile, and realists who want to beat them up until they stop fricking with us.
Ideally you'd have schisms happening dynamically during a campaign (with the player picking which side they want to stick with), but I seriously doubt the game would support that without some serious frickery
Ah yeah, a Transhumanist faction would probably work.
Though you could argue that alien-derived transhumanism could be a thing that a couple of the existing factions could get into (Servants and Academy I'd guess, maybe with the Initiative commercialising it as well).
If you wanted a Servants variant faction, that could be it actually, like less "worshipping the aliens because they are divine" and more "becoming one with the alien's flesh so we may inherit their divinity" All I can think of is the Nigerians in District 9 eating Prawns for their "magic powers"
Honestly I think if the way you theme factions is "potential reactions to an alien invasion" they've pretty much covered all major bases.
"Fight them off", "Exterminate them", "Profit from their arrival", "Run away from them", "Capitulate to them because Humanity is terrible", "Worship them because they're obviously divine", "Make them respect us as equals" is pretty comprehensive as far as motivations go.
If you're keeping the main factions as is, maybe the way to go would be variants or breakaways a la Alien Crossfire?
So like you could schism the Academy into peaceniks who still want to befriend the ayys after they prove hostile, and realists who want to beat them up until they stop fricking with us.
Ideally you'd have schisms happening dynamically during a campaign (with the player picking which side they want to stick with), but I seriously doubt the game would support that without some serious frickery
Subjugating the aliens. A faction that wants to be empire builders and take the ayys as a subservient civilization. An aggressive faction that doesn't want extermination.
Finding some other aliens to be friends with. Basically Humanity First when it comes to the ayys that are trying to invade Earth but the Academy to any other ayys that want to be friends. They try to get help from some other aliens in repelling these aliens and fighting them off.
Ah yeah, a Transhumanist faction would probably work.
Though you could argue that alien-derived transhumanism could be a thing that a couple of the existing factions could get into (Servants and Academy I'd guess, maybe with the Initiative commercialising it as well).
If you wanted a Servants variant faction, that could be it actually, like less "worshipping the aliens because they are divine" and more "becoming one with the alien's flesh so we may inherit their divinity" All I can think of is the Nigerians in District 9 eating Prawns for their "magic powers"
IMO not only have they covered the bases, Humanity First and Resistance, as well as Academy and Protectorate are redundant.
NPC faction, which is just a mafia family trying to turn legit, without care about the aliens. This would mean they would just sell services to players, while they try to turn a weakened country to their side and then stop.
Currently doing a tryhard minmax run as Humanity First. So far I have Europe and America. Going to break into China soon. Control point capacity is a b***h though. Going to grab Eurasian Union after China and start unifying that. Then I'll merge the EU with the EU and start working on the Pan-Asian Combine. Specifically I'll be using Thailand to grab as much of Southeast Asia as I can to easily unite it into the Pan-Asian Combine.
I'm also playing with the Earth unification mod, so that's my end goal. After I get Great Europa finished I'm going to take Canada and Mexico to merge them into America. I'll just declare war on all the random little nations to absorb them without issue. By that time I should be about done unifying the Pan-Asian Combine as well. Once that's done I'll start working on the Caliphate primarily and South America secondarily. The Caliphate will get merged into the EU as soon as it's gotten all of the territory it can get, same with South America to America. After that it'll just be the long and hellish process of unifying Africa. Then I'll merge them all together and see just how much it can do.
What does loyalty do? Do they try to steal your councilors or does loyalty affect certain missions?
Also my plan is mostly to just not let them get that far in the first place.
The mission that the aliens use to snag CPs for the servants includes a defensive modifier that is your councilors total loyalty divided by 6. 6 councilors with max loyalty will provide a -25 modifier to their mission. The same thing applies to command and the terrorize mission. If you don't level those stats up the aliens will take the CPs from you and you will be rolling 1% crackdowns to take them back.
Inspire mission. Most classes with high persuasion have it.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Is there any way to know how much it increased loyalty by if you don't know the actual loyalty? Also, if you get a councilor up to 25 loyalty and install the loyalty monitor cybernetic implant which reduces loyalty by 5, can you increase loyalty back up to 25 or is it stuck at 20?
2 years ago
Anonymous
I have tested it and the inspire mission seems to randomly increase loyalty by 1-3, so you cant know for sure until you investigate them. I also tested the loyalty monitor and it reduces maximum loyalty. I think any trait that reduces loyalty also imposes a cap on maximum loyalty, so the monitor reduces the maximum loyalty value to 20... pretty bad. I have never seen someones loyalty randomly decline without an event occurring, so if you inspire someone up to 25 and investigate them to confirm, they will stay at 25 until something obvious happens to reduce their loyalty.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Damn, that really sucks about the max loyalty.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Like I said, I have never seen it decline without an event stating it is declining. Once you hit 25 you can forget them. Just forget the monitor.
Leaked dev version, running exe of the demo, using a patch to the demo to unlock other stuff. If you don't already have it then you might be fricked. I don't know if any of the links still work. But as long as you downloaded the demo already then you can play it as much as you want.
>What if the aliens were all extremely good looking and their goal was to have sex and interbreed with humans?
Don't even think about it. It would basically be a great replAYYcement for the human race. Everything human would go extinct and so would probably our culture.
Thankfully this is a very slim posibility as humans can't interbreed with anything that isn't human on planet earth. So the chances for beign able to produce viable offspring with ayys is even smaller.
And there's also the chance that our genes are stronger than theirs. And the possibility that alien females can get pregnant by human males but human females can't get pregnant by alien males.
But realistically all scenarios lead to war.
>alright we can only reproduce using one gender going forward - should we go with the model designed around a womb and mammaries to grow and feed infants, or would we be better off going with the model with just a semen cannon down there?
There were some implications that the Asari were able to psychologically manipulate different species into seeing them as attractive, based on each of their own beauty standards. For example, an Asari from the perspective of a Krogan probably looks complately different compared to an Asari from the perspective of a human.
The demo/leaks consistently crash on my machine on starting a campaign, RIP
Out of curiosity what's the Ayylmao's deal? Like why are they here in the Solar System, and what are they trying to accomplish? Or is that not fully detailed in the beta builds?
Given that they're willing to work with the Servants I'd guess that they're on an imperialist mission rather than looking to wipe us out just because.
Is there a lore reason why they hold off on going apeshit until the 2030s?
They want slaves. Specifically they want manpower and people they can use to fight other aliens. They got invaded by some other ayys and are now invading humanity as a preemptive strike and to strengthen their own position.
There is FTL but it's via wormholes on the outer edges of solar systems and has extremely low throughput. This means that offensives have to be fought almost entirely in-situ, which gives an enormous homefield advantage. This is also why they can't go balls-to-the-wall, because they literally don't have the ability to within the solar system and have to build up their capabilities.
Is it just my bias or does this vindicate the Academy? So there's an Alien War going on, and instead of becoming a pawn (Servants/Protectorate), or an mutual problem (Humanity First), Humanity becomes a player in local interstellar politics Kinda like Japan post Russo-Japanese War
The academy are the best faction for sure. They offer the aliens a chance to become allies, and if they decline, they basically default to the humanity first option. Great faction all-around.
>and if they decline, they basically default to the humanity first option >The beatings will continue until the Star Trek Federation happens
Yeah, sort of. It vindicates the Academy and the Resistance. The Resistance because it means just turtling up and telling everyone else to frick off isn't necessarily doomed to fail as an inevitability. The Academy because the aliens aren't necessarily unreasonable and could theoretically be allied with, which would be a much stronger position in the universe, in addition to just being nicer. Humanity First starts out vindicated and stays vindicated, albeit in a less strong position since taking the fight to them would be significantly more difficult.
> Humanity First starts out vindicated and stays vindicated, albeit in a less strong position since taking the fight to them would be significantly more difficult.
So basically becoming the North Sentinel Island of local space? Like a black spot where the locals will use their outdated tech (railguns, etc) to kill you if you get too close Well that's one way to do it
The funniest ending would be Project Exodus ending up in a system controlled by the invader's archenemy, who then use Exodus' knowledge to steamroll the Invaders and give Earth back to Exodus
>They offer the aliens a chance to become allies, and if they decline
They aren't making an offer. The aliens don't have a choice. They'll become allies whether they want to or not.
Yeah, sort of. It vindicates the Academy and the Resistance. The Resistance because it means just turtling up and telling everyone else to frick off isn't necessarily doomed to fail as an inevitability. The Academy because the aliens aren't necessarily unreasonable and could theoretically be allied with, which would be a much stronger position in the universe, in addition to just being nicer. Humanity First starts out vindicated and stays vindicated, albeit in a less strong position since taking the fight to them would be significantly more difficult.
>The Resistance: throw the Ring into mt Doom >The Protectorate: deliver Ring to Sauron >The Initiative: sell the Ring >The Academy: wear the Ring and try to control it >Humanity First: kill every orc, elf, dwarf and treant on your way to Sauron >The Servants: your sphincter becomes new Ring >Project Exodus: stay in Shire
>tell Canada to finish their space program >launch pad spawns in Quebec >liberate Montreal >Canada has a space program >Quebec doesn't
The instructions must've been written in English
It creates an organization that produces boost into your pool.
The one time I did it it gave me one that produces .25 boost per month, and then I never touched it again.
It creates an organization that produces boost into your pool.
The one time I did it it gave me one that produces .25 boost per month, and then I never touched it again.
I guess that's like a couple years of US boost investment, but it still only sounds like something you'd go for if you're trying to rush the moon or something.
Can it give you good ones like Whitefang Industries?
I just did it some 60 times and it appears to be a 50/50 chance to get an org that gives 0.25 boost per month or 1.25 boost per month. Didn't get anything other than one of those in all of the orgs.
I really wish orgs became available all at once at set times of year with a big announcement - kind of like councilor mission assignment. For example each January 1st and July 1st.
It would really improve turn flow because I'm in the same boat... am I supposed to checking orgs for each councilor every week otherwise and just keep seeing the same old crap 90% of the time in the name of optimization?
It's all part of a larger UI and flow issue. I wish there was a diplomatic conversation with other factions set to happen every few months as well so you aren't just speeding between assignments.
>Diplomatic conversation with other factions
Want to particularly harp on this as a major UI sore spot. It took me 3 games until I realized non-aggression pacts we're even a thing, and once I signed one with my complimentary faction it gave me zero notice that it would run out after a bit and the other faction would start overthrowing my control points again. In addition the intel game is a mess, I get steal tech opportunities seemingly at random, the Intel tab can't keep track of which faction has what agent for more than a week despite me exhausting their investigations everytime my 25 guy has an opportunity, humanity first is tolerant of the servants for some godforsaken reason instead preying on other random factions, it's just a mess
HF is justified as long as they chill the frick out after knocking out the current crop of aliens, since they literally launched wars of aggression against all their stellar neighbours because of Bush-tier WMD paranoia
All of the ideologies are broken clocks that came into existence when all we had to go off of was a bombed out chasis in the woods. Humanity First will kill everything they find forever, the Academy will befriend every abomination they see no matter how awful, the Resistence will literally never talk to anyone and keep turtling to protect the status quo forever, etc.
Protectorate would probably end up joining up with the Initiative because Banerjee is just a ruthless powermonger who was planning to use the ayys to become a Breen like figure, Servants would probably melt away into various other cults, and Exodus would just be fricking gone lmao
Anyone else a little bit overwelmed? >In what to Invest? When should you direct invest?
This is the biggest problem for me. Gdp generates Investment points If I understood that correctly, but also generates Pollution, so you should also go welfare? Knowledge is science right? Unity seems like a meme. Should Military only be invested by specialised countries or by every country? Spoils or Funding? Booster investments only for countries with an already ongoing space program? >What is the most important resource?
I feel money is semi useful but Science and Boosts feel king. Is the strategy to just invest in Knowledge? Also how to get more influence? Positive global opinion? >What to research? When should you start contributing to global research instead of focusing admin cap and other stuff?
I focused on own research and AI basically researched 4 techs that gave 4 different battery types. So I guess one should start contributing to global research to avoid that, but when? Also, what is that third engineering project slot at the bottom? >What countries to focus on early?
I rush Scandinavian nations, then into Europe. Then Poccna. Is there a way to remove a faction from a control point they block, besides staring an open feud with them? >Space stuff
Should you even build stations before you can extract minerals and volatiles in space + generate water? If I understand correctly, if you dont produce things in space you waste boosts launching supplies from earth? Also I build moon bases before I got mines tech. Is that the correct way?
When should one start to build navy? >Councillor interactions/Strategy.
Is my feeling correct that you should level councillors to have 25+Admin + 25 of their specialized ability? I made the mistake to focus on persuasion to flip a lot of countries early, and failing later because no commando/espionage. What Abilities are most important? I didn't know what to do after claiming my countries, so I just spread Public opinion without a clue.
>This is the biggest problem for me. Gdp generates Investment points If I understood that correctly, but also generates Pollution, so you should also go welfare? Knowledge is science right? Unity seems like a meme. Should Military only be invested by specialised countries or by every country? Spoils or Funding? Booster investments only for countries with an already ongoing space program?
Rule #1: All long-term investments in national productivity are pointless, in every case. That discounts economy, welfare, unity, and funding, for every nation and in every condition. Any points that go towards them are wasted. The bonuses are so tiny, and the timeframe of the game gives you so little opportunity to reap the rewards, that you should discount them all entirely. Pollution? Don't give a shit about it, the timeframe of the game ain't long enough for you to have to deal with the consequences of your actions.
Rule #2 is that the above rule also holds for armies, navies, and nuclear weapons, because it's so much better to take over a country that already has them, rather than try to build them yourself. So navy, army, and nuclear weapons are out the window too.
This makes the rest fairly simple. Invest in boost if you need the resource, invest in Military if you're USA / China and want to be able to fight endgame spider-mechas, invest in mission control if you're out of orbital slots.
The end, ez.
So basically just invest in Knowledge and Boosters( and spoils in Nations you don't care about)? What about Democratic/Authoritarian score, inequality and this united population thingy ? Can they be ignored?
Yes. Just ignore everything, actually.
This anon is a moron who's spreading disinformation and doesn't realize it's possible to do some very whacky things.
Also "just ignore welfare lmao and go full spoils" is just asking for like a baseline unrest score of 9 because making every country into a hellhole where a tiny elite rule over a mass of penniless disenfranchised peasants isn't as good an idea as you think in the 21st century
also the GDP loss from climate change raises exponentially because the devs rebalanced it in response to a player running full spoils across the world and only getting like 10% gdp loss per year at 5C temperature anomaly
>Also "just ignore welfare lmao and go full spoils" is just asking for like a baseline unrest score of 9 because making every country into a hellhole where a tiny elite rule over a mass of penniless disenfranchised peasants isn't as good an idea as you think in the 21st century
This isn't a "develop the world properly long-time" game.
This is a "fight off the ayys" game.
You need to get out of the normal grand strat mindset. It the countries don't revolt (or it's easy to bring them back into the fold with a couple of councillor actions), it literally doesn't matter how dystopian you make them as long as they keep feeding money to your boost nations. > This anon is a moron who's spreading disinformation and doesn't realize it's possible to do some very whacky things.
An anon did math in the last thread mathematically proving that long term investment is useless compared to Mission Control, see
How are you going to fight off the ayys if you've nationruined all of earth? iirc there's an event that straight up deletes all boost sites and it can result from high inequality, high unrest, and loss of GDP, which is something that WILL happen with your strategy
2 years ago
Anonymous
>How are you going to fight off the ayys if you've nationruined all of earth?
With spaceships, which are unaffected by the status of Earth apart from in the very distal sense of how much research you've done into their weaponry. > Spoiler
Did you find out about this mysterious event because your dad works at Nintendo?
2 years ago
Anonymous
I learnt about it via the game files and ingame experimentation.
I sure hope the devs don't patch your cheese strat by making it easier to trigger uwu
2 years ago
Anonymous
My point is that your tactic of "Invest in unity, funding and welfare" won't help you avoid high unrest anyway, because the benefits of completing them are so tiny - and I don't even mean tiny to the meta of defeating the ayys, but tiny to the very national statistics they're supposed to be improving - that it's a wasted investment EVEN IF your only goal is to make every nation a peaceful Scandanavian welfare state, aliens be damned.
2 years ago
Anonymous
The fact that trying to be a goodie two shoe fix all the nations in the world is a noob trap is one my favorite things about this game.
It's like the board game imperial. You don't own the country, you're just renting it. And you better squeeze it for all it's worth or lose to those that do.
There are probably viable ways to execute upon completely fricking up the planet and becoming self sufficient in space, and there are also probably ways to win this game by making Giga-China and never actually bothering with space.
Rather than trying to insist upon an optimal way to play, people should try to achieve what they actually want for the future of humanity.
You absolutely want to inves economy and knowledge in china or India if you take control of them.
Even 5 years if advising (any 25 admin free agents) and improving economy/knowledge will give you massive development points and research points, and then you can get some funding or leech spoils.
The reason for this is that at game start those two countries have such a low personal income level, and such large populations, that after a few years you can have China be 3x EUs, for example. India I reckon would take longer to develop.
But, then, to your point, countries like Japan, USA and EU already are pretty well developed, and have low populations, so you would want to focus knowledge, boost and mission control instead, because your economy investment there is just to keep it maintained where it already is.
Additionally, you cannot get research from using spoils. You should probably take over servants/protectorate nations (the garbage ones you didnt take over), set them to spoils only, then abandon them, to use them as cash fountains but not wasting influence income.
Thanks for the insight!
What does advising actually do?
[...]
[...]
Unity isn't useless since high cohesion blots out public opinion, but yeah unless the country is couping every 30 seconds you're free to let personal liberties slip; you are at war after all. That being said spoils/funding is also a noob trap since you end up with more money than god fairly quickly and are instead limited by influence/operations/R&D. I suggest always maxing knowledge and boost, switching the latter to mission control once your mining bases are active
Of course, this assumes you are actually fighting the aliens. If you are servants or initiative than steal everything not bolted down and party in your secret bunker while everything burns around you I guess
But isn't development kind of wasted on unity? The game tells that high cohesion is worse than middle ground cohesion and public opinion can be raised fast by councillors as well as unrest reduction.
You need a little bit of spending in unity to raise your faction's goals higher in the approval polls.
It increases the difficulty of other factions taking actions in your territory and decreases the difficulty for you. Unless you want to keep a councilor there running public campaigns for the entire game.
Like the above anon said, every tick in unity gives public opinion for the faction that controls said country. it's use is to have your councilors available for other missions than public campaign. just 5-10% investment in unity is enough if your country is at 5 cohesion and running knowledge. If you don't think it's worth democratizing a country (russia) cohesion above 5 is useful to keep unrest low, to maximize your development points, and military investments.
So basically just invest in Knowledge and Boosters( and spoils in Nations you don't care about)? What about Democratic/Authoritarian score, inequality and this united population thingy ? Can they be ignored?
Yes. Just ignore everything, actually.
This anon is a moron who's spreading disinformation and doesn't realize it's possible to do some very whacky things.
Also "just ignore welfare lmao and go full spoils" is just asking for like a baseline unrest score of 9 because making every country into a hellhole where a tiny elite rule over a mass of penniless disenfranchised peasants isn't as good an idea as you think in the 21st century
also the GDP loss from climate change raises exponentially because the devs rebalanced it in response to a player running full spoils across the world and only getting like 10% gdp loss per year at 5C temperature anomaly
Unity isn't useless since high cohesion blots out public opinion, but yeah unless the country is couping every 30 seconds you're free to let personal liberties slip; you are at war after all. That being said spoils/funding is also a noob trap since you end up with more money than god fairly quickly and are instead limited by influence/operations/R&D. I suggest always maxing knowledge and boost, switching the latter to mission control once your mining bases are active
Of course, this assumes you are actually fighting the aliens. If you are servants or initiative than steal everything not bolted down and party in your secret bunker while everything burns around you I guess
>Finally get THE run going >Perfect almost everything, full control over Russia, China, USA and India >Almost fully democratized China >80 space control and stations everywhere >All of that by 2029 >Didn't escalate with the Aliens so got at least 3-4 years before Servants start building alien facilities to turn nations into alien states >Infinite nullpointexception spam begins
Let me play the actual fricking game already. And no, I'm not going to shit out 250 bucks for early access.
does anyone have the leaked dev build...i only have the cracked demo with time-limit removed but not being able to save sucks major dick and so does being locked into the resitance
Can I get a link to the pre release version?, or at least a key word to find it in the archive? thx in advance.
Literally been linked in this thread.
Thanks for the insight!
What does advising actually do?
[...]
But isn't development kind of wasted on unity? The game tells that high cohesion is worse than middle ground cohesion and public opinion can be raised fast by councillors as well as unrest reduction.
>What does advising actually do?
Increase investment points by administration % and science by science %. Also increases army performance based on command, but only during advice.
If you have a big country, it's worth advising to increase outputs.
So far everyone either died to endless alien spam or endless error spam, so its hard to say what the winning condition is. HF story I was able to see before everything came crashing down suggests finding a way to make sure the wormhole the aliens used to get here never opens again while eradicating all aliens in the solar system.
Also yeah, the servants start converting their nations into alien nations around 2030 onwards, and once you push back the ayys will start blowing up your outposts and send their armies to earth. 3 armies a 8.7 strength with near instant recovery abilities. Only way to stop them from sending their armies is to intercept their army carriers or of course blowing up their motherbase.
>or of course blowing up their motherbase.
Could this be a viable strat? Leave them alone, tech up, and then rush straight to their staging point to kill them?
>Could this be a viable strat? Leave them alone
You have to. Any action you take against the ayys causes them to escalate their actions. For instance, if you starting hunting down all of their infiltrators and kill them when you spot them the aliens will instantly send in a strike force towards earth and land their armies way before they would do that normally.
Grab your preferred nations, build them up before merging them and establish your outposts with sufficient defense tech before you start pushing against the ayys. Although right now the balance is a bit off since the game is still in development.
One kill and one capture is fine. Anything beyond that and the ayys will start blowing up your shit.
2 years ago
Anonymous
you can capture them? I was never able to select "arrest" on an alien, only "investigate" and "assassinate"
2 years ago
Anonymous
In order to capture them, you need to kill one, then complete some xeno tech projects that include "hydra containment". If you havent done the research then the option wont be available.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Is it really only one for both? I don't care about them fricking about the 3rd world but when they're fricking about in my main superpower I should have some ability to defend myself
Can anyone post a screenshot of any kind of ayy army or similar? I'd like to see if it's actually enticing or generic blue ayy with breasts and tentacle hair
What is the point of the devs making fifty shitty drives that are less efficient than grid drives?
Fission frag drives, pegasus drives are all shittier versions of grid drives. You need ONE high efficiency, low-thrust drive. And ONE high-thrust low efficiency drive. Have the same choices in the next tier! Not a bunch of clutter in your project research screen fulfilling the same roles but worse.
It seems there's two tiers. Before magnetic nozzles you use grid drives. After magnetic nozzles you can get really good torches.
So for the modules that say they will automatically upgrade as you unlock more techs, how exactly do they upgrade? Do they actually have some layout of defenses like ships do? The defense score doesn't change, at least not the one that's shown. Is there some hidden score based on your techs and such that's just weighted against the firepower of ships trying to attack it or something? How does this work? Should I put one or two defense modules on each station, or should I have one station with tons of them?
I said in the last thread that we just needed >"Putin is a Mad Dog!"
to complete the trifecta of March's Russiaphobic talking points, and the Support Current Thing devs did not disappoint. Bravo. Spazka Ukraine!
calm down... this happens to leaders in any country, all the time.
In order to capture them, you need to kill one, then complete some xeno tech projects that include "hydra containment". If you havent done the research then the option wont be available.
It happens all the fricking time in the later stages of the game, in my game's the aliens are running around performing these events across the middle east, specifically Iran.
What? First time I saw it was Mexico. Then Canada. It's just an event that's produced by alien actions, which you won't be able to spot until you get the relevant techs.
Should I focus on a single continent or spread out my activities to at least one big power everywhere? All of Europe cooperating with the ayys seems kinda dangerous in the long term.
There's not much of an advantage in having contiguous influence blocs. Really you should focus on specific individual countries that suffice your needs. Aim for the superpowers (US, China, EU, Russia) and special cases like Kazakhstan (huge boost income), then just focus on fricking with the Servants.
You should focus on megastates. I think neighboring countries having CPs controlled by other factions gives them bonuses to certain missions. So it's not great to have one country surrounded by a bunch of hostile ones. Though that doesn't really matter with the big countries that much.
Listen to the autism of someone who had spent too many hours on this game. I present you the ideal pip distribution for stable growth for most countries.
Pips are percentages and their importance lies in their overall distribution, so large deviations from it can frick up the math.
Economy: Always 1 pip less than welfare, making your inequality constantly decrease. You can go for a 45-55 distribution once inequality reaches 1 and can no longer unify with others. Higher per capita GDP decreases unrest.
Welfare: It's king thanks to libtard devs. Not only decreases inequality, but also slows climate change, therefore helping your economy in the long run. Might be the only way to reverse climate damage through late game techs.
Knowledge: I might be undervaluing it with a single pip, but knowledge increases unrest which decreases your research output overall. You can go 2 pip with very stable nations, but even 3x1pip and 2x2 pip is too much on the knife's edge for me. It's better to get the extra research from orgs or research bases on Mercury.
Unity: At least 2 pips for everyone bar Japan (1pip), 3 for Mexico, India or other shitholes until their cohesion is maxed out. With this distribution 2 pips are generally enough to keep ideological dominance, unless there are very few nations left for the other factions to meddle with.
Military: Maxed out if you have unrest, otherwise 2 pips once the country is stable. I seem to run into occasional hitchups with just 2 pips and I only ever could get away with a single pip in Japan. Think of it as an investment into the police force, the increased mil tech is just an added bonus.
Spoils: I don't like it, it increases unequality and fricks up climate for everyone. It supposed to keep the elites happy, but it's not worth it in my opinion. At most, use it on shitholes which are not possible federation leaders.
Funding: 1-2 pips on stable and developed nations, otherwise ignore. I know it's not an efficient way of making money, but since I'm not using spoils it's the only way for me to extract wealth and it does add up later in the game. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to help with the economy as it should, which is bonkers.
Boost: You should fund your stations and habs through space resources all the time, which is incidentally also way faster. Your majority boost income should come from orgs and existing infrastructure, which the AI loves to build anyways. I only increase boost for big nations situationally. Defending rocket infrastructure from sabotage is also a pain.
Mission control: 1 or 2 pips, always keep it growing. Signal stations around Mercury can only take you so far while costing valuable resources and money.
Army: Only build a single one for federation leaders, like Ivory Coast, Bolivia or Ethiopia, so you can call your big daddy main federation into the war. Direct investing into it might be a good idea.
Navy: I prefer to have a 3 army task force deployable around the world, so if you couldn't snag the US it is worth to invest into power projection depending on your style.
Nukes: Waste of resources.
Space defenses: Wtf is this even, I'm in 2042 and still haven't got them. Use ships and defense batteries on your stations instead, I guess.
Space defenses are unlocked by Trans-Interface warfare and make a region immune to nuking and aliens landing their armies there. It doesn't provide total immunity to orbital bombardment, but will fight back against ships attempting to orbitally bombard the region. It costs 50 per region so it's really difficult to get going. This is probably the best thing to use direct investments for in the late game. In fact this might be the single greatest reason to not unite everything you can. If you rush down space defenses and tons of income then you can go around spamming space defenses in small nations prior to uniting them, allowing you to not only get them up for much cheaper, but also get far more per year than you'd otherwise be able to.
I wish the AI built in space more, honestly the planet stuff gets very boring, I wish the councillors were more automated and you did not have the stupid fricking control point's flipping randomly to the aliens even when they are defended. The space game is the most fun but the other factions are moronic in orbit. so you can never fight them effectively.
This entire game would be more fun in multiplayer.
So, which techs improve the power of the defense arrays used in Ground bases and Space Orbitals? I see the SDI symbol (1x for T1, 3x for T2), and I assume this number will go up once I research specific techs. Does anyone know what they are?
Furthermore, how can I calculate the power of a defense unit against alien ships? For example, pretend that one of their destroyers were to engage an orbital station with SDI of 3x? What would happen? I want to plan out on how to defend my Mars bases, and Earth Orbitals.
Also, I think one of my agents is compromised (projects keep getting stolen by humanity first, but the espionaeg numbers on all my agents is above 10 at least, now), even with loyalty improved to 20 and above, how do I find out if someone is compromised? All my older agents have the loyalty implants and are at 20 Loyalty. Presumably once my agent is IDes as compromised, I just need to spam "inspire" and they will turn back?
Loyalty implants immediately and clearly show when your agents are turned.
It also breaks the game as you can no longer turn enemy agents and keep them as easy diplo contacts.
Turning agents still gives you perfect intel on all other agents from that faction for a few turns. Good enough to kill them all and /or steal their orgs.
So, which techs improve the power of the defense arrays used in Ground bases and Space Orbitals? I see the SDI symbol (1x for T1, 3x for T2), and I assume this number will go up once I research specific techs. Does anyone know what they are?
Furthermore, how can I calculate the power of a defense unit against alien ships? For example, pretend that one of their destroyers were to engage an orbital station with SDI of 3x? What would happen? I want to plan out on how to defend my Mars bases, and Earth Orbitals.
Also, I think one of my agents is compromised (projects keep getting stolen by humanity first, but the espionaeg numbers on all my agents is above 10 at least, now), even with loyalty improved to 20 and above, how do I find out if someone is compromised? All my older agents have the loyalty implants and are at 20 Loyalty. Presumably once my agent is IDes as compromised, I just need to spam "inspire" and they will turn back?
Thanks in advance for replies.
Seconding all of the stuff about defenses.
Defense platforms are very under-explained and the tooltip from the research window isn't even accurate. They will use whatever best armor you have researched and whatever best laser fitting to their size you have researched. Small laser batteries for point-defense, medium for defense arrays and large for battlestations. Would be nice if in the finished game you could actually hover over your defense platforms and see what exactly they are equipped with, but alas.
>So, which techs improve the power of the defense arrays used in Ground bases and Space Orbitals?
Space defenses currently employ a point defense laser and kinetic weapons. Upgrading laser type from basic -> arc laser -> phaser improves those lasers. Upgrading from conventional ballistics to railguns to coilguns improves the kinetic weapons.
Secret pro strat where you play as servants and rush the US and then dominate the science and prevent everyone from learning how to get into space until 2030.
this looks like a research enabled org. But, from what i have seen so far, the servants T1 faction org is the best (makes assassination on that guy very difficult - more than aliens - almost requires a successful arrest on home turf to pull off).
Has anyone successfully defeated the alien armies in ground combat? Wondering if it makes any sense to have USA and China tech on miltech, or if there is some tech or orbital weapons that I need to rush to first to make ground combat feasible. My experience so far is that upgrading miltech takes forever.
The resistance and humanity first. I would say the executioners is the best, but the special activities division is quite good. The executioners doesn't give investigation but gives +10 security, which is huge.
You need the projects called united north america and greater united north america. Then you can either conquer them or go for a diplomatic unification.
Trying out the skirmish to try and gauge battle stations - the dev version doesnt even have a skirmish that allows you to play defense to a normal hab or ring... to try and gauge my level of readiness.
Anyway, after having played COADE and Jupiter Incident, I find the maneuvering interface total garbage. There is no button to face the ship towards a target, for example. which is fricking critical! When you enable AI mode, it wasted all the delta V like a moron. I am trying to setup trial runs of massed missile boats against stations, for example, but the default ships have their volleys overwhelmed, and in any case, I guess if I was able to speed up the ships before launching volleys they would have a much better chance but I cant even figure out to accelerate or point ships in a specific direction (or all of them at once).
Space combat interface needs a lot of improvement. Cant even tell why the guns arent firing most of the time.
We will need a ship designer to go with a more customizable skirmish mode to better plan naval doctrine and stuff.
Capture some of the larger nations around it, that seems to improve your chances of doing campaigns and control missions. Also try to grab any persuasion orgs.
How useful is assassination? Will it actually set them back or will they instantly rehire?
[...]
And the different between a new agent and a veteran agent is massive.
i think about 2027-2030 is good idea to start killing all the agents. Im just playing humanity frick yeah only so im partial of killing every one of them included their families
Anyone else feel the game demands too much micro? The controlling of the nations is fun at first but then juggling it plus fleets + habs + stations gets a bit much.
I'm more worried about replayability, the game captures extremely well the anxiety and stress of waiting for the unknown (hopefully they'll disable the ability to see ships and stations, it kills the atmosphere by letting the player know too much) but I wonder how well written and diverse are the random events. I don't like seeing the same chain of events every time I play.
Hey Boys, I think if you manage to keep sabotaging the servants mission f"Hydra Language" from servants, it will preventing them from having the alien armies land.
I have sabotaged it thrice now at around 5000/10000 research points, and I kept the servants hounded continuously so far... let see if keeping this objective from being achieved buys time.
Also, pro-tip... do not build fission piles in mars, it uses up your radio actives - better to just build more solar arrays.
there is a "sex Change" org you can hire. The Resistance faction leader is a BLM black trans troon 🙂
How bad is global war in this game? I've got China Japan and the USA and am thinking of going to war vs. India and Russia (the Servants). I think I can win but will it be a loss for Earth as a whole?
Unless you've dismantled their nukes they'll just obliterate all your armies and territories. Russia itself has enough nukes to cause environmental doomsday.
You can dismantle nukes if you take control of the executive CP. And there is a research that let's you build ground defences that block nukes and orbital attacks in your regions.
Main problem is that it's owned by the servants who are very happy to fire off nukes, most of the other factions in my experience will only fire them off in retaliation. In one of my games I went to war with pretty much all of europe using russia, india and china to restore the warsaw pact territories, but could only start the war once I'd taken control of the unclaimed USA and ended all their alliances then abandoned the country. Starting WW3 with servants, HF and independent nuclear countries just isn't really a good idea.
The game doesn't end but it causes an event where the world GDP is crushed and billions of people die once there's been enough nukes fired to increase the stratospheric aerosols to the point the global temperature drops. You could probably still win if you have a good space presence and it might even be a funny way to beat global warming if say you nuked africa in a slow controlled way.
I'm playing on the pre-Demo leaked Dev version with a stability patch-thing someone posted in a previous thread. Is there a newer dev version that fixes these flaws?
It is just fricking near impossible to intercept Alien fleets. The game told me it would only take a few days to intercept with end-game drives, but instead they're gone for the next year. That's a huge ass fleet out of contact and uninteractable.
I got another huge ass fleet fricked. It finished taking over an alien space station around asteroid 63, then just fricked itself. The fleet is floating in the middle of nowhere, not close to the asteroid. The fleet claims to still be at the station, but the station is gone. I can't interact with the fleet. I guess I can try to console command killasset to get rid of it, but holy shit.
An alien fleet swung by Mercury and attacked one of my stations in Extreme Mercury Orbit. I thought the aliens were headed to JUST Extreme Orbit, but I guess I missed something or they snapped to the station. So they attacked the station, blew up some modules and uh, stuck around for a few months and then just vanished. None of my fleets could make an intercept course to the alien fleet, claiming it would take infinity KPS. Any fleet reaching the station after over a week of transit (??? But it takes only 2 weeks to travel from Earth to Jupiter for them...) just gets bumped off into the Extreme orbit area.
Part of me wants to start up the game again and work past these problems, but it's just obnoxious.
Anyone know more of the console commands beyond those provided by the help command?
>I got another huge ass fleet fricked. It finished taking over an alien space station around asteroid 63, then just fricked itself. The fleet is floating in the middle of nowhere, not close to the asteroid.
Okay, so I watched carefully on a replay of the save. The fleet was moving from asteroid 62 to a mid orbit Earth station. Then about half way through, the fleet suddenly triggered combat with the station around asteroid 63, which they are not near at all.
There is another of my fleets, the once that got fricked up trying to intercept aliens, that is headed to the asteroid 63 station. Maybe I'll get them to try and join the other fleet, reset it.
Also, what the frick are we supposed to do if a ship loses propulsion from combat damage? Apparently directional thrust or direct thrust will do it. Now the ship can't move, and unless split away from the fleet, the entire fleet can't move. Great stuff. Now I just gotta scuttle a Dreadnought.
Yeah, human abductions, mind control of political figures, alien plants. If not removed, the alien plants begin to spawn giant creatures that rampage. Plants also affect humans and make them look at aliens more favorably. That's just the early problems they cause.
Just testing some stuff. >very start of game >unify Earth >in game part of pic related >each point in economy gives $71.3 >grows by $85.3T per year at 25% economy (3 pips economy, welfare, and knowledge; 1 pip unity, military, and funding) >will gain 10 IP after one year
I am, however, getting spammed with null reference exceptions. Still interesting to see its stats though. In lieu of being able to test it in game I charted it out and created the three graphs. And if anyone is wondering, after 30, 40, 50, 100, and 200 years it has 178, 203, 226, 313, and 438 investment points respectively.
Literally nothing. I did that before the first month even ticked over. I could go do some more calculations for various levels of economy bonuses if you want. Maybe 10, 25, and 50% extra? Do you know what the highest bonus you can get is?
>Your model does not account for increasing GDP malus from pollution, does it?
No, because it's assuming enough points dedicated to welfare to counteract pollution.
I should check the tech tree again, but from memory you can get like 10-25% bonus to economy from them (they're quite expensive techs even though some are early in the tree, like photonic computing or right after it).
How to form the caliphate? Who even forms it?
I've got the Maghreb then the United Arab League, but there are no countries left to unify with.
I basically only need the Greater Caliphate for that shitty Indian Ocean nation, but I think I need the Caliphate existing for that, not just the tech researched.
I believe you need to get countries to release regions to allow it to form. I recall reading someone suggest Saudi Arabia can release its region's to let it form.
The bonuses to economy are actually a lot less effective than I had thought.
Although I suppose the bonuses are somewhat achievable. Especially for a big nation/union, because you can also get an advisor with 20+ admin to advise there and boost investment broad spectrum by 20%+, although that is also pretty costly in influence and opportunity cost of councillor usage.
----
Let's see what inferences can be drawn from this analysis.
1. With a 10% bonus, it takes 2 years for points into economy to pay themselves off.
Proof: from 59.99 to 75.92 took 2 years. 25% is paid towards economy. 60 * 1.25 = 75
Although an argument could be made that you're actually paying 50% of points towards economy (economy+welfare being 50% in this model). Which would mean the period to have an investment start making profit is rather 4 years (59.99-88.99).
Two unexamined results is that this also massively reduces inequality, so being a stabilizer for countries like India. And the other that a 0% investment in economy means reduction of economy (as a result of world pollution) and eventual removal of control points which leads to lesser influence generated.
Though that last bit might actually have the advantage of requiring less org to control more important countries, even if they do become weaker. Because this allows you to keep it out of other's hands.
2. Going from a 10% economy bonus to a 50% economy bonus reduces the period for an investment to pay off from 2 years to 1.5 years if you count 25% (economy), and from 4 years to 3 years if you count 50% (economy+welfare).
For sure. I had 2 computer scientists as councillors and thought I'd rush some of the information technology techs. So the first satellite also boosted it and I ended up with a 40% boost (and +35% from engineering for personal projects). Still, photonic computing was so expensive in hindsight, that I'm sure it wasn't worth it. Getting one of the techs that gives extra orgs is much more likely to give you access to more admin orgs and orgs that give much better bonuses which are similarly global.
But by continuously killing a factions agents, you continuously suppress a faction's power:
1) their agents dont have the chance to get too powerful.
2) their agents are not able to collect too many orgs - not enough admin, not enough influence income - and because of this, that faction becomes stunted.
3) having agents dead or arrested means the faction continuously has to spend influence to keep hiring agents, and while dead, going to ground or arrested, the agents are not doing anything useful
4) weaker/newer agents are easier to find, arrest, sabotage/steal from, interrogate, turn and kill. If you let them grow experienced, you will have a much harder time to find (high espionage level) and kill (security level).
However you can only do this heavy suppression against a single faction. As Resistance, I suggest you do it against Servants.
I just dread spending all this time in a run and losing everything because the game is still too buggy to play to finish - my current run will probably be my last until release (or early access - devs really need a wider test base to polish this). In the meantime, I am enjoying the hell out of it.
I don't understand how to unify nations. I have Russia and Kazakstan and they are federated but I can't make them merge. Is there something else I need to have researched?
Click on Russia on the map, so the left side nation window becomes visible. In that window, there should be a little voting icon, like the one for the mission that enables you declare war. If you hover over it, it shows possible available decisions you can take with that mission, like "Federation" shows possible countries to invite to federation, "Unification" to merge countries. Note that if its not available, its usually because of a cooldown. If a country leaves a federation, there is like 1 year cooldown to join again, and another year to unify. If the country was already in the fedeartion, and it left just as you were about to take control, you should just remove al its allies, make it a rival of the federation parent, and declare war on it - it will be much faster - jsut be aware that you may need to cycle your armies in the territory (you should make the military you use at least 4.0 if you plan on taking over by force).
Also, note that if you declare wars on a country, you will not have it became part of the winning country/federation unless it has a claim. It just converts all the control points to you.
Just got a dev reply to a question many must be wondering about - if You need a high INV agent to run the "Surveil" mission. This was the devs reply: >>The bonus from the surveillance mission is flat and independent of the councilor's investigation score. It's essentially a +12 to investigation in the councilor's region only.
, councilors with higher investigation scores contribute to a higher base chance of detecting enemy councilors in the region they are in. This is calculated before the mission bonus is added.
>>So, if you're looking for someone in a particular place, you can maximize your chances of succeeding by using someone with a high investigation score to run that mission.
So what's the farthest anyone has got so far? It feels like I've been playing for a while but I still haven't formed any Great Nations yet and have no ships still.
I managed to get the leaked build to early 2030s before alien attacks, null references, and general slowdown made me shelf that run. In that run I had a fleet of early-mid tier ships that never got to engage anything, stations around earth/Luna/mars that got all my enemy kills, bases on the same that all my enemies killed, and the ayys turning Africa into their own nation. I'm probably done with serious runs on this build; gonna see if I can get one of the debug factions enabled and just yeet ships at each other
>Do my best to supress the servants so they don't trigger the alien takeover in their storyline >Protectocucks get storyline done and want to start building "peacekeeping" battlestations in earth orbit
2032, full control over great Europa and greater north America, so this is going to be the run to finally reach the end. Or end in yet another nullexception spam.
God damn this game needs a better UI, it's so fricking hard to tell what's going on. I thought I was crushing the game with full control of China Russia, Japan, the USA, Canada, Israel and others but the other factions were apparently still kicking and Project Exodus somehow has 10x the boost I do and tons of fleets. There are xenoflaura everywhere and I'm confused where to progress from here.
>I'm confused where to progress from here
Depends on your faction. Generally, once you dominate most major Earth nations you should already be finishing building up your space empire. Until you research proper fusion drives your ships won't do much besides guarding earth as any larger distance will take literal years.
https://files.catbox.moe/5rbuv4.ods
Did China and then decided I'd make a general-purpose one. The above is a spreadsheet for calculating the monthly investment points of a nation up to thirty years out. If you need spreadsheet software then LibreOffice is a good and easy choice.
why are the scales on the graphs set different? Even though you visually made the look different, the final numbers at the end are almost the same - did you wiener up the Y scale or is this a troll post?
Google trends does that kind of shit too nowadays except its a dumbass 0-100 percentage rating that can only be used to do a relative comparison between charts or in the chart itself. This allows someone to basically lie with statistics because it doesn't give any numbers.
Seeing the numbers laid out like this makes me second guess putting any priority into economy at all. A decade of investment spent on economy to gain about 5 more investment points when that all could have been spent on getting a shitload of mission control and research.
It seems like it's much better to invest into economy after creating the megastates and stacking up some bonuses.
For example, with some rough ballparks (based on stats at the beginning of the game) of the stats of a Pan-Asian Combine ($40T GDP, 2.5B pop, $12.5 per economy point, 35% bonus to investment points in economy, and 25% investment point dedicated to economy) you go from 33.1 to 38.2 over 5 years and to 42.8 over 10 years. But again, maybe those points would be better invested into other things. For the five years that's about 99 points per year spent on economy to gain 60 investment points per year.
Ah I've misinterpreted, I assumed that was spending 100% priority on economy. That's not as bad and actually pretty good for bigger countries not just the PAC. But still maybe not worth the effort for countries that have less than 1b people. Nice testing.
Why? Whether you invest in economy in 5 countries or invest it to boost in those 5 countries (assuming they already have a space program), the reward is the same, isn't it?
What does it matter if they're unified or separate for this?
It seems like it's much better to invest into economy after creating the megastates and stacking up some bonuses.
For example, with some rough ballparks (based on stats at the beginning of the game) of the stats of a Pan-Asian Combine ($40T GDP, 2.5B pop, $12.5 per economy point, 35% bonus to investment points in economy, and 25% investment point dedicated to economy) you go from 33.1 to 38.2 over 5 years and to 42.8 over 10 years. But again, maybe those points would be better invested into other things. For the five years that's about 99 points per year spent on economy to gain 60 investment points per year.
China (including Taiwan) gets ridiculous research from ecoing up. You can easily get 50-80% bonus to economy by 2030 via orgs and stations, I was over 80% by then. I could have gotten more eco if I wasn't building mission control on the ground and strengthening the army (since I was wrestling with Protectorate over US and wanted a backup army state).
With a max science advisor, easy 1.8K research on China alone.
So as you can see, ignore every other single drive option, don't bother researching them, just get the Ion Drive and then the Grid Drive. Use this drive to set up all your colonies, bases, stations and shipyards throughout the solar system. Build up a stockpile of resources, aim for asteroids and stuff with radioactives and noble metals. Build up small fleets of ships with high combat thrust to defend planetary orbits, they don't need much delta V at all.
What you really want to aim for is the Orion Drive. The big nuke bomber thing. It has very high combat acceleration and pretty damn great delta V for travel. You WILL want to build up your Radioactive stockpile for this drive. For drives that use extremely valuable substances as fuel, you don't ever want more than 5 fuel loads.
Or just you know, cheat, and play with these toys before the devs fix them or something.
>continued
But let's look at those techs. (Minus the individual project for the drive itself) The, ">" symbols means moving onto another tier, the "+" symbol means everything on the same tier. Tier costs do not seem to make a lot of sense against techs on the same tier.
Resistojet needs: Mission to Space > Deep Space Propulsion Concepts + Advanced Magnetics > Electrothermal Propulsion
Tungsten Resistojet needs all Resistojet needed, along with High-Energy Electrothermal Propulsion
Arcjet Drive needs all Resistojet needed. Nothing else.
Plasma Wave Drive? All Resistojet needed + Advanced Superconductors
Lorentz Drive? This is quite deep in the mid-game needing: Mission to Space > Deep Space Propulsion Concepts + Advanced Magnetics + Advanced Superconductors + Advanced Carbon Manipulation + Photonic Computing> Advanced Heat Management Concepts + Electromagnetic Propulsion + Magnetic Force Manipulation + Advanced Atomic Manipulation > High-Temperature Superconductors > Magnetic Plasma Confinement > High-Energy Electromagnetic Propulsion
Helicon Drive? Same as Lorentz.
Hall Drive? Same as Resistojet.
Ion Drive? Same as Resistojet
Grid Drive? Same as Resistojet, just Electrostatic Propulsion > High-Energy Electrostatic Propulsion + Ion Drive > Grid Drive
Colloid Drive is the same as Grid Drive, but without Ion Drive researched.
So what does this mean? It means that you are pretty much cucking yourself if you research ANY of the above options except Ion Drive and Grid Drive. So much of this shit DOESN'T MAKE FRICKING SENSE!
Why is the Lorentz and Helicon Drives just between Plasma Wave and Helicon Drives on the ship builder UI, but totally different in the tech tree?
Why so many drives that compete for the same niche unlocked by the same tech?
Why so many techs that seem to have the same name but, "High-Energy," or, "Advanced," strapped onto them?
Why is the Grid Drive so much easier to access than Lortentz and Helicon, but nearly the same, if not better?
Why do you even need interplanetary spaceships at all?
You can just ignore grid drives and build defence fleets to cover your bases. Build a shipyard above Mars for your Mars garrison until you get good fusion drives.
I was using the most efficient advanced rocketry drive with like 3 kps for my Earth fleet. Low kps is actually good since it lowers your effective strength so you can bring more ships to fight the aliens. I haven't worked out how to maneuver my ships, I simply leave them on their straight-ahead trajectory and let the aliens run straight into my missiles and lasers. They're shitty weapons but I outnumber them 5:1 and if I order them to always face the enemy, I can tank a lot of fire with heavy frontal armour. Combat AI wants to moronicly spin all over the place, always lock them in place.
where china or India get all resources needed for economic up?
considering whats going on right now they would need really strong global or at last regional presence to secure needed resource
There's only an energy crisis because morons decided to cripple energy production.
Guess what, if you suppress coal and oil production, output will fall! If you sanction your energy importers you'll experience higher energy costs!
The eco investment priority can be modeled as a political effort to babysit these drooling idiots that 'lead' our countries and prevent them from wrecking their economies. Sri Lanka decided to ban fertilizer - didn't work out well for them.
sure >me control EU and Russia+stans >Resistance control USA >we all supply resources and energy to Servant chinks
anon pls
2 years ago
Anonymous
You control the Middle East as well?
Considering how GDP plummets when Servants are in charge, they probably aren't doing a great job with their countries. They just stack up armies and nukes uselessly, it'd be like living in 1984.
2 years ago
Anonymous
somebody else control it
thing is the global trade system in this game should fall
it should be bronze era collapse all over again, with trade flow disturbed, sanctions, piracy and shit
but it isn't
2 years ago
Anonymous
The devs won't picture that because they're genuine true believers in the globalised liberal world order
2 years ago
Anonymous
what a gays
alien arrival and fractured humanity is best scenario for economic collapse and rise of NWO
2 years ago
Anonymous
I'm glad they didn't simulate resource acquisition in a more complex way, tbh.
Transnational elites have an incentive to grow particularly china as the new world power, because the chinese are much more willing to do whatever draconian shit they're ordered to do.
A lot of economic problems in the west are engineered, like the ukranian war.
yeah i got you
but engineered or not shortage is real and you can see how west roll with that
no reason why if china get sanctioned it would not roll down in the same fashion as its export economy relaying on imports of food, energy and raw resources
and its geography make it vulnerable
When you find an alien counciler don't kill them instantly, try to investigate them first. If you do that you will get info on the alien faction and it will show you were all the alien xenofauna and facility sites on the planet are. Every single one, Get burning lads!
>you will get info on the alien faction >it will show you were all the alien xenofauna and facility sites on the planet are. Every single one
Another really useful piece of info.
No, its a % value, when it gets to a threshold (I am not sure what value the threshold is) you can detect it and then attack it reducing that value by 60-95% depending upon the roll you get. So you can never 100% get rid of it as far as I know.
Ah, I was looking at the files and when I tried there was still xenofauna in areas I had purged. It is rather annoying as it means you have to constantly do this hero unit clicker gameplay of setting them to do ten million purge missions thoughout a game.
If you get better techs (and possibly the xenoscience hab buildings help, I think?) you can one-shot the flora with councillors, but it's a late-game thing.
I honestly hate the councillor system so fricking much. They should have had orgs that you subvert, like gaining control of the FBI gives you power in the US and gives you "Agents" you can deploy on set missions. Or gaining control of a cartel lets you get criminal agents you can use. Don't give them faces or shit just stats and capabilities.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I still think that guy's idea of having resources of various types of people that you allocate to various tasks would be a much better system.
2 years ago
Anonymous
that would also be good I think, anything but the boring councillor system we have now.
2 years ago
Anonymous
unfortunately sunk cost fallacy is in full effect, you can't convince the colorado cucks to rewrite their entire game now
2 years ago
Anonymous
It's like the opposite of a sunk cost, people literally paid them to put their faces in the game.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Have councilors still exist but have them provide bonuses to the people resources and missions that they do.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Just imagine that each ops you spend is a guy with a gun. That's like 64 guns.
2 years ago
Anonymous
It would be nice if it was more practically represented rather then just having to imagine I am sending ops teams. And if they are ops teams why am I "Spending" them? Does every operation end with me killing everyone involved?
2 years ago
Anonymous
They expect one of us in the wreckage brother.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Presumably it's just an abstracted measure of the resources required to undertake a mission.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Presumably it's just an abstracted measure of the resources required to undertake a mission.
>Le Mana
2 years ago
Anonymous
It is bullet
2 years ago
Anonymous
They've also put family members in the game lmao
2 years ago
Anonymous
Even better, saving on next year's Christmas presents.
anyone figure out how to use the debug stuff to give yourself all tech and resources? I want to start testing my own ship designs but the whole way that is setup in campaign mode is jank
My biggest complaint about the game is that there is little difference in how each faction plays. Sure, you've got one unique org that each faction can unlock, but aside from that, there are no bonuses, maluses, etc. that make a faction feel unique. They're just carbon copies of each other with a different endgame.
Like, Project Exodus should get bonuses to shipbuilding, Humanity First should get bonuses to war, etc.
Same here. There is a lot of wonkyness, lack of clarity, and clunky UI but I'm already loving it. A few months of polish could really make it a great game.
Speaking of quotes, they're all a bit weak. I wasn't expecting SMAC tier quality but some are seriously worse than Beyond Earth. Feels like wasted potential, along with milquetoast personalities of the faction leaders.
>worse than Beyond Earth
Agree unfortunately, and there is a real lack of inter-faction banter like you'd get in SMAC when they would compliment or shit talk your beliefs based on your relations.relationship.
It's a shame because the factions conceptually are all very interesting but their dialogue is either one-note (I love/hate aliens!) or painfully generic summary of tech reiterating what is obvious from the tech's title.
And here I just realized some factions are a literal copy-paste of SMAC. Morgan, Miriam and Santiago at least.
Where's the beef? Where's Deirdre casually commenting the slaughter of an entire Spartan city by mindworms? Where's Morgan calling the nerve stapling journalists "a PR disaster"? Those quotes are so epic I still remember them after decades. Here so far I heard the Servants' lady singing "let it shine" and my eyes rolled so hard they almost hurt.
Has anyone found a good way to gain research points beyond creating/stealing rich socialist utopias like the tooltip implies? How efficient is spamming research stations or engineering gear mana?
>How efficient is spamming research stations or engineering gear mana?
The problem is that those hab stations cost money to upkeep. A substantial amount of money that quickly adds up. THEORETICALLY you could make a lot of money from hab modules, with Geriatric facilities and Space Resorts, but the problem is that those money making habs cost a quite high amount of monthly BOOST to maintain, which you can ONLY get from nations.
You're better off working to build up those super-state nations, then aim to build tier 3 research bonus modules on habs, each giving a 25% bonus.
Nanoforges are also an option for income. 60 monthly at the cost of some metals. Space stations are overall still the better choice for income than grinding funding from nations since its easier to spam command centers and mines than nation building. Plus no danger of constantly getting control points flipped by aliens. On the off-chance of one of your earth orbit stations being flipped, just send in the marines.
Did some debug testing on early-game combat ships (3x Escorts + NERVA engine + Infared/1st Railgun/1st research Missiles) against alien destroyers; turns out any type of missile trumps absolutely everything and were in fact the only thing that could get a kill. Even facing it against a group of ayy corvettes that could theoretically out manuever them still ended up in everyone-killed draw. I also tried an equivalent destroyer with just the 2x nose cannons/lasers and only the laser one was able to damage the alien ship, though my side still lost. I may try some mid-game ships but it seems the devs were more concerned implementing literally every single type of engine autism that could ever be contrived into the game rather than actually balancing shit so I dunno
I've never had problems with funding beyond being somewhat limited on what I can dump back into nations so I'm not sure why everyone is so keen on optimizing it with spoils and such. Influence is what limits me most the the time
I think what is important is to make sure the missiles can be volley fired in spam mode to overwhelm point defense, cannot be evaded (enough Gs acceleration to never be outmaneuvered), and have multiple ships with the weapons.
It would be like real life torpedo boat swarm overwhelming battleships and wrecking everything at a much lower cost, even if all your ships get exploded.
From what I was able to test using the default ships in skirmish mode, the early tech lasers are just garbage and only varely work if you have enough numbers so ships can support eachother. In any case, I am more for the fast small ship with a swarm of shipkiller missiles.
Influence becomes a non-issue from mid-game onwards as both your persuassion specialized coucillor will shit out influence en mass as well as the massive populace of the superpowers you hopefully have under your control. What becomes an issue is keeping afloat with your space empire and trying to develop your nations with direct investments. The latter lets you reach 7+ military power easily by 2030, giving you armies capable of contesting alien forces and resilient enough to not die to a single nuke.
So direct investment is better to upgrade miltech than using IPs? How much to go from 4.0 to 5.0 and beyond?
2 years ago
Anonymous
3 IP give you roughly 0.005 at best and 0.00375 (USA) at worst depending on the country, so worst case would be 800 IP to get from 4.0 to 5.0. Using USA for numbers again, it costs 2.4k funds to raise 1 IP without any modifiers. Looking at my 2035 save you can get it down to at least 700.
Best case would be 560.7k, worst case 1922.4k. There's also a limit of 200 IP you can invest per year, so it would take you 4 years of pure investments to raise your miltech level by 1.
Comparing that to the economy output of the USA, we've got about 21 IP per month, so assuming we get it up to 24 due to decent management, spending all of your IP on miltech would take you about 2.8 years to raise miltech by 1 naturally.
The natural way is faster, but that is assuming you spend all of your natural IP gain on miltech.
2 years ago
Anonymous
ah ok, so probably you need to have a portion of it being natural and then using direct funding to make the gap - using only one is prohibitive
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY FRICKING ENGINES
SO MANY FRICKING POWER PLANTS
SO MANY FRICKING MISSILES
I just can't figure it the frick out. So many of these Engine types I have no fricking idea what they're supposed to do. I only care about three engine types:
1: I have high combat acceleration, use me to fight in a planetary system
2: I am very efficient and can get high Delta-V. Use me to travel to other planets.
3: I am an end-game option that can do both very well
I just don't fricking get it. I boosted with console commands to see how the game works, (I will not waste hundreds of hours to do this naturally and endure all the fricking interrupt pauses,) and it seems like a super viable option is to never attack alien ships, just kill alien agents, aiming to build up antimatter infrastructure. Maybe. I have no idea.
I really fricking wish the game explained all this shit so much more. There are like ten fricking nuclear missile options and I can't tell what the big fricking differences are. There are so many missile options but I have no idea what the specialties are. I'm not sure what good ship design is, I have NO FRICKING IDEA HOW MUCH FRICKING ARMOR I SHOULD HAVE. It seems like putting one slot highest damage laser weapons in every slot seems to work.
Also, access to Exotics comes waaaaay too late, players should get it from attacking ground assets, not just space assets. And uh, we should probably get Exotics from CAPTURING FRICKING ALIEN STATIONS AND BASES, not just space combat. All that loot just up in smoke.
like look at this shit, they literally have a fricking glorified electric kettle as a propulsion method. This shit is barely adequate for a cubesat's RCS, let alone the main drive on a fricking multiton warship. And you have to research it too, it's not even a "baby's first" engine
at least they put in the Orion drive, albeit requiring a bunch of future tech for an engine designed for the 1950s
2 years ago
Anonymous
I dont understand it myself. There is no use for any of this that I can imagine. Its almost like a trap technology that will never yield a useful project.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Okay, I did some tests with these drives, quick little optional choices. Using the smallest ship frame, the Gunship, with Solid Core Fission Reactor I (SCFR), (Fuel Cell I is about 20 tons smaller but you'll see I need more power for another option), Lithium-Ion Battery, Titanium Radiator, no weapons, just a Fission Platform in the utility slot, planned transfer mission is Extreme Earth Orbit to Extreme Jupiter Orbit.
Ship has 1 engine, 20 Propellant Tanks
Resistojet? 4.6 kps, can't go very far
Tungsten Resistojet? 15.4 kps, almost triple the delta V.
Arcjet Drive? 30.9 kps. The trip would take 108.79 weeks. It's possible, but very long.
Now, let's try some others.
Plasma Wave Drive? 123kps, but still 104 weeks. Going to 4 engines takes it down to 84.39 weeks.
Lorentz Drive? 160kps, 53.92 weeks! Can get that down to 40 weeks SCFR 4, 3 engines.
Helicon Drive? 53.92 weeks with SCFR 2, but can get it down to 22.61 weeks with SCFR 4 and 5 engines.
Hall Drive? 82 weeks with SCFR 1, 5 engines. SCFR 5, 6 engines only goes to 81.75. This seems to be a real stinker.
Ion Drive? 84.39 weeks with SCFR 1, 6 engines.
Grid Drive? THIS IS WHERE IT GETS GOOD. With SCFR 1 and 1 engine, time is 78.27 weeks. Not great. Buuuut.. Bump up to SCFR 3 and 6 engines, time to destination is 27.83 weeks!
Colloid Drive seems to be worse, SCFR 1 with 6 engines gives 61.71 weeks, but uses Volatiles instead of Water as fuel?
2 years ago
Anonymous
>continued
But let's look at those techs. (Minus the individual project for the drive itself) The, ">" symbols means moving onto another tier, the "+" symbol means everything on the same tier. Tier costs do not seem to make a lot of sense against techs on the same tier.
Resistojet needs: Mission to Space > Deep Space Propulsion Concepts + Advanced Magnetics > Electrothermal Propulsion
Tungsten Resistojet needs all Resistojet needed, along with High-Energy Electrothermal Propulsion
Arcjet Drive needs all Resistojet needed. Nothing else.
Plasma Wave Drive? All Resistojet needed + Advanced Superconductors
Lorentz Drive? This is quite deep in the mid-game needing: Mission to Space > Deep Space Propulsion Concepts + Advanced Magnetics + Advanced Superconductors + Advanced Carbon Manipulation + Photonic Computing> Advanced Heat Management Concepts + Electromagnetic Propulsion + Magnetic Force Manipulation + Advanced Atomic Manipulation > High-Temperature Superconductors > Magnetic Plasma Confinement > High-Energy Electromagnetic Propulsion
Helicon Drive? Same as Lorentz.
Hall Drive? Same as Resistojet.
Ion Drive? Same as Resistojet
Grid Drive? Same as Resistojet, just Electrostatic Propulsion > High-Energy Electrostatic Propulsion + Ion Drive > Grid Drive
Colloid Drive is the same as Grid Drive, but without Ion Drive researched.
So what does this mean? It means that you are pretty much cucking yourself if you research ANY of the above options except Ion Drive and Grid Drive. So much of this shit DOESN'T MAKE FRICKING SENSE!
Why is the Lorentz and Helicon Drives just between Plasma Wave and Helicon Drives on the ship builder UI, but totally different in the tech tree?
Why so many drives that compete for the same niche unlocked by the same tech?
Why so many techs that seem to have the same name but, "High-Energy," or, "Advanced," strapped onto them?
Why is the Grid Drive so much easier to access than Lortentz and Helicon, but nearly the same, if not better?
2 years ago
Anonymous
So as you can see, ignore every other single drive option, don't bother researching them, just get the Ion Drive and then the Grid Drive. Use this drive to set up all your colonies, bases, stations and shipyards throughout the solar system. Build up a stockpile of resources, aim for asteroids and stuff with radioactives and noble metals. Build up small fleets of ships with high combat thrust to defend planetary orbits, they don't need much delta V at all.
What you really want to aim for is the Orion Drive. The big nuke bomber thing. It has very high combat acceleration and pretty damn great delta V for travel. You WILL want to build up your Radioactive stockpile for this drive. For drives that use extremely valuable substances as fuel, you don't ever want more than 5 fuel loads.
Or just you know, cheat, and play with these toys before the devs fix them or something.
2 years ago
Anonymous
How do fission drives compare to fusion drives in terms of research time to reach them?
2 years ago
Anonymous
It gets pretty absurd. Not only do the technology requirements go in the tens of thousands, but so will the engineering projects themselves. And remember that you have to research other things and cant just focus on propulsion.
2 years ago
Anonymous
So you do this, and start the construction of an outpost - are you able to bootstrap an entire colony this way, since resources teleport?
May be viable to start an early swarming to kuiper belt, and by early i mean, a few years in - since it would take longer to build a proper ship to further out. Maybe this is nonsense since you cannot build outposts in the regions until the specific research was performed. I think the outposts you build from ships is to be used to bootstrap a support base for a takeover of a system (jupiter, saturn, etc)
>continued
But let's look at those techs. (Minus the individual project for the drive itself) The, ">" symbols means moving onto another tier, the "+" symbol means everything on the same tier. Tier costs do not seem to make a lot of sense against techs on the same tier.
Resistojet needs: Mission to Space > Deep Space Propulsion Concepts + Advanced Magnetics > Electrothermal Propulsion
Tungsten Resistojet needs all Resistojet needed, along with High-Energy Electrothermal Propulsion
Arcjet Drive needs all Resistojet needed. Nothing else.
Plasma Wave Drive? All Resistojet needed + Advanced Superconductors
Lorentz Drive? This is quite deep in the mid-game needing: Mission to Space > Deep Space Propulsion Concepts + Advanced Magnetics + Advanced Superconductors + Advanced Carbon Manipulation + Photonic Computing> Advanced Heat Management Concepts + Electromagnetic Propulsion + Magnetic Force Manipulation + Advanced Atomic Manipulation > High-Temperature Superconductors > Magnetic Plasma Confinement > High-Energy Electromagnetic Propulsion
Helicon Drive? Same as Lorentz.
Hall Drive? Same as Resistojet.
Ion Drive? Same as Resistojet
Grid Drive? Same as Resistojet, just Electrostatic Propulsion > High-Energy Electrostatic Propulsion + Ion Drive > Grid Drive
Colloid Drive is the same as Grid Drive, but without Ion Drive researched.
So what does this mean? It means that you are pretty much cucking yourself if you research ANY of the above options except Ion Drive and Grid Drive. So much of this shit DOESN'T MAKE FRICKING SENSE!
Why is the Lorentz and Helicon Drives just between Plasma Wave and Helicon Drives on the ship builder UI, but totally different in the tech tree?
Why so many drives that compete for the same niche unlocked by the same tech?
Why so many techs that seem to have the same name but, "High-Energy," or, "Advanced," strapped onto them?
Why is the Grid Drive so much easier to access than Lortentz and Helicon, but nearly the same, if not better?
I was reading the earlier devblogs, and the differences exist because a single playthrough is not guaranteed to have all of them. Sometimes only one will be discovered due to how the chance of prohject discovery happens. This means one playthrough may have one tech, and not be available in the next, but that next playthrough will have a different propulsion method. That is my theory on why there sometimes similar propulsion choices (and sometimes, intentionally to trick you or the AI to make bad choices).
2 years ago
Anonymous
>Sometimes only one will be discovered due to how the chance of prohject discovery happens.
Can you elaborate on this? Some playthroughs just have techs missing wholesale from the tech tree?
>>But not every faction will get access to every project. Each project has a trigger percentage for each faction. For critical projects, it’s 100% -- so RNG won’t block your path to win -- but for others, only a few factions may have access to it, and it’s possible some interesting but non-vital techs may not appear in a particular campaign at all. An example is the Nuclear Salt Water Reactor project, which is necessary to power the powerful Neutron Flux Drive. Once the tech prerequisites of Advanced Fission Systems and Ultracapacitors are met, each faction has a 15% of unlocking the project in a given campaign, plus any bonuses they receive from contributing to its parent techs.
>>This is in part to simulate that it’s unclear whether some real-world ideas will actually work, and also to keep campaigns a bit different from one another.
>How efficient is spamming research stations or engineering gear mana?
The problem is that those hab stations cost money to upkeep. A substantial amount of money that quickly adds up. THEORETICALLY you could make a lot of money from hab modules, with Geriatric facilities and Space Resorts, but the problem is that those money making habs cost a quite high amount of monthly BOOST to maintain, which you can ONLY get from nations.
You're better off working to build up those super-state nations, then aim to build tier 3 research bonus modules on habs, each giving a 25% bonus.
Like
Nanoforges are also an option for income. 60 monthly at the cost of some metals. Space stations are overall still the better choice for income than grinding funding from nations since its easier to spam command centers and mines than nation building. Plus no danger of constantly getting control points flipped by aliens. On the off-chance of one of your earth orbit stations being flipped, just send in the marines.
said, using nanofactories and nanofacturing complexes is the way to go.
China is waaaay too difficult to grab. You're better off spending your time and efforts building an EU superstate, and THEN grab the United States. The Servants seem to benefit from alien brainwashing, which is why they gain so much popularity in China, they're not using regular methods.
However...
The secret sauce to victory? Just orbital bombardment. BLOW EM UP! Spend a few months bombarding Beijing with an alright sized fleet of the earliest available weapons that can bombard through atmosphere, for me, it was green lasers.
All you have to do is kill maaaybe just a few million people and you can HALVE the entire national GDP. You can cut them down to size, and the smaller economy makes it much easier to use councillor agent actions on.
Also, you need more powerful, more numerous, and higher damage bombardment weapons to even make a tiny dent against armies and mission command nodes, but you can FRICKING DESTROY nodes of Boost power. I got all the Servants boost down to less than 0.1 monthly, across the entire world. Boost just fricking MELTS when bombarded.
Grab it first, AI is useless enough against USA that it can wait
until you've secured China, and no censorship + low cohesion makes it easy enough to bully out those that do make it in
Seems like the meta order is: Kazakhstan, EU, Russia if get get fricked on UK, something adjacent to US, China, and then US. Deteor to some resource rich 3rd country you can spoil to death if you get the opportunity. Large countries get developed, small developed countries get assimilated into large countires, slavic shitholes that refuse to assimilate get boost, and everything past the US's southern border gets looted
Making the jump to from figuring out Earth to dealing with the Solar System is fricking hard. I've got control of most of Earth and have basically neutered all other factions besides Project Exodus. But I don't know how to break out into space without waiting years for ships and stations.
you want to rush to mars, because those are the easiest and fastest high throughput mines to get. Once you have 1 mine that has all resources going, you can expand very easy because you do not need much Boost to build things. Without the mines, starting outposts is VERY boost expansive.
So I found something while looking through the files:
Inside TIGlobalConfig.json, the "strategyLayerSpeedSettings" not only can be modified but extended with more values. Doing so will turn the earth into seizure inducing strobe light, but will also make the turns pass much faster. Combined with abusing Permanent Assignment and the game actually starts feeling a whole more dynamic.
Also I just completed establishing the Initiatives' goal, and it's actually humorously based: >We want to control & profit from the world >Aliens taking over the world means we don't control the world >As thus, we need to defeat the aliens >Other random factions squabbling make it harder to defeat the aliens >As thus we need to subvert and control the population, to get them to stop fighting each other, in order to defeat the aliens, so we can keep ruling
It's like if Humanity First was ruled by accountants
also forgot to add, but Defend Interests stacks. Instead of playing constant control point musical chairs, you can just spend a year leaving a guy on each important country until they are two decades out and then never worry about it again
>Defend Interests stacks.
It seems like every single day there's a new mind-blowing discovery of something extremely useful that absolutely no one knows about.
>Defend Interests stacks.
It seems like every single day there's a new mind-blowing discovery of something extremely useful that absolutely no one knows about.
And, the public opinion of a country you own dictates the total influece generated, which shows you should have PO in each country set to 90% and above, probably through use of Unity.
This means that while growing your empire, having PO maxxes allows you to control more nations without going into negative influence.
Thought initiative was the weirdest faction in the beginning but in the end it seems like I really play like them. Creating one really powerful nation, constant wars with shitty third world countries to spoil, abandon and build cohesion at home. Subverting other major countries just to dismantle their armies and nukes so they can't defend themselves (thus rely on me). Generally stuff that doesn't really make sense if you're playing the resistance.
Might do an initiative playthrough when the game comes out funneling the world's resources into Israel.
yup, I was trying to look how far I can abuse repeat/permanent and since I had the extra influence I decided to experiment. Horribly communicated to you since I could only tell by the change in the tooltip but yup it does.
They really are the most fun faction to play straight as a remorseless videogame min-maxer since it fits their theme of "No nonsense efficiency" so well. All the other factions you have to RP and limit yourself a bit, but with Initiative it's just GO GO GO GO GO GO GO. Surprising too since all the tech quotes make it sound like it would just be some wacky corporate libertarian parody incapable of any sort of long-term planning. Unfortunately I may have to restart the run I did with them since it started as just a trial out of curiosity and thus never reset their nation priorities, meaning the US and EU were over-exploited and are now about to collapse from pollution and infighting
Speaking of quotes, they're all a bit weak. I wasn't expecting SMAC tier quality but some are seriously worse than Beyond Earth. Feels like wasted potential, along with milquetoast personalities of the faction leaders.
How do you know what priorities do? Like by the default its resist which i assume lowers alien influence but i don't have much of a clue for most other things
The president of the USA waves the flags of Israel, BLM, LGBTQIABRAAP live from the ruins of Washington DC and asks the American people one last sacrifice in order to help their greatest ally get a shipment of alien xenoflora before the end of Israeli President Xgkangoipn's wedding to Eli Shekelberg.
I was pretty far in an initiative run, but I felt like restarting. Doing an exodus run now. If I reach the end I'll make a post on the active terra invicta thread, if it's no longer this one.
Nah, so far when I run into them, a recent autosave gets me past them. I just want to put in the things I've learned into a new game rather than continue the old one sometimes.
now since the nightly /misc/ buzzword circlejerk has died down and the productive discussion can start again, let me ask you a question: Which of the society arrival techs do you think should be focused on and which can be safely ignored? I know there is some good monthly organizational boosting stuff in there, but also a lot of fluff which is only useful to the servants
Go for domestic politics and economics in that order because they both unlock projects that give +5 available orgs each month and the former is cheaper. International relations can be good for diplomatic cooldown reduction. Same with arrival law on unlocking diplo cooldown. Sociology (in addition to domestic politics) can be good for independence movements since that unlocks global command structure for extra control point cap. International development can be good to get transnational investments for cheaper direct investments, but that shouldn't really matter until somewhat later into the game.
Arrival domestic politics and arrival economics for their +5 org techs. Arrival law in conjunction with the military science techs "terrestrial military science" and "arrival security" leads to a number of defensive bonus projects that protect you against terror and enthrall, which are always good.
Arrival international relations is the precursor for unity movements and great nations, or if you are so inclined, the independence movements tech.
>Why is every faction trying to maintain control over their nations
I wonder. Not like it matters once the ayys start doing their insta flipendo bullshit.
I can't imagine they have enough agents to protect every single nation on the planet while still being able to flip nations themselves, i'm still in the early game ffs.
According to people on the discord the gdp bonus to research is actually pretty substantial up to a max of $48750 per person. They used China in this example.
Nice so it looks like combining the EU with the Eurasian union might be overall worse? You could keep EU as your science powerhouse and Eurasian union as a military/utility powerhouse. Likewise the same if you had the caliphate and you only had the higher GDP nations.
Also does anyone know how the stats of funding and science transfer over when you unify? Seems to me like funding doesn't even transfer to the parent country.
>Nice so it looks like combining the EU with the Eurasian union might be overall worse?
Combining nations in general is worse because unification tanks your total Investment Points.
Current game I'm even trying the opposite, splitting up nations to the maximum possible extent to go in the other direction
Are you burning through your influence cap that way?
Centralising seems to make sense for security reasons but I guess if they're all in a federation it shouldn't be too big a problem.
>Are you burning through your influence cap that way?
Quite the opposite. Big countries cost quadratically (rather than linearly) more to hold than small countries: the US takes 36 from the cap, not 6. So if (hypothetically) you split the US in two and got two 3-CP countries, that'd cost you 2(3^2)=18 influence cap rather than 1(6^2)=36 influence cap.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>Nice so it looks like combining the EU with the Eurasian union might be overall worse?
Combining nations in general is worse because unification tanks your total Investment Points.
Current game I'm even trying the opposite, splitting up nations to the maximum possible extent to go in the other direction
WTF ARE THEY THINKING
2 years ago
Anonymous
I see. Who would have guessed balkanizing would be the best way to play this game.
When it's releases hopefully they figure we that shit out.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I was scratching my head for weeks when the demo first came out as to wtf was the point of the independence movement techs, because you can only utilise them if you have the relevant parent country's executive point and if you already have that why would you want to frick over your influence cap by generating more CPs? But yeah, it turns out that balkanizing actually unfricks your influence cap AND your investment points through the quadratic effect
2 years ago
Anonymous
Don't know how I feel about having the world balkanizing in response to an alien invasion be the meta thing to do.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I wouldn't say it's the best way, smaller countries are more efficient at building mission control/boost building space defences, creating armies and maintaining them given you've got more IP overall and these investments don't scale with population. Plus they're much less painful to regain if you lose CP's. But bigger countries increase research, miltech, gdp, public opinion much more efficiently even with reduced IP count. It's also cheaper overall to direct invest in one large country than many small ones.
2 years ago
Anonymous
True, maybe I should leave the EU balkanized for a bit before making the big blue blob. Should get some early boost from that.
2 years ago
Anonymous
It's basically guerrilla warfare against an enemy that has methods for infiltrating and taking over institutions pretty easily.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>"aw shit aliens are here" >earth immediately splinters into hundreds of made-up countries
2 years ago
Anonymous
That's the secret anon, all countries are made-up.
2 years ago
Anonymous
It's only Balkanization in name, every country is still coalescing into a unified world order under the control of whichever faction is winning; it's just the difference between the hierarchy being deep or broad.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I think its the meta thing to do to the countries you do not control, which you want to have in larger blobs for more efficient control. Think how impossible it would be to Defend 30 countries vs 8 or less. I think for the player, having NA, EU, China and a few other countries like Japan is enough. Then you can ensure that servants only have small garbage countries and leave the rest to the otehr factions. If you break up the leftover countries like Indonesia, Australia, india etc, the factions have a much harder time protecting them among themselves, and it also makes it easier for you to headshot servant countries (take over and dismantle nukes, armies, etc).
2 years ago
Anonymous
Given how IP works, the best nation layout is having one, massive nation GDP wise for research and military and several smaller, but still somewhat powerful satellite nations for funding or mission control only. For example, using China as your research powerhouse while using Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the SEA alliance as your funding/mission control nations.
On the other hand, when you independence Scotland (and hand Belfast to Ireland just for fun), at the end Great Britain is still 4CP and you've added independent Scotland as 2CP, so you actually increase your influence cap useage by 4, in the specific case of Britain at least
How should you start going out in space to mine? Like i went to the moon to mine but i lack the resources to build anything, do i have to trade for them?
You have to save up Boost, which is the critical resource in the earlygame after the scramble for countries.
There's also the problem that the moon doesn't actually provide much resources - often, the cost of running a Lunar mine exceeds the gains you get out of it. Really the first big motherlode is Mars mining - after that you never need Boost again, because your space resources skyrocket.
Good practice seems to be to basically not launch anything until you can save up the ~65 boost needed for a Mars mine, and then fire that off asap by investing your Earth countries' economies in Boost heavily
>But to build a mines you need space resources and i have none.
No, you can use space resources OR boost
It's always a better idea to use space resources, but for your first mine where you don't have any space resources, you gotta use boost
Alternatively just have your Persuasion guy stage a mutiny on someone else's mine lol
If you're just using them for materials, go with outposts. The only limit is mission control capacity and the number of sites on a given planetary body. But that's why you want to use outposts, because mission control is a very valuable and limited resource.
2 years ago
Anonymous
>because mission control is a very valuable and limited resource
It is until you can build stations around Mercury where solar arrays pump out 267 energy each.
2 years ago
Anonymous
But you can only use boost on earth, don't tell you actually needed to mine on the Moon before being able to build everywhere else on the galaxy
2 years ago
Anonymous
I think you're stupid, anon.
2 years ago
Anonymous
"Build on Earth" means "Build on Earth and then ship it to the selected site elsewhere in the solar system using Boost"
It took me half an hour but i think i finally got it, didn't realize you can eventually build stuff in space without pulling resources from Earth.
2 years ago
Anonymous
"Build on Earth" means "Build on Earth and then ship it to the selected site elsewhere in the solar system using Boost"
Tempting, but I am more interested in setting up space mining and shit, how do I do that?
t. please be patient, I suffer from grugism in regards to this game
Build up boost, establish bases on the 2-4 best spots on Mars. Work towards mission to the inner planets. Once that's done build a base on Mercury and give it a construction module. And I mean the instant the tech finishes you need to get that base up. As soon as that finishes start spamming orbitals around Mercury and putting the modules that give extra mission control.
Also, always make sure your habitats have enough hydroponics to support their crew.
China is a means to getting space mining and shit.
All nations with space programs can add to your Boost resource, and your Boost resource is how you get space mining
An early lunar mine is absolutely worth it. The Moon has enough resources to kickstart your first martian bases, then you can just sell it off to other factions for a peace deal.
Other factions love shitty space infrastructure and I love feeding them with it to hamper them.
I had the USA's GDP drop to around 30k per capita after a pretty sizable nuclear exchange (about 20 total) that didn't even touch the US. The countries that got nuked (Russia and the Aliens in control of China + India) actually fared better economically. Europe fell by just as much despite not being touched.
I had the USA's GDP drop to around 30k per capita after a pretty sizable nuclear exchange (about 20 total) that didn't even touch the US. The countries that got nuked (Russia and the Aliens in control of China + India) actually fared better economically. Europe fell by just as much despite not being touched.
Its not bullshit, pretty sure its realistic that nukes could have a global effect on the environment if many of them went off, doesn't matter where the explosions did it.
Didn't happen in my case, both India and Russia have a similiar GDP to Egypt (1000 billions but Russia also merged with Georgia and some other small nations) in 2035, what is probably not that realistic is how much population they lost, India is still around 1 billion.
>what is probably not that realistic is how much population they lost, India is still around 1 billion.
This is one thing that really irked me. Too few people die from nukes.
2 years ago
Anonymous
They would be too OP if they actually reduced the population by a lot, the drop in GDP and the damage they do to armies is already bad enough.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Why pussy out at the last moment? They already frick shit up, but for some reason they do very little to population.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Who are you gonna send to space if there is no one left in the entire planet?
2 years ago
Anonymous
You can't kill everyone. You probably wouldn't be able to get the world population below several hundred million people. But killing billions of people should absolutely be on the table.
2 years ago
Anonymous
It really depends on how many and what sort of bombs we're talking about.
Allegedly, some people within 2 miles of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survived; not many, but some.
Looking at the ones they listed, the US and Europe suffered greatly while China and India weren't as much.
It sounds like democratic, low population, high GDP per capita nations suffer greatly from nuclear winter while non democracy, high population, low GDP per capita nations are less effected.
Given how specifically Investment points are allotted (Japan is somehow the 3rd/4th strongest nation) it appears that nukes unfrick that weird discrepancy between the 1st and 3rd world.
Even if a billion Indians die, there might be enough to keep their government running, but if the American's get scared they immediately destroy their own economy by panic buying.
There is a technology that unlocks a secret funding priority called something like "space defense" that lets you build guns on earth that shoot down spaceships. These also work on nukes or so I have heard.
I've survived long enough on earth and avoided nullpoint exceptions where I could to finally reach this stage. All of my bases are settlements with 2 layered defense arrays and arc green lasers. I'm am currently researching my first fusion drive to start building a fleet of cruisers to defend earth and eventually raid their asteroid belt bases. Time will tell if the errors or the aliens for once beat me this time.
>Game shits itself when ayys start bombing astroid settlements
I really, REALLY, want to play this game more and would be more than willing to pay for it, but charging 250 bucks for early access is something straight out of the scrolls of Zion.
If the game ever becomes stable enough that late game becomes reachable, I imagine that arriving at Jupiter is going to feel less like D-Day and more like the entirety of World War II.
when you upgrade the research habs, you reach the limits faster. T1 research is 3%, T2 is 10%. I think the limit from research stations is 50% or so, requring only 5x T2 stations to max out. Its possible I am wrong, and the research bonus is unbound and only the interface orbit bonuses have a cap.
Then you have to use orgs to boost on top of that. Some orgs boost 10% or even 15% of a research type, and they stack, if you can find them.
On top of that, for engineering projects, you can also stack gears to improve their research speed. Right now i have enough ors and skunkworks (T2 module) that I boost those 95% on top of, for example 50% of a research type. This makes researching projects like Pan-Asian Combine (50000) much more viable.
I am not sure if there is a cap to engineering bonuses.
SO yeah, if you are coming up to a research/project wall, start hunting for those research booster orgs - you may need to steal or trade for them..
I'd be interested in learning how bad things get from the colonialism, or if the Servant's end game is about finding a way to integrate with the aliens and get rights and shit.
But I'm probably gonna go Academy or Exodus first.
Yes. You can nuke your own territories to do extreme damage to hostile armies there. That's one of the threats of invading minor nuclear powers. If you rush their capital with all of your armies then they're very likely to just nuke all of them.
Based on the tooltips, it should only take a few pips in welfare to completely offset pollution from economy/spoils even at modern tech levels.
Does the game have a feedback loop mechanism?
It might be that you've pushed the earth over the edge and can't save it.
How long were you polluting before you started funding welfare?
I've NEVER used spoil and were gunning for minimal unequality FROM DAY 1.
It's 2045 and the annual GDP impact is -1,83%
Methane and Aerosols are under control, Nitrous Oxide seems to be stagnating, but CO2 just keeps increasing by 0.1-0.2 EVERY MONTH.
STUPID DEVS WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO CONTROL CLIMATE CHANGE EVEN BY CONTROLLING JUST 1/3 OF THIS DIRTBALL
"Welfare" as it's used in the game is just a catch-all term for investments into things that don't directly contribute to the economy. This also includes stuff like recycling and pollution cleanup.
I'm enjoying the ride, its probably impossible to win now unless the US and the aliums go at war with each other and i swoop in with my armies and try to liberate everything.
Just wait for the actual release. Don't burn yourself out on a version that's in dire need of bugfixes and UX/balance improvements.
I played plenty of it and I'm now just waiting for the release proper. The lategame is just too awkward to play with. The game also tends to have a continually increasing chance of just breaking the longer you go on, meaning that even if you do very well your run could just be killed at any moment due to unfinished jank.
How tf do you build space mining? It says I lack the resources to build it but I need mining to get the resources ? How does that work? Why cant i shoot mining complex materials to my base?
But maaaaaybe there is still one bad-ass country left in the world
I had the same doubts too, you need boost+money to start building outside of earth, to build a mine you need like 50 boost which is a lot in the early game, after that you should just use space materials to build anything.
Rip, kek. Is initiative any fun? Is their goal just hoarding money and orgs, or something like establishing trade with the aliums to israelite them on their home planet?
https://anonfiles
.com/D0a9a9w4ye /Terra_Invicta_rar
https://anonfiles
.com / B8c2afw2yf/Terra_Invicta_Part_2_rar
streamingassets from part 2 goes in part one's terrainvicta_data folder
>Israel
Well shit. Also, two major changes I've already noticed:
Rushing EU unification is no longer an option as the diplomatic cooldown has been extended to September 23th 2023. You either have to hold on to a dozen nations which will annihilate your influence income or try to only gain major eco EU nations while eventually baiting the rest to leave the EU so you can annex them via war. It does make the Warsaw pact rather appealing to unite EU and Russia now though.
Also, Russia seems to no longer win the war against Ukraine all of the time. A rather peculiar change.
Minor changes so far are a rearranged tech tree to make it look at bit nicer, although the full tree is still laggy as frick to open. Also some of the fixes from the demo, which is neat.
With some of the suggestions other anons already made, new Meta would probably be: Kazakhstan, Canada/Mexico, USA, China, couple of satellite states if you have the capacity for funding and/or mission control only. Mexico and Canada seem good candidates for the latter since you can absorb them into USA eventually.
Really fricking pissed to learn that combining countries fricks up your influence cap. I spent ages researching those techs just to frick myself over. AND IT DOES EVEN MAKE SENSE. MANAGING 100000 TINY COUNTRIES WOULD BE INFINITELY WORSE THAN 3 MASSIVE ONES.
Having an educated democracy with a large population produces absolutely insane amounts of science, which is clearly the most important resource in the game.
you are confused. Managing a combined country is better for influence, however, you must have above 90% public opinion, which is the factor that decides your influence generation (or how much you need to spend to control) from countries.
A 6-CP country contributes the same towards influence cap as four 3-CP countries.
Combining countries is a fool's errand for people who don't understand the quadratic influence-cap formula.
Countries start generating a lot of influence if they are at high public opinion. It doesn't matter that it costs twice as much cap if it's generating more influence than you're losing.
Besides, having one mega-state with a massive educated population is how you make the science go brrr.
Inheriting already existing massive countries like China is better than creating them though since cohesion tanks which both fricks your public opinion and forces you to spend IP on unity spam, which also wears away your democracy which is also important for research
Actually on that note what's best way to build democracy? Is spamming knowledge the only way?
Also, do NOT absorb everything you can into the combine - its better to try and have Greater India as a separate nation (cohesion gets tanked, since the pop is so large, but also, its better to have it yourself as a separate country). You should absorb north Korea, Mongolia and some of the SEA contries into it though.
2 years ago
Anonymous
Can you even absorb India into the PAC? I thought unification requires a claim on the capital
2 years ago
Anonymous
the pac gets claims on at least parts of things that would go to Greater India.
I asked about this topic on the discord. There are multiple factors at play that you need to take into account.
First, is that combined countries have less total Investment Points than if they remain independent. this means that many small countries are better for utility (mission control, boost) generation - IF YOU CAN HAVE THEM FOR YOURSELF.
Second, research output scales better with larger developed populations due to synergy/formula, so that a single combined country will output more research than the single nations.
Third, despite what the quadratic formula may be, IF you have high public opinion(90-95+ - use Unity to do this automatically, and leave around 5% once reached to sustain), the influence generation offsets the higher maintenance cost of the large/combined nation, that it will always be cheaper influence-wise to sustain control over the combined nations than if they were to remain independent.
Fourth, it is more efficient to control and protect less, but larger countries from being contested and messed with by the factions and aliens. This is because you can only have up to 6 councilors. It also costs 20 influence to "defend" a country. As part of this, it is always easier to crackdown or straight purge or destabilize a small nation. If you have many small nations, you will not be able to afford influence to protect them all and agent mission time to stabilize/defend/advise/protect/etc.
Based on the above, Ive come to the conclusion that you must find some balance. A "small" country like Japan is ideal to leave independent as your Research and Mission Control or Boost generator, because all its parameters are already so good, you can afford to focus. On the other hand, you probably want to unify the EU and EF because you can better protect them and keep them from the other factions.
Larger nations with high public opinion scores are harder to crackdown/purge and do any revolt or sabotage mission on. you cannot ensure same level of protection on smaller and more numerous nations.
It is also easier to upgrade miltech in certain countries like EU/USA/China because they can afford the IPs to do that, and they can also support more armies/navies.
You will want to strive to breakup enemy faction nations to keep them balkanized and easier to disrupt, while keeping a few powerhouse "small" nations like Japan and South Korea independent to farm utility resources, and unify the other blocks as possible. In the demo, the EU is a good option, but the devs are already patching the ability to unify it from the start of the game to at least late 2023 (ingame). Later research allows for other federations and large countries, put they are very expensive research and enginering projects, so you will need space assets to boost your engineering and research outputs with stations that do that. Diminishing returns for engieering becomes unsustainable at 150%, but there is no cap (there is a cap for effects on earth) for flat research bonuses on research stations, and T2 stations give you 10% bonus per.
>there is no cap (there is a cap for effects on earth) for flat research bonuses on research stations, and T2 stations give you 10% bonus per.
Really? So you could spam rings of a certain type to get +1000% research bonus to a specific type?
Can you even absorb India into the PAC? I thought unification requires a claim on the capital
No, you can't. India is always on its own.
2 years ago
Anonymous
No, there is a pnushing cap above 50% in every category except xeno research which scales differently.
I was struggling to get more than 430 research/day by 2040 with controlling the whole Earth, since there are only so many research campuses I can afford on Mercury.
2 years ago
Anonymous
No, there is a pnushing cap above 50% in every category except xeno research which scales differently.
I was struggling to get more than 430 research/day by 2040 with controlling the whole Earth, since there are only so many research campuses I can afford on Mercury.
There is a diminishing returns cap, but you should be able to get 60% bonus from research stations alone without too much effort - then add on top ORG bonuses AND if you have a scienctist that gives a 15% bonus to that subject, that would be on top - not sure if the org/scientist bonuses get diminishing returns. Engineering projects start having a punishing diminishing returns at 150% (ie, thats 5% for first skunkworks/gears, but at 100% i think have almost 30).
This means that pure research should be easy to get 60% bonus, and for engineering projects 60% + 100% should also be trivial (so, 160% bonus).
Xenoresearch adds 1% per alien investigation, and flat additions per xeno lab. Currenty on my latest save i have 115% without gears.
My dev build save finally got nullexception explosion when I build an explorer cruiser to colonize the inner system.
Ran to 2032, 500 research p/ day, was snowballing.
Looking forward the final stable release, which by the volume of bugs, I dont believe will come for at least 6 months. Will gladly pay for it, and respect the devs for not falling on the ealry access train. They know the game is not ready, and are willing to wait to get it good to go.
Thank you for the dev build uploads, heroes! but, they are not stable enough to use more than experimentally.
Still love the game and see myself playing this for at least hundreds of hours - im sure Ive put in at least 50 already.
That's what i did, didn't realize i could peace out in time and they stole many of my countries, i'll probably stop playing and consider this an ay lmao victory
I used to almost quit in defeat the moment the Alien Administration formed, but now I realised it's kind of a paper tiger. As long as you have a councillor with 25 command - and that's trivial by 2030 - you just boost unrest every turn until the ayys shit 'emselves. Here they had China AND America, and I just bumped them to civil war only a year after they formed; adios.
(Idk if I should have done that as I'm Protectorate, but shitting on the Servants is a habit that's hard to kick)
You can also prevent the alien administration from forming to begin with. The servants at some point in their story line unlock the ability to turn over their nations to the aliens, but you can also just sabotage their research indefinitely for them to never reach that point.
Yeah, I managed that in my previous save: no Alien Admin even by the time the bugginess killed me in 2033.
This game I had a bad start and got bogged down in Europe pretty much indefinately, so they got China and America while I was otherwise engaged
>New dev build heavily buffed the ayys, use heavy projectile nose weapons instead of a laser now >Fleet power increased 10x times for most ayy ships
Oh shit oh frick. I guess the devs noticed how a single layered defense array could easily fend off destroyers so now they all just shit on anything not heavily armored or mobile.
Ayys were already stupidly OP at the early 2030s when they usually start attacking, did they at least give more buffer or improve science rates at all?
Actually wait, they swapped out lasers for nose cannons? That means they don't have any point defense at all encouraging cheapass disposable missile boats even more
No, they still use hull-mounted lasers for point defense, they "just" have projectile nose canons now that annihilate everything. Pic related is a destroyer by the way.
Addendum, it seems small gunships still use only nose lasers, but all alien ships have absurd fleet power values as compared to before. While I don't quite believe those ships to be extremely powerful now, they definitely received a buff to an unknown degree, especially against stationary defense platforms. I have yet to test it though.
The aliens do feel more stronger earlier on, I'm actually seeing the aliens starting to use point defence and stronger frontal weapons, but missile spam will still win the day and a generic missile boat is relativity cheap and "quick" to build. Can't say how the aliens progress beyond the 2030s
The aliens do feel more stronger earlier on, I'm actually seeing the aliens starting to use point defence and stronger frontal weapons, but missile spam will still win the day and a generic missile boat is relativity cheap and "quick" to build. Can't say how the aliens progress beyond the 2030s
Actually on that note has anyone seen the aliens field missile weaponry yet beyond maybe some token armament on their largest craft? I wonder if the disparity between missiles and direct weapons is intentional to demonstrate the aliens are using an "outdated" paradigm similar to battleships late-WWII while also punishing players who think it's a good idea to get in a direct slug-fest with an obviously technologically superior opponent instead of favoring guerilla tactics
Lasers are the predominate weapon I've seen the aliens use, occasionally they'll use some kind of slower projectile weapon. Never seen a missile on the alien ships. All the human AI ships use missiles though.
Aliens fielded missiles in one of my campaigns in the old rip, they absolutely obliterated my ships. Missile storm went like a school of fish picking off one after the other.
Lost five gunships to one of their (now well armoured) destroyers. AI does a good job of designing ships to counter you. They started fielding a few of those shortly after.
You fricking their shit up, including their agents. If you leave them alone they won't do shit. Just focus on fricking with the servants so they don't trigger the alien invasion.
I've been imprisoning the aliens for the alien research boost, I guess after 10 of them captured they get butthurt about it. Should I let them capture all my executive points and create abduction sites?
The AI in the game is very easy to upset.
The difference is that when a human faction decides they are now "In conflict" with you, they don't have giant robot spiders to wipe you off the earth.
Managed to compress things down to 10.6 GB for those that still haven't downloaded the new version.
anonfiles , com/ Ddgamcwcy0 / TI-2.0.6_torrent
Or magnet link: pastebin , com/ 5Zd1QBfb
Also contains an edited Assembly-Csharp that fixes the SetDisplayName having a space in front of it if a councilor only possessed a family name (why isn't this fixed yet the frick) and uses compressed/not-pretty serialization for save files so if your drive is slow it takes less time to save. If you're running an SSD or whatever it's basically useless beyond smaller save files though. Maybe a few dozen ms saved at best, basically nothing compared to the hundreds/thousand+ that serializing the current game instance takes by itself already with the disgustingly slow serializer the devs are using.
Managed to compress things down to 10.6 GB for those that still haven't downloaded the new version.
anonfiles , com/ Ddgamcwcy0 / TI-2.0.6_torrent
Or magnet link: pastebin , com/ 5Zd1QBfb
Also contains an edited Assembly-Csharp that fixes the SetDisplayName having a space in front of it if a councilor only possessed a family name (why isn't this fixed yet the frick) and uses compressed/not-pretty serialization for save files so if your drive is slow it takes less time to save. If you're running an SSD or whatever it's basically useless beyond smaller save files though. Maybe a few dozen ms saved at best, basically nothing compared to the hundreds/thousand+ that serializing the current game instance takes by itself already with the disgustingly slow serializer the devs are using.
Actually on that note has anyone run a search yet inside the strings table on the exe between the demo and the two leaks for anything that could oust them? If it's a homebrew leak detector it may be doing something obvious like a plaintext username or ID
2 years ago
Anonymous
I did check. Didn't see anything like that changed in the changed .dll's but if the devs got especially craft I *suppose* it could be hiding in one of the packaged unity file assembly stuff which I didn't bother to open up.
If there's anything like a fingerprint, though, I mean... it's kinda too late for the leaker since it's already leaked now.
The game did want to access windows firewall rules, but I just told it to frick off. I think that's just the steam workshop code and other stuff laying around, though.
2 years ago
Anonymous
I have no idea how they could do it, however I know smaller devs sometimes give out individual copies through e-mail, which they could track.
If it's distributed through steam, they could be relying on some steam fingerprinting, but that would be normally illegal from steam.
2 years ago
Anonymous
They share the project through a private github - I dont think they are going through the effort to personalize each copy - think about it, they are probably going to be publishing a new version every week or 2 for the testers to try. It would be too much effort vs reward here.
>Focus on Republic of China and USA as my main nations only >Every other major nation gets the alien flipendo treatment >Painstakingly purge them out of every single one of them >Divide the territory as much as possible >Let other factions back in since I can't administrate them all >2 years later they get flipped again >Repeat, same shit after 2 years, again
It's all so tiresome.
How do I protect against bombardment of my mars bases? The atmosphere nullifies my defense arrays and parking a fleet in orbit just causes the ayys to run forward a bit and start attacking again
Look in the install folder, inside one of the json files in TerraInvicta_DataStreamingAssetsTemplates. Don't remember specific file off the top of my head
you can install defense arrays in the ground bases as well... when they get attacked by fleets, they fire back. Just research weapons systems so they get enough power. Railguns and Lasers
So, does anyone know what is the exact process in which you can diplomatically annex countries into, for example, the pan-asian combine? I see the claims... do I have to ally the nation, wait for cooldown, invite to federation, wait for cooldown, then unify (after 2 years)? because if this is the way... i will have to just invade.
You got it right. The process of uniting two nations can be quite time consuming. Invading a nation is significantly quicker in uniting the nations at the cost of some damage to the regions that are affected by the war.
>because if this is the way... i will have to just invade
While it is faster, there are downsides to it. For one, you won't get their funding income, which will get important once you start expanding your space empire as those stations get really expensive really fast. Having to wait before peacefully annexing them also gives you time to properly prepare the country for annexation. Peacefully or forcefully, your annexed nation will affect the overall miltech, education, unity, inequality and per capita GDP. It can drag down your main nation by a lot if you just conquer shitholes that drive down your overall nation stats.
I have a plan to deal with the cost. It involves building nanofactories in Venus and Mercury orbit, fed by mercury mined metals. Since the solar panels are so efficient in mercury, I will be able to build 6 mission control per station (T2) to able to daisy chain. When I get get T3 Habs it will snowball with the nanofactories.
Also, absorbing small nations like north/south korea, mongolia and the small SEA countries is just for my control efficiency. Most of those are not even owned by me, and I doubt they will drag down china much.
For the Earth interface orbits, after the interface bonus maximums are reached, all you should have extra are nanofactories (as power allows).
How the frick do you take over a major, democratic country
As Humanity First, I'm basically the king of all Africa and most of the other third-world shitholes, but I haven't really found a good way in with a major power. But now I'm realizing I'm doing something very wrong, because the AI has taken most of Europe, Russia and India. The last two independent great powers are China and the US. Coups don't work, neither does just asserting control. I started working on my public opinion in the EU, which has grown between 30-40%, but the AI took them before I realized it.
Should I have gone into the popularity contest sooner, then go for a takeover? Or is there a third mechanic to take control I'm not aware of besides taking control and instigating coups?
>I'm basically the king of all Africa
You are the king of a shithole. Don't even bother with bumfricknowhere nations. >Should I have gone into the popularity contest sooner
Yes, you have to. Ayy lmaos will flip uncontested points in favour of the servants 2 years in and even start instantly flipping taken points including executive points about 5 years in. You have to keep up and keep other nations in check, either with your councillors or via war. The latter can be devastating if its a nuclear power, but can be the only option if your councillors are too weak. Or if it's India or China, which are especially hard to break with councillors due to high population and unity.
A rather easy strat early on is taking over Canada and Mexico followed by the US. Gives you are nice powerboost early on and the military capacity to deal with non nuclear nations. EU unification rush was a strat that already got nerfed.
China is the hardest of the major world powers to get a hold into. USA is second followed by uniting the European Union. EU is "easier" since you just need to grab France and start uniting the nations, but you need to rush for the EU at the start of the game or else you'll be wasting five to ten years on the project.
Best way into China is to get a few decent levelled persuasion councillors (two to three) and spam public opinion in the country until you have good public support. Once you have reached the point where you have a ~20% chance to take a CP then just start going for it, once you've nabbed the first CP the rest will follow.
Honestly in all my games the only way the AI can nab China is with the Aliens helping the Servants, otherwise the AI just won't go for it.
>How the frick do you take over a major, democratic country?
Step 1: Get the highest persuasion councillor you can.
Make sure they do a mission every week that has 80%+ chance of succeeding so they can get an extra persuasion every 12 missions (+2xp per succesful mission if the mission has a roll).
Of course, strivers and quick learners need fewer missions.
Pay attention to how their abilities might boost or decrease their persuasion for the countries you want them to eventually start controlling.
Step 2: Take some, any, control points and set it to kleptocratic for maximum cash boost in short time. Smartest is to go to nation, sort by nations that have your faction opinion the highest and then pick some of those near the top, as you'll get the best chance/cash value.
Step 3: Pay 160 or 320 cash for public campaigns in the country you want to control. Ideally with another high persuasion councilor besides your first. I like tech magnates, because they also give good resources, which is helpful in early game. But anyone with public campaign works.
Step 4: Once you hit 50%+ popularity, you are able to start controlling points with your 7-12 persuasion councillor.
Also check the orgs and pick up every persuasion org, even if you can't equip it on your persuader yet. You might get an admin org later so that you can re-equip the persuasion org to them.
>meganations aren't the mathematically effective way to go
Yes and no. Meganations are the best source of research which is arguably the most important resource in the game. However, smaller nations are much more efficient for mission control and funding. >what's the best route to form the biggest possible one
Greater Europa lets you fuse the EU with Russia, so that's one of the better ones. Caliphate is a bit of a meme since all nations involved aren't that developed, Pan-Asian combine gives you the most populous nation possible, but involves a lot of underdeveloped nations that drag China down while also including developed nations that are better off staying independent, Greater North America is okay, but requires developing Mexico a bit to not drag down the US, African Union and South American Union is poverty central, and that's about it really.
I think if you cheese the system then the Caliphate can make claims on huge swathes of territory. This is a slightly older picture of some guy ruining his economy to take a ton of territory.
The devs have stated they don't really want the game to devolve into map painting, you can already tell considering most of the unification techs come late into the game and are incredibly expensive to unlock.
Re-enacting the Finno-Korean Hyperwar here.
I've got Korea, Russia, and EU as the Protectorate, but the Servants (who are supposed to be my pro-ayy allies) keep fricking me over by Enthralling Elites and then withdrawing nations from the Federal EU.
So eventually I've decided to invade my own countries and bring them into the supernation by force.
Having to use the Korean armies becuase all the Russian and EU ones are tied up fighting Illuminati Iran
Something about this new dev build feels off. It is late 2032. There are 2 of those fleets in earth orbit. No escalation, just purging servants as the alien flipendo bullshit has been going into overdrive.
I've observed this behaviour as well. The aliens just sit there doing their "Earth Surveillance" objective.
I have to wonder if this was done by the devs so players have a target for their military ships in the early game? Since beforehand you were pretty much reduced to killing the occasional alien transport ship.
If nothing else its a good signal to the player they need to start building up a military force in space if the aliens have started parking large fleets in Earth's orbit.
Them just staying in orbit isn't the issue. Them having an absolute death fleet is. Before, you had like one or two destroyers at most with like 3k fleet power total, not this absolute hell squad, especially multiple ones like that. This entire dev version just seems really, really off. Almost intentionally.
The alien fleet is not as horrifying as you'd expect. Most of the threat is coming from the aliens massive fuel reserves.
Even a modest fleet of missile ships should be able to clear up the alien fleet, with some casualties.
The problem is that the aliens have enough speed/fuel to only engage when they want to, and unfortunately the AI is smart enough to be wary of a suspiciously small human fleet yeeting itself towards their ships
tbh the devs sound like those annoying masters in D&D that wants players to magically read their minds and do exactly the weird precision moves and thinking that the master wants otherwise rocks falls, everyone dies.
they say this variance is good and to force different strategies for different playthroughs. looks like you are not going to be using Orion drives.
And, to be fair, that 4.6 radioactive site should be the one you upgrade first so you get higher yields from it (hopefully you dont get the depletion event on that site).
>You can actually check what techs other factions have and how far they've progressed with new ones >You can check resources as well
I didn't know that. This makes sabotaging a lot easier.
It's short-term relations, not long-term. I know because I rapidly have to keep yeeting non-aggression pacts at Humanity First only for them to forget and do something counter-productive 5 turns later
MOTHERFRICKER
Everything is going just fine, 2032, almost 500 research effective on projects, 200 research/day. building habs in mercury and venus. Humanity First Saudi Arabia gets nuked invading Initiative Turkey, Nukes back. Suddenly massive global GDP loss, like 10%, including research... Better start these civil defense techs ASAP, its only going to get worse moving forward.
How the frick do I tell this ayy to frick off
I know messing with them is the Humanity First bigbrain moment to get them mad, but I need to do it to progress the event chain. Dumping every single Espionage org on my Kingpin, and doing a full hail-mary with my Ops only gets me to 30%
>but I need to do it to progress the event chain
You still do it. You can do one assassination and one detaining against them without an escalation against you. The next killing after those two actions will trigger raids against your bases.
>but I need to do it to progress the event chain
You still do it. You can do one assassination and one detaining against them without an escalation against you. The next killing after those two actions will trigger raids against your bases.
i dont give a shit, i see an ayy, i kill him. i see also any enable, i kill them, simple as.
>Endless KeyNotFoundException always triggering in the same timeframe no matter which save I reload
Well, it was a nice run. Still has game-breaking bugs, albeit at a slightly lower rate. What a shame.
I only know the following from trial and error, I haven't read the game files or anything, but I believe it works like the following:
There's a hidden attribute on every settlement site / orbital spot which, for want of a better term, we will call "Do You Count As In-Situ". If you DO count as in-situ, then you're allowed to build things with space resources in 30 days instead of being forced to use Boost from Earth and wait ~2 years.
Taking Mars as an example: when you build your first surface settlement, you count as being in-situ on that exact spot, so you can build powerplants, etc with space resources in 30 days. However, you can't found NEW Mars bases (or orbitals) in 30 days, they still have to be boosted from Earth.
But, if you build a construction module, your "Do You Count As In-Situ" gets set to Yes everywhere in the Mars local system. Now you can not only upgrade your existing Mars bases in 30 days, but you can found new Mars bases (and, indeed, Phobos and Deimos bases) in 30 days.
Having more than one construction module per planetary system (i.e. a planet's surface sites, all its orbits, and all its moon's sites and orbits) is superfluous, you only ever need one.
Good places to build (ONE) construction module: Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Mercury.
Pointless places to build a construction module: asteroids (becuase they only have two locations, the surface site and one orbit), anywhere in Earth-Luna (because you automatically get "Do You Count As In-Situ" in Earth-Luna from gamestart).
>Having more than one construction module per planetary system (i.e. a planet's surface sites, all its orbits, and all its moon's sites and orbits) is superfluous, you only ever need one.
They're not entirely superfluous, because (in addition to allowing space construction in the first place) each one also speeds up construction by 10%. So it's plausibly useful to spam them in cases e.g. when you first arrive at Mercury and want to set up 30 outposts / platforms at the same time.
Not having EU on the new dev build is rough. I'm playing HF and just managed to get control of North America by 2025. Europe and Russia got swallowed near immediately (luckily by the resistance thank god), fricked dice rolls lost any chance at India, so now I'm grinding China with support from Japan & Taiwan. That's pretty much it other than Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia; at least I finally have enough research to start steering global research again
Anyway while I was getting reamed by dice making me lose 83% rolls 3 times in a row I think I brainstormed a potential way to buyout all of a factions assets without ever angering them >Get past early game to the point all your mines are active >Start spamming probes to all nearby asteroids >In addition to the usual claiming of the best ones, start settling subpar ones too >Develop them enough they look sexy on paper but are expensive to run >Trade them to other factions for all their money/boost/organizations >Watch them go over their mission control and start rebeling back to you >Rinse and repeat
Maybe they change their opinions later but early on factions value space assets to an insane degree. Trading luna outposts you don't need anymore let's you rob a faction of everything they own.
You're playing a leaked in-development build instead of waiting for an actual release, in an era where even release builds tend to still be bug-ridden messes.
Declaring war increases a countries cohesion by 1, but being declared war on increases cohesion by FOUR. You can just have your own countries declare war on each other and instantly peace out to immediately fix cohesion problems, like for instance declaring war on mexico at the start of the game with the US which will fix the unrest problems in Mexico and increase research in the US. The only downside to this is getting war crime events that increase atrocities and it's necessary to have an army capable of attacking a nation in order to declare war. Plus it hits research pretty hard if you push cohesion too high in a well developed nation.
On a similar topic there doesn't seem to be much of a downside to high inequality as it only effects the resting point of cohesion as far as I can tell which it only moves towards at a max of 0.05 per month. That's offset by investment in research or even just 1 IP in unity per month in every country I checked. Unless I'm missing something that would mean that it's a waste of time putting pips in welfare except if climate change is out of control, or you're roleplaying a nice guy faction.
It's half illuminati grand strategy, subverting or invading the nations of earth. Welded to half autistic space mining simulator, where you have to plan your launch window to Mars years in advance and balance acceleration Vs delta-v Vs payload like a literal rocket scientist.
It's breddy gud.
It's breddy gud but it also needs a lot of work. Mostly on bugfixes and filling in a few pieces of missing content (mostly VA work, I think they just never got someone for the Resistance lady yet? frick if I know but I only remember her voice lines being missing). It could also use balance changes, automation improvements, and better/more aggressive AI that can be a threat outside of the Servants which're only really that because they get OP ayy assistance.
Tonally, it's got some SMAC vibes but where SMAC was the shit, this is more lukewarm. It's decent, but it's lacking that certain je ne sais quoi.
The gameplay feels a little oddly torn between the Earth-focused illumina grand strategy and the mostly-hard-sci-fi space rts. If they had focused on just one, it'd likely be a lot better, but because of the split they've both suffered for it.
If you're a grand strategy autist like me you'll nonetheless enjoy it and get plenty of hours out of it, though, I'm sure. Just because it isn't perfect, or even excellent, doesn't mean it's BAD.
My recommendation, however, is wait for the actual release. Possibly a couple major patches after that too for extra work to be done on it. Especially if you don't see yourself doing lots of runs and mainly only see yourself as doing a couple before not touching it again.
Why yes I would like to be able to know when my resource probes will finish and yes I would like some sort of alert for things I choose to be important, such as alien events and enemy factions launching bases instead of having to sift through the left bar for it
Just saw my first Judgement Day: Ayys sent their armies into HF India, and fricking hell, HF takes no prisoners. 16 nuclear strikes in one day, Washington, Toronto, New Delhi, Vancouver, Hyderabad, Mumbai, NYC...
I wasn't involved at all, it'll be fun to see how much my economy tanks in nuclear winter
>Humanity First.
Why are you racist?
Because I am an average person.
*speciest
>Humanity shouldn't be first
have a nice day right fricking now if you truly believe that. Prove your conviction.
If I kill myself who will clean alien futa wieners?
I will. So please have a nice day so that there are more for me.
>it's racist to ensure that all non-human species will be subjugated by mankind
Wake me up when these Black folk have a release date.
And No ~ Q6 2222 is not a release date.
> when you post a truly exceptional pepe
i like your agent naming convention - adopting.
>Annica Zetterberg, how are you going to get six billion humans into space?
I've never played the original 2D XComs so i dont have a frame of reference to compare to this
What genre even is this game? a 4X? A space colony sim with a huge prologue game? An Illuminati simulator? I dont get it
I'm confused as well anon. It feels like Illuminati simulator for the first 10 years then a crappy space game after that.
2D xcom doesn't give any more insight into it. This was inspired more by 3d xcom.
In 3D xcom there was this shadowy council that gave you funding, something that did not exist in the 2D one. These long war mods went from there and let you play as the shadowy council instead.
It is slightly genre defying, but not by much. Honestly you just described it. An illuminati simulator that is space colony sim, all to the backdrop of aliens doing shady shit and taking over governments, so you have to do the same.
So its like a grand-strategy level of 3D-Com where you're fricking the sectoids and thin men infiltration at a more macro level
still weird how you wed that to interplanetary spess colony sim with space ship fighting
Pretty much, except that it's a divided humanity, into 7 factions, each with their separate goal, and I presume, win condition.
The exodus just has the goal to flee earth and try to survive somewhere else. Humanity first wants to eradicate the aliens. The protectorate is looking to negotiate continued existence of humanity for some loss of autonomy and so on.
You're not just fighting aliens, you're fighting (and trading and cooperating) with other humans.
So space colonization is also a bit of a competitive land grab, and the geopolitics simulator has a bunch of choices towards selfishness vs. cooperation, like how the science tree is done.
The tech tree has techs that are universal and personal. Most new technology gets unlocked by factions paying together towards it. Applications of that tech still need to be researched and only apply to the factions that research them. Since you decide how much of your research is going to mutual benefit and how much to personal benefit there are interesting trade-offs made.
Its just playing aztec and inca in other games, but with aliens instead. And has the same problem that it should be impossible to win but you can still win
I've been trying to think if there's any interesting faction opportunities they've missed.
What faction would you want from a game-mod?
Honestly I think if the way you theme factions is "potential reactions to an alien invasion" they've pretty much covered all major bases.
"Fight them off", "Exterminate them", "Profit from their arrival", "Run away from them", "Capitulate to them because Humanity is terrible", "Worship them because they're obviously divine", "Make them respect us as equals" is pretty comprehensive as far as motivations go.
If you're keeping the main factions as is, maybe the way to go would be variants or breakaways a la Alien Crossfire?
So like you could schism the Academy into peaceniks who still want to befriend the ayys after they prove hostile, and realists who want to beat them up until they stop fricking with us.
Ideally you'd have schisms happening dynamically during a campaign (with the player picking which side they want to stick with), but I seriously doubt the game would support that without some serious frickery
I'm sure one faction would want to become alien.
Ah yeah, a Transhumanist faction would probably work.
Though you could argue that alien-derived transhumanism could be a thing that a couple of the existing factions could get into (Servants and Academy I'd guess, maybe with the Initiative commercialising it as well).
If you wanted a Servants variant faction, that could be it actually, like less "worshipping the aliens because they are divine" and more "becoming one with the alien's flesh so we may inherit their divinity"
All I can think of is the Nigerians in District 9 eating Prawns for their "magic powers"
Faction that wants to frick the aliens
REEEEE WHY DID YOU STOLE MY IDEA
WAS JUST THINKING ABOUT IT AND THOUGHT I WAS SMART
Subjugating the aliens. A faction that wants to be empire builders and take the ayys as a subservient civilization. An aggressive faction that doesn't want extermination.
Finding some other aliens to be friends with. Basically Humanity First when it comes to the ayys that are trying to invade Earth but the Academy to any other ayys that want to be friends. They try to get help from some other aliens in repelling these aliens and fighting them off.
IMO not only have they covered the bases, Humanity First and Resistance, as well as Academy and Protectorate are redundant.
NPC faction, which is just a mafia family trying to turn legit, without care about the aliens. This would mean they would just sell services to players, while they try to turn a weakened country to their side and then stop.
Breed with the aliens faction
Currently doing a tryhard minmax run as Humanity First. So far I have Europe and America. Going to break into China soon. Control point capacity is a b***h though. Going to grab Eurasian Union after China and start unifying that. Then I'll merge the EU with the EU and start working on the Pan-Asian Combine. Specifically I'll be using Thailand to grab as much of Southeast Asia as I can to easily unite it into the Pan-Asian Combine.
I'm also playing with the Earth unification mod, so that's my end goal. After I get Great Europa finished I'm going to take Canada and Mexico to merge them into America. I'll just declare war on all the random little nations to absorb them without issue. By that time I should be about done unifying the Pan-Asian Combine as well. Once that's done I'll start working on the Caliphate primarily and South America secondarily. The Caliphate will get merged into the EU as soon as it's gotten all of the territory it can get, same with South America to America. After that it'll just be the long and hellish process of unifying Africa. Then I'll merge them all together and see just how much it can do.
Make sure you max up loyalty and command, those meganation CPs are a b***h to take back from alien actions.
What does loyalty do? Do they try to steal your councilors or does loyalty affect certain missions?
Also my plan is mostly to just not let them get that far in the first place.
The mission that the aliens use to snag CPs for the servants includes a defensive modifier that is your councilors total loyalty divided by 6. 6 councilors with max loyalty will provide a -25 modifier to their mission. The same thing applies to command and the terrorize mission. If you don't level those stats up the aliens will take the CPs from you and you will be rolling 1% crackdowns to take them back.
Wow, that's incredibly useful to know.
But how do you increase loyalty?
Inspire mission. Most classes with high persuasion have it.
Is there any way to know how much it increased loyalty by if you don't know the actual loyalty? Also, if you get a councilor up to 25 loyalty and install the loyalty monitor cybernetic implant which reduces loyalty by 5, can you increase loyalty back up to 25 or is it stuck at 20?
I have tested it and the inspire mission seems to randomly increase loyalty by 1-3, so you cant know for sure until you investigate them. I also tested the loyalty monitor and it reduces maximum loyalty. I think any trait that reduces loyalty also imposes a cap on maximum loyalty, so the monitor reduces the maximum loyalty value to 20... pretty bad. I have never seen someones loyalty randomly decline without an event occurring, so if you inspire someone up to 25 and investigate them to confirm, they will stay at 25 until something obvious happens to reduce their loyalty.
Damn, that really sucks about the max loyalty.
Like I said, I have never seen it decline without an event stating it is declining. Once you hit 25 you can forget them. Just forget the monitor.
How are you frickers playing this when it isn't out?
Leaked dev version, running exe of the demo, using a patch to the demo to unlock other stuff. If you don't already have it then you might be fricked. I don't know if any of the links still work. But as long as you downloaded the demo already then you can play it as much as you want.
https://arch.b4k.co/vst/thread/1105030/#q1113955
Just get them into the metaverse. While they're hooked up, you can move them wherever you want.
Dead
We need a brave anon to upload it somewhere else
I tried making a torrent and I could see people trying to leech, but it just didn't upload (despite other torrents uploading as normal)
What if the aliens were all extremely good looking and their goal was to have sex and interbreed with humans?
Depends on how the breeding goes and how married life with an alien would be like.
>that pic
Wait a second...
>What if the aliens were all extremely good looking and their goal was to have sex and interbreed with humans?
Don't even think about it. It would basically be a great replAYYcement for the human race. Everything human would go extinct and so would probably our culture.
Thankfully this is a very slim posibility as humans can't interbreed with anything that isn't human on planet earth. So the chances for beign able to produce viable offspring with ayys is even smaller.
And there's also the chance that our genes are stronger than theirs. And the possibility that alien females can get pregnant by human males but human females can't get pregnant by alien males.
But realistically all scenarios lead to war.
When in doubt always remember
Human rights don't apply to aliens. I'm not sure about animal rights tho...
So... Mass Effect? Yuck. A race of w*men would actually improve after being turned into husks.
Yeah, unfortunately the Asari were a coomer fantasy. A real single sex species would likely resemble men rather then women.
>alright we can only reproduce using one gender going forward - should we go with the model designed around a womb and mammaries to grow and feed infants, or would we be better off going with the model with just a semen cannon down there?
What's the male version of alienussy?
Brainlet, I said resemble. They would be built like men, most animal's mammaries are tiny and they might not even have any.
>They would be built like men
Not if they want to give birth veganally.
Bugman-breaking? Humie-liation?
There were some implications that the Asari were able to psychologically manipulate different species into seeing them as attractive, based on each of their own beauty standards. For example, an Asari from the perspective of a Krogan probably looks complately different compared to an Asari from the perspective of a human.
There is only so far you can stretch that tho, like the physical form has to conform somewhat with the mental image.
Quasarium Mechanics.
Asari look like everything until they are perceived.
Why not just Amazonian women?
Who said anything about w*men?
https://imgur.com/a/cq43KFv
That's still a woman.
Define "woman."
Sapient female.
The time between solidifying your holdings on earth and before you can afford building a fleet is too long and sucks ass
The demo/leaks consistently crash on my machine on starting a campaign, RIP
Out of curiosity what's the Ayylmao's deal? Like why are they here in the Solar System, and what are they trying to accomplish? Or is that not fully detailed in the beta builds?
Given that they're willing to work with the Servants I'd guess that they're on an imperialist mission rather than looking to wipe us out just because.
Is there a lore reason why they hold off on going apeshit until the 2030s?
They want slaves. Specifically they want manpower and people they can use to fight other aliens. They got invaded by some other ayys and are now invading humanity as a preemptive strike and to strengthen their own position.
There is FTL but it's via wormholes on the outer edges of solar systems and has extremely low throughput. This means that offensives have to be fought almost entirely in-situ, which gives an enormous homefield advantage. This is also why they can't go balls-to-the-wall, because they literally don't have the ability to within the solar system and have to build up their capabilities.
I'd guessed as much honestly
Is it just my bias or does this vindicate the Academy?
So there's an Alien War going on, and instead of becoming a pawn (Servants/Protectorate), or an mutual problem (Humanity First), Humanity becomes a player in local interstellar politics
Kinda like Japan post Russo-Japanese War
The academy are the best faction for sure. They offer the aliens a chance to become allies, and if they decline, they basically default to the humanity first option. Great faction all-around.
>and if they decline, they basically default to the humanity first option
>The beatings will continue until the Star Trek Federation happens
> Humanity First starts out vindicated and stays vindicated, albeit in a less strong position since taking the fight to them would be significantly more difficult.
So basically becoming the North Sentinel Island of local space? Like a black spot where the locals will use their outdated tech (railguns, etc) to kill you if you get too close
Well that's one way to do it
The funniest ending would be Project Exodus ending up in a system controlled by the invader's archenemy, who then use Exodus' knowledge to steamroll the Invaders and give Earth back to Exodus
>They offer the aliens a chance to become allies, and if they decline
They aren't making an offer. The aliens don't have a choice. They'll become allies whether they want to or not.
Yeah, sort of. It vindicates the Academy and the Resistance. The Resistance because it means just turtling up and telling everyone else to frick off isn't necessarily doomed to fail as an inevitability. The Academy because the aliens aren't necessarily unreasonable and could theoretically be allied with, which would be a much stronger position in the universe, in addition to just being nicer. Humanity First starts out vindicated and stays vindicated, albeit in a less strong position since taking the fight to them would be significantly more difficult.
Can I buy the full game? I don't mind playing alpha jank. I like throwing money at the market I want to grow.
you can put it on your wishlist
Supposedly you can get early access for $250 now (was only $65 if you bought into the kickstarter), but I haven't seen how to.
I'll email the devs and make them a cash offer.
I really really want this game to be finished. I think about it all day.
dogo
>The Resistance: #theresistance #downwiththeempire
>The Servants: #xenosapientswelcome
>The Initiative: "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it."
>Project Exodus: pic related
>Humanity First: HFY
>The Protectorate: Hon hon, le baguette!
>The Academy: Friendship is Magic
>The Resistance: throw the Ring into mt Doom
>The Protectorate: deliver Ring to Sauron
>The Initiative: sell the Ring
>The Academy: wear the Ring and try to control it
>Humanity First: kill every orc, elf, dwarf and treant on your way to Sauron
>The Servants: your sphincter becomes new Ring
>Project Exodus: stay in Shire
>why didn't they just use the eagles to get the frick out of there
Really makes you think
>literally pic related
LOTR mod when
>The Servants: your sphincter becomes new Ring
kek
I wish the ground combat in this game was more complex than just risk army with tech level.
What game?
Dirt untaken
Terra invicta. Made by the people who did the Xcom Long War mods
>tell Canada to finish their space program
>launch pad spawns in Quebec
>liberate Montreal
>Canada has a space program
>Quebec doesn't
The instructions must've been written in English
What does commercial rocket companies do? It is missing it's tooltips.
It creates an organization that produces boost into your pool.
The one time I did it it gave me one that produces .25 boost per month, and then I never touched it again.
It's probably unironically best to just savescum right before it finishes until you get a good one.
Can it give you good ones like Whitefang Industries?
No clue. I did the exact same as
It can roll a +1.25. You got a bad roll.
I guess that's like a couple years of US boost investment, but it still only sounds like something you'd go for if you're trying to rush the moon or something.
They definitely help. The sooner you get a mine setup on a spot with the 5 resources on mars, the sooner you can do space construction.
I guess I am hyper-fixating on the late game.
I just did it some 60 times and it appears to be a 50/50 chance to get an org that gives 0.25 boost per month or 1.25 boost per month. Didn't get anything other than one of those in all of the orgs.
Wait, some of them also give a few percentage points bonus towards spaceflight program in addition to their boost.
Frick, just as I posted that I also realized that they're all tier one orgs.
Sorry for the three posts.
why did I read her name as "Anal Viral Celebrity"
Holy shit, I need to pay better attention to the org pool. I just snagged one that almost doubled my boost amount.
I really wish orgs became available all at once at set times of year with a big announcement - kind of like councilor mission assignment. For example each January 1st and July 1st.
It would really improve turn flow because I'm in the same boat... am I supposed to checking orgs for each councilor every week otherwise and just keep seeing the same old crap 90% of the time in the name of optimization?
It's all part of a larger UI and flow issue. I wish there was a diplomatic conversation with other factions set to happen every few months as well so you aren't just speeding between assignments.
>Diplomatic conversation with other factions
Want to particularly harp on this as a major UI sore spot. It took me 3 games until I realized non-aggression pacts we're even a thing, and once I signed one with my complimentary faction it gave me zero notice that it would run out after a bit and the other faction would start overthrowing my control points again. In addition the intel game is a mess, I get steal tech opportunities seemingly at random, the Intel tab can't keep track of which faction has what agent for more than a week despite me exhausting their investigations everytime my 25 guy has an opportunity, humanity first is tolerant of the servants for some godforsaken reason instead preying on other random factions, it's just a mess
>I get steal tech opportunities seemingly at random
You have to have an enemy councillor visible that has access to technology (gear symbol in orgs)
>the Intel tab can't keep track of which faction has what agent for more than a week
When you lose sight of an agent, they may be dead or fired. That's what the "go to ground" mission does, it puts them back into hiding.
>despite me exhausting their investigations everytime my 25 guy has an opportunity
Turn them and their guy will report to you directly.
HF is justified as long as they chill the frick out after knocking out the current crop of aliens, since they literally launched wars of aggression against all their stellar neighbours because of Bush-tier WMD paranoia
All of the ideologies are broken clocks that came into existence when all we had to go off of was a bombed out chasis in the woods. Humanity First will kill everything they find forever, the Academy will befriend every abomination they see no matter how awful, the Resistence will literally never talk to anyone and keep turtling to protect the status quo forever, etc.
Protectorate would probably end up joining up with the Initiative because Banerjee is just a ruthless powermonger who was planning to use the ayys to become a Breen like figure, Servants would probably melt away into various other cults, and Exodus would just be fricking gone lmao
> The targeted civilians are often members of religious or ethnic minorities
OK, now we're talkin
Anyone else a little bit overwelmed?
>In what to Invest? When should you direct invest?
This is the biggest problem for me. Gdp generates Investment points If I understood that correctly, but also generates Pollution, so you should also go welfare? Knowledge is science right? Unity seems like a meme. Should Military only be invested by specialised countries or by every country? Spoils or Funding? Booster investments only for countries with an already ongoing space program?
>What is the most important resource?
I feel money is semi useful but Science and Boosts feel king. Is the strategy to just invest in Knowledge? Also how to get more influence? Positive global opinion?
>What to research? When should you start contributing to global research instead of focusing admin cap and other stuff?
I focused on own research and AI basically researched 4 techs that gave 4 different battery types. So I guess one should start contributing to global research to avoid that, but when? Also, what is that third engineering project slot at the bottom?
>What countries to focus on early?
I rush Scandinavian nations, then into Europe. Then Poccna. Is there a way to remove a faction from a control point they block, besides staring an open feud with them?
>Space stuff
Should you even build stations before you can extract minerals and volatiles in space + generate water? If I understand correctly, if you dont produce things in space you waste boosts launching supplies from earth? Also I build moon bases before I got mines tech. Is that the correct way?
When should one start to build navy?
>Councillor interactions/Strategy.
Is my feeling correct that you should level councillors to have 25+Admin + 25 of their specialized ability? I made the mistake to focus on persuasion to flip a lot of countries early, and failing later because no commando/espionage. What Abilities are most important? I didn't know what to do after claiming my countries, so I just spread Public opinion without a clue.
>This is the biggest problem for me. Gdp generates Investment points If I understood that correctly, but also generates Pollution, so you should also go welfare? Knowledge is science right? Unity seems like a meme. Should Military only be invested by specialised countries or by every country? Spoils or Funding? Booster investments only for countries with an already ongoing space program?
Rule #1: All long-term investments in national productivity are pointless, in every case. That discounts economy, welfare, unity, and funding, for every nation and in every condition. Any points that go towards them are wasted. The bonuses are so tiny, and the timeframe of the game gives you so little opportunity to reap the rewards, that you should discount them all entirely. Pollution? Don't give a shit about it, the timeframe of the game ain't long enough for you to have to deal with the consequences of your actions.
Rule #2 is that the above rule also holds for armies, navies, and nuclear weapons, because it's so much better to take over a country that already has them, rather than try to build them yourself. So navy, army, and nuclear weapons are out the window too.
This makes the rest fairly simple. Invest in boost if you need the resource, invest in Military if you're USA / China and want to be able to fight endgame spider-mechas, invest in mission control if you're out of orbital slots.
The end, ez.
So basically just invest in Knowledge and Boosters( and spoils in Nations you don't care about)? What about Democratic/Authoritarian score, inequality and this united population thingy ? Can they be ignored?
Yes. Just ignore everything, actually.
This anon is a moron who's spreading disinformation and doesn't realize it's possible to do some very whacky things.
Also "just ignore welfare lmao and go full spoils" is just asking for like a baseline unrest score of 9 because making every country into a hellhole where a tiny elite rule over a mass of penniless disenfranchised peasants isn't as good an idea as you think in the 21st century
also the GDP loss from climate change raises exponentially because the devs rebalanced it in response to a player running full spoils across the world and only getting like 10% gdp loss per year at 5C temperature anomaly
>Also "just ignore welfare lmao and go full spoils" is just asking for like a baseline unrest score of 9 because making every country into a hellhole where a tiny elite rule over a mass of penniless disenfranchised peasants isn't as good an idea as you think in the 21st century
This isn't a "develop the world properly long-time" game.
This is a "fight off the ayys" game.
You need to get out of the normal grand strat mindset. It the countries don't revolt (or it's easy to bring them back into the fold with a couple of councillor actions), it literally doesn't matter how dystopian you make them as long as they keep feeding money to your boost nations.
> This anon is a moron who's spreading disinformation and doesn't realize it's possible to do some very whacky things.
An anon did math in the last thread mathematically proving that long term investment is useless compared to Mission Control, see
How are you going to fight off the ayys if you've nationruined all of earth?
iirc there's an event that straight up deletes all boost sites and it can result from high inequality, high unrest, and loss of GDP, which is something that WILL happen with your strategy
>How are you going to fight off the ayys if you've nationruined all of earth?
With spaceships, which are unaffected by the status of Earth apart from in the very distal sense of how much research you've done into their weaponry.
> Spoiler
Did you find out about this mysterious event because your dad works at Nintendo?
I learnt about it via the game files and ingame experimentation.
I sure hope the devs don't patch your cheese strat by making it easier to trigger uwu
My point is that your tactic of "Invest in unity, funding and welfare" won't help you avoid high unrest anyway, because the benefits of completing them are so tiny - and I don't even mean tiny to the meta of defeating the ayys, but tiny to the very national statistics they're supposed to be improving - that it's a wasted investment EVEN IF your only goal is to make every nation a peaceful Scandanavian welfare state, aliens be damned.
The fact that trying to be a goodie two shoe fix all the nations in the world is a noob trap is one my favorite things about this game.
It's like the board game imperial. You don't own the country, you're just renting it. And you better squeeze it for all it's worth or lose to those that do.
That was proving that funding specifically is not worth doing.
There are probably viable ways to execute upon completely fricking up the planet and becoming self sufficient in space, and there are also probably ways to win this game by making Giga-China and never actually bothering with space.
Rather than trying to insist upon an optimal way to play, people should try to achieve what they actually want for the future of humanity.
Actually this is only true for garbage nations.
You absolutely want to inves economy and knowledge in china or India if you take control of them.
Even 5 years if advising (any 25 admin free agents) and improving economy/knowledge will give you massive development points and research points, and then you can get some funding or leech spoils.
The reason for this is that at game start those two countries have such a low personal income level, and such large populations, that after a few years you can have China be 3x EUs, for example. India I reckon would take longer to develop.
But, then, to your point, countries like Japan, USA and EU already are pretty well developed, and have low populations, so you would want to focus knowledge, boost and mission control instead, because your economy investment there is just to keep it maintained where it already is.
Additionally, you cannot get research from using spoils. You should probably take over servants/protectorate nations (the garbage ones you didnt take over), set them to spoils only, then abandon them, to use them as cash fountains but not wasting influence income.
Thanks for the insight!
What does advising actually do?
But isn't development kind of wasted on unity? The game tells that high cohesion is worse than middle ground cohesion and public opinion can be raised fast by councillors as well as unrest reduction.
You need a little bit of spending in unity to raise your faction's goals higher in the approval polls.
It increases the difficulty of other factions taking actions in your territory and decreases the difficulty for you. Unless you want to keep a councilor there running public campaigns for the entire game.
Like the above anon said, every tick in unity gives public opinion for the faction that controls said country. it's use is to have your councilors available for other missions than public campaign. just 5-10% investment in unity is enough if your country is at 5 cohesion and running knowledge. If you don't think it's worth democratizing a country (russia) cohesion above 5 is useful to keep unrest low, to maximize your development points, and military investments.
Unity isn't useless since high cohesion blots out public opinion, but yeah unless the country is couping every 30 seconds you're free to let personal liberties slip; you are at war after all. That being said spoils/funding is also a noob trap since you end up with more money than god fairly quickly and are instead limited by influence/operations/R&D. I suggest always maxing knowledge and boost, switching the latter to mission control once your mining bases are active
Of course, this assumes you are actually fighting the aliens. If you are servants or initiative than steal everything not bolted down and party in your secret bunker while everything burns around you I guess
Release when?
Q4
code faster
also, you are homo
PSA to all.
DO NOT INSTALL LOYALTY AUGMENTS, because it reduces maximum loyalty from 25 to 20 (wish it would have said this on tooltip).
You cannot inspire above 20 loyalty if there is an implant, and there is no way to take it out that i am aware of.
Can I get a link to the pre release version?, or at least a key word to find it in the archive? thx in advance.
>Finally get THE run going
>Perfect almost everything, full control over Russia, China, USA and India
>Almost fully democratized China
>80 space control and stations everywhere
>All of that by 2029
>Didn't escalate with the Aliens so got at least 3-4 years before Servants start building alien facilities to turn nations into alien states
>Infinite nullpointexception spam begins
Let me play the actual fricking game already. And no, I'm not going to shit out 250 bucks for early access.
does anyone have the leaked dev build...i only have the cracked demo with time-limit removed but not being able to save sucks major dick and so does being locked into the resitance
Literally been linked in this thread.
>What does advising actually do?
Increase investment points by administration % and science by science %. Also increases army performance based on command, but only during advice.
If you have a big country, it's worth advising to increase outputs.
yeah i looked at that thread, and the links posted in it are all dead, the only one still up is for the demo
yeah i got a gold dep. on my first playthrough, but it was an incredibly minor deposit iirc
>yeah i looked at that thread, and the links posted in it are all dead
Ah they took it down. Oh well, not gonna upload it again. Someone else can if they like.
Has anyone ever found any gold on the moon?
Or is that single 0-10 a lie?
It can happen, but it is usually pitiful. Skip the moon and go to mars. The moon is only good for fissiles if you roll well.
I got a 24 gold on the moon on the devbuild.
So how do i detect an enemy agent in my fleet that very cheesily turns my ships into their cause? and why is this even a thing?
are you sure you aren't just over mission control space?
no, i have 133 mission control space and only 100 used.
it turned out to be a cheesy 25 per AI agent in my shipyard. the bugger turned half my ships before i killed him
So what happens at the end of the game? Full scale alien invasion?
No one knows.
So far everyone either died to endless alien spam or endless error spam, so its hard to say what the winning condition is. HF story I was able to see before everything came crashing down suggests finding a way to make sure the wormhole the aliens used to get here never opens again while eradicating all aliens in the solar system.
Also yeah, the servants start converting their nations into alien nations around 2030 onwards, and once you push back the ayys will start blowing up your outposts and send their armies to earth. 3 armies a 8.7 strength with near instant recovery abilities. Only way to stop them from sending their armies is to intercept their army carriers or of course blowing up their motherbase.
>or of course blowing up their motherbase.
Could this be a viable strat? Leave them alone, tech up, and then rush straight to their staging point to kill them?
>Could this be a viable strat? Leave them alone
You have to. Any action you take against the ayys causes them to escalate their actions. For instance, if you starting hunting down all of their infiltrators and kill them when you spot them the aliens will instantly send in a strike force towards earth and land their armies way before they would do that normally.
Grab your preferred nations, build them up before merging them and establish your outposts with sufficient defense tech before you start pushing against the ayys. Although right now the balance is a bit off since the game is still in development.
What is "sufficient defense tech?"
making sure you don't get nuked or walkered to death
On habs?
i killed one of their agents in early 2028 for the objective - did i frickup?
One kill and one capture is fine. Anything beyond that and the ayys will start blowing up your shit.
you can capture them? I was never able to select "arrest" on an alien, only "investigate" and "assassinate"
In order to capture them, you need to kill one, then complete some xeno tech projects that include "hydra containment". If you havent done the research then the option wont be available.
Is it really only one for both? I don't care about them fricking about the 3rd world but when they're fricking about in my main superpower I should have some ability to defend myself
The good news is we made it to Mars, the bad new is the food didn't.
>15/16 mission control
>15 Mars bases
Oh no...
>15 Mars Bases
>15/16 control used
> clearly no mining going on anywhere
> no boost income or money to speak of to send stuff from earth
this is going to implode the second these go online jesus frick
well it will be a learning experience for him.
Everything seems to be stabilizing, a single mine is able to feed everyone.
My boost income stayed positive even after two people bombed me.
Can anyone post a screenshot of any kind of ayy army or similar? I'd like to see if it's actually enticing or generic blue ayy with breasts and tentacle hair
[s]one of the slaved species is a lizard/saurian type[/s]
you can get an event at any time that takes away mission control slots (solar flare, half?). Just be aware of it.
Huh, good to know...
I have seen the flare, it takes 100 boost to completely circumvent the effect.
That's trivial after you start mining.
What is the point of the devs making fifty shitty drives that are less efficient than grid drives?
Fission frag drives, pegasus drives are all shittier versions of grid drives. You need ONE high efficiency, low-thrust drive. And ONE high-thrust low efficiency drive. Have the same choices in the next tier! Not a bunch of clutter in your project research screen fulfilling the same roles but worse.
It seems there's two tiers. Before magnetic nozzles you use grid drives. After magnetic nozzles you can get really good torches.
advanced pulsar drives are very good for earth/luna or mars defense. Grid lacks a lot of thrust.
Also, advanced dumbo lets you build ships on mars protected by lasers
The tech tree is overwhelming by design.
You have to be able to look at other people's bad ideas and decide that they do not suit your objectives.
Yeah, early game you only need advanced pulsars for defense fleets and grid drives for colony ships, and everything else is just awful.
So for the modules that say they will automatically upgrade as you unlock more techs, how exactly do they upgrade? Do they actually have some layout of defenses like ships do? The defense score doesn't change, at least not the one that's shown. Is there some hidden score based on your techs and such that's just weighted against the firepower of ships trying to attack it or something? How does this work? Should I put one or two defense modules on each station, or should I have one station with tons of them?
How good is the AI for battles? I have no idea what I'm doing.
What is the tech that allows you to build defenses for the orbitals, and which ones should i use?
I said in the last thread that we just needed
>"Putin is a Mad Dog!"
to complete the trifecta of March's Russiaphobic talking points, and the Support Current Thing devs did not disappoint. Bravo. Spazka Ukraine!
calm down... this happens to leaders in any country, all the time.
ah, thanks
If it's so non-specific, how come it never in practice triggers anywhere except Russia?
It happens all the fricking time in the later stages of the game, in my game's the aliens are running around performing these events across the middle east, specifically Iran.
What? First time I saw it was Mexico. Then Canada. It's just an event that's produced by alien actions, which you won't be able to spot until you get the relevant techs.
>This random event is justifying my preconceived notions of someone else's political alignment!
And you're the guy we should be taking advice on how to play from? Get real.
AAAAAAA NOOOO THE RANDOMLY GENERATED EVENT IS TARGETING POOR ME AAAA SAVE ME MR PUTIN
Shut up Ruskie
Should I focus on a single continent or spread out my activities to at least one big power everywhere? All of Europe cooperating with the ayys seems kinda dangerous in the long term.
There's not much of an advantage in having contiguous influence blocs. Really you should focus on specific individual countries that suffice your needs. Aim for the superpowers (US, China, EU, Russia) and special cases like Kazakhstan (huge boost income), then just focus on fricking with the Servants.
You should focus on megastates. I think neighboring countries having CPs controlled by other factions gives them bonuses to certain missions. So it's not great to have one country surrounded by a bunch of hostile ones. Though that doesn't really matter with the big countries that much.
Jesus, the dev version is a buggy mess
Is there any easily accessed list of the datanames of all countries?
This is moronic, now i cant start any space combat, game freezes some seconds and then nothing happens. RIP 2036 game
Listen to the autism of someone who had spent too many hours on this game. I present you the ideal pip distribution for stable growth for most countries.
Pips are percentages and their importance lies in their overall distribution, so large deviations from it can frick up the math.
Economy: Always 1 pip less than welfare, making your inequality constantly decrease. You can go for a 45-55 distribution once inequality reaches 1 and can no longer unify with others. Higher per capita GDP decreases unrest.
Welfare: It's king thanks to libtard devs. Not only decreases inequality, but also slows climate change, therefore helping your economy in the long run. Might be the only way to reverse climate damage through late game techs.
Knowledge: I might be undervaluing it with a single pip, but knowledge increases unrest which decreases your research output overall. You can go 2 pip with very stable nations, but even 3x1pip and 2x2 pip is too much on the knife's edge for me. It's better to get the extra research from orgs or research bases on Mercury.
Unity: At least 2 pips for everyone bar Japan (1pip), 3 for Mexico, India or other shitholes until their cohesion is maxed out. With this distribution 2 pips are generally enough to keep ideological dominance, unless there are very few nations left for the other factions to meddle with.
Military: Maxed out if you have unrest, otherwise 2 pips once the country is stable. I seem to run into occasional hitchups with just 2 pips and I only ever could get away with a single pip in Japan. Think of it as an investment into the police force, the increased mil tech is just an added bonus.
Spoils: I don't like it, it increases unequality and fricks up climate for everyone. It supposed to keep the elites happy, but it's not worth it in my opinion. At most, use it on shitholes which are not possible federation leaders.
cont.
Funding: 1-2 pips on stable and developed nations, otherwise ignore. I know it's not an efficient way of making money, but since I'm not using spoils it's the only way for me to extract wealth and it does add up later in the game. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to help with the economy as it should, which is bonkers.
Boost: You should fund your stations and habs through space resources all the time, which is incidentally also way faster. Your majority boost income should come from orgs and existing infrastructure, which the AI loves to build anyways. I only increase boost for big nations situationally. Defending rocket infrastructure from sabotage is also a pain.
Mission control: 1 or 2 pips, always keep it growing. Signal stations around Mercury can only take you so far while costing valuable resources and money.
Army: Only build a single one for federation leaders, like Ivory Coast, Bolivia or Ethiopia, so you can call your big daddy main federation into the war. Direct investing into it might be a good idea.
Navy: I prefer to have a 3 army task force deployable around the world, so if you couldn't snag the US it is worth to invest into power projection depending on your style.
Nukes: Waste of resources.
Space defenses: Wtf is this even, I'm in 2042 and still haven't got them. Use ships and defense batteries on your stations instead, I guess.
Space defenses are unlocked by Trans-Interface warfare and make a region immune to nuking and aliens landing their armies there. It doesn't provide total immunity to orbital bombardment, but will fight back against ships attempting to orbitally bombard the region. It costs 50 per region so it's really difficult to get going. This is probably the best thing to use direct investments for in the late game. In fact this might be the single greatest reason to not unite everything you can. If you rush down space defenses and tons of income then you can go around spamming space defenses in small nations prior to uniting them, allowing you to not only get them up for much cheaper, but also get far more per year than you'd otherwise be able to.
>its cheaper to build a giant space laser than it is to build an army
US OP
I wish the AI built in space more, honestly the planet stuff gets very boring, I wish the councillors were more automated and you did not have the stupid fricking control point's flipping randomly to the aliens even when they are defended. The space game is the most fun but the other factions are moronic in orbit. so you can never fight them effectively.
This entire game would be more fun in multiplayer.
It would also take fricking forever. It would basically have to be done more like DnD campaigns.
>I wish the AI built in space more
In my game everything within the asteroid belt is spammed full of their shitty bases.
So, which techs improve the power of the defense arrays used in Ground bases and Space Orbitals? I see the SDI symbol (1x for T1, 3x for T2), and I assume this number will go up once I research specific techs. Does anyone know what they are?
Furthermore, how can I calculate the power of a defense unit against alien ships? For example, pretend that one of their destroyers were to engage an orbital station with SDI of 3x? What would happen? I want to plan out on how to defend my Mars bases, and Earth Orbitals.
Also, I think one of my agents is compromised (projects keep getting stolen by humanity first, but the espionaeg numbers on all my agents is above 10 at least, now), even with loyalty improved to 20 and above, how do I find out if someone is compromised? All my older agents have the loyalty implants and are at 20 Loyalty. Presumably once my agent is IDes as compromised, I just need to spam "inspire" and they will turn back?
Thanks in advance for replies.
Send all your operatives into hiding for a turn
Loyalty implants immediately and clearly show when your agents are turned.
It also breaks the game as you can no longer turn enemy agents and keep them as easy diplo contacts.
Turning agents still gives you perfect intel on all other agents from that faction for a few turns. Good enough to kill them all and /or steal their orgs.
Defense platforms are very under-explained and the tooltip from the research window isn't even accurate. They will use whatever best armor you have researched and whatever best laser fitting to their size you have researched. Small laser batteries for point-defense, medium for defense arrays and large for battlestations. Would be nice if in the finished game you could actually hover over your defense platforms and see what exactly they are equipped with, but alas.
Ah, so focus lasers when playing defensive.
or ofensive. i found gunships with a big nose laser, armor and propulsion, produced in masse are great anti ayys
Seconding all of the stuff about defenses.
Space defenses use lasers and railguns iirc
>So, which techs improve the power of the defense arrays used in Ground bases and Space Orbitals?
Space defenses currently employ a point defense laser and kinetic weapons. Upgrading laser type from basic -> arc laser -> phaser improves those lasers. Upgrading from conventional ballistics to railguns to coilguns improves the kinetic weapons.
Secret pro strat where you play as servants and rush the US and then dominate the science and prevent everyone from learning how to get into space until 2030.
Which faction has the best org?
this looks like a research enabled org. But, from what i have seen so far, the servants T1 faction org is the best (makes assassination on that guy very difficult - more than aliens - almost requires a successful arrest on home turf to pull off).
Has anyone successfully defeated the alien armies in ground combat? Wondering if it makes any sense to have USA and China tech on miltech, or if there is some tech or orbital weapons that I need to rush to first to make ground combat feasible. My experience so far is that upgrading miltech takes forever.
The resistance and humanity first. I would say the executioners is the best, but the special activities division is quite good. The executioners doesn't give investigation but gives +10 security, which is huge.
Executioners?
That's the humanity first org
>orbital debris
>orbital debris
>orbital debris
>orbital debris
That's it I'm leaving this planet and never coming back.
how the frick do you federate the USA with mexico and canada?
You need the projects called united north america and greater united north america. Then you can either conquer them or go for a diplomatic unification.
Trying out the skirmish to try and gauge battle stations - the dev version doesnt even have a skirmish that allows you to play defense to a normal hab or ring... to try and gauge my level of readiness.
Anyway, after having played COADE and Jupiter Incident, I find the maneuvering interface total garbage. There is no button to face the ship towards a target, for example. which is fricking critical! When you enable AI mode, it wasted all the delta V like a moron. I am trying to setup trial runs of massed missile boats against stations, for example, but the default ships have their volleys overwhelmed, and in any case, I guess if I was able to speed up the ships before launching volleys they would have a much better chance but I cant even figure out to accelerate or point ships in a specific direction (or all of them at once).
Space combat interface needs a lot of improvement. Cant even tell why the guns arent firing most of the time.
We will need a ship designer to go with a more customizable skirmish mode to better plan naval doctrine and stuff.
>face the ship towards a target
There is, I swear I remember seeing it somewhere. I think in the advanced maneuvers submenu?
If you select a ship then on the far right button of their UI I believe the lock does this
So is it just impossible to influence China? I've been trying and having 0 luck getting even a small foothold
Capture some of the larger nations around it, that seems to improve your chances of doing campaigns and control missions. Also try to grab any persuasion orgs.
nvm lol i just got 2 control points in a row with 20% chance both times
Now just pump everything into unity and the country is yours
How useful is assassination? Will it actually set them back or will they instantly rehire?
They can rehire a shit tier person who hasn't been leveling up, but if you just need someone to stop you can just jail them once every four turns.
i think about 2027-2030 is good idea to start killing all the agents. Im just playing humanity frick yeah only so im partial of killing every one of them included their families
And the different between a new agent and a veteran agent is massive.
Anyone else feel the game demands too much micro? The controlling of the nations is fun at first but then juggling it plus fleets + habs + stations gets a bit much.
This is why I'm just gonna turtle up on Mercury and play tall.
I'm more worried about replayability, the game captures extremely well the anxiety and stress of waiting for the unknown (hopefully they'll disable the ability to see ships and stations, it kills the atmosphere by letting the player know too much) but I wonder how well written and diverse are the random events. I don't like seeing the same chain of events every time I play.
Having watched youtube streams and hung around the discord my conclusion is that 80% of the people playing are either Australian or trans.
Hey Boys, I think if you manage to keep sabotaging the servants mission f"Hydra Language" from servants, it will preventing them from having the alien armies land.
I have sabotaged it thrice now at around 5000/10000 research points, and I kept the servants hounded continuously so far... let see if keeping this objective from being achieved buys time.
Also, pro-tip... do not build fission piles in mars, it uses up your radio actives - better to just build more solar arrays.
there is a "sex Change" org you can hire. The Resistance faction leader is a BLM black trans troon 🙂
They should make it a double agent for the Servants just for the sake of it
Lol you weren't kidding
>+1 persuasion
>you're so mature for your age haha, wanna cut off your dick?
If they weren't good at persuasion, no one would do it. And yeah, this stuff makes a lot of money, lol.
>project exodus building a ship literally every five seconds
They just might make it.
God frickign damn I hate the the thing that makes you lose influence the more countries you have. Fricking BS.
How bad is global war in this game? I've got China Japan and the USA and am thinking of going to war vs. India and Russia (the Servants). I think I can win but will it be a loss for Earth as a whole?
Unless you've dismantled their nukes they'll just obliterate all your armies and territories. Russia itself has enough nukes to cause environmental doomsday.
How do I dismantle nukes? Are there no other defenses (missile tech or something?)? What's the point of the war mechanic if I can't use it?
You can dismantle nukes if you take control of the executive CP. And there is a research that let's you build ground defences that block nukes and orbital attacks in your regions.
Main problem is that it's owned by the servants who are very happy to fire off nukes, most of the other factions in my experience will only fire them off in retaliation. In one of my games I went to war with pretty much all of europe using russia, india and china to restore the warsaw pact territories, but could only start the war once I'd taken control of the unclaimed USA and ended all their alliances then abandoned the country. Starting WW3 with servants, HF and independent nuclear countries just isn't really a good idea.
never fricking mind, i fricked up the save on the cracked demo and just lost 5 hours of progress. frick this, ill just wait for release.
Can you lose the game in case of a global thermonuclear war?
The game doesn't end but it causes an event where the world GDP is crushed and billions of people die once there's been enough nukes fired to increase the stratospheric aerosols to the point the global temperature drops. You could probably still win if you have a good space presence and it might even be a funny way to beat global warming if say you nuked africa in a slow controlled way.
I'm playing on the pre-Demo leaked Dev version with a stability patch-thing someone posted in a previous thread. Is there a newer dev version that fixes these flaws?
It is just fricking near impossible to intercept Alien fleets. The game told me it would only take a few days to intercept with end-game drives, but instead they're gone for the next year. That's a huge ass fleet out of contact and uninteractable.
I got another huge ass fleet fricked. It finished taking over an alien space station around asteroid 63, then just fricked itself. The fleet is floating in the middle of nowhere, not close to the asteroid. The fleet claims to still be at the station, but the station is gone. I can't interact with the fleet. I guess I can try to console command killasset to get rid of it, but holy shit.
An alien fleet swung by Mercury and attacked one of my stations in Extreme Mercury Orbit. I thought the aliens were headed to JUST Extreme Orbit, but I guess I missed something or they snapped to the station. So they attacked the station, blew up some modules and uh, stuck around for a few months and then just vanished. None of my fleets could make an intercept course to the alien fleet, claiming it would take infinity KPS. Any fleet reaching the station after over a week of transit (??? But it takes only 2 weeks to travel from Earth to Jupiter for them...) just gets bumped off into the Extreme orbit area.
Part of me wants to start up the game again and work past these problems, but it's just obnoxious.
Anyone know more of the console commands beyond those provided by the help command?
>I got another huge ass fleet fricked. It finished taking over an alien space station around asteroid 63, then just fricked itself. The fleet is floating in the middle of nowhere, not close to the asteroid.
Okay, so I watched carefully on a replay of the save. The fleet was moving from asteroid 62 to a mid orbit Earth station. Then about half way through, the fleet suddenly triggered combat with the station around asteroid 63, which they are not near at all.
There is another of my fleets, the once that got fricked up trying to intercept aliens, that is headed to the asteroid 63 station. Maybe I'll get them to try and join the other fleet, reset it.
Also, what the frick are we supposed to do if a ship loses propulsion from combat damage? Apparently directional thrust or direct thrust will do it. Now the ship can't move, and unless split away from the fleet, the entire fleet can't move. Great stuff. Now I just gotta scuttle a Dreadnought.
>Ship propulsion compromised.
>Can't make it back to a shipyard to repair.
Yeah makes sense, you lost a ship, deal with it.
The game even makes a point that the crew will evacuate on escape pods if you chose to scuttle a ship. So its a fairly logical solution.
I suppose a mobile shipyard ship module might be useful to repair ships in a fleet.
Patch?
which stability patch? I thought late game there was just spams of nullpoint references could you post the link for it?
Do the ayys start terraforming Earth or some similar shit?
Yeah, human abductions, mind control of political figures, alien plants. If not removed, the alien plants begin to spawn giant creatures that rampage. Plants also affect humans and make them look at aliens more favorably. That's just the early problems they cause.
Seriously why the frick are there so many Australians streaming this stuff
Just testing some stuff.
>very start of game
>unify Earth
>in game part of pic related
>each point in economy gives $71.3
>grows by $85.3T per year at 25% economy (3 pips economy, welfare, and knowledge; 1 pip unity, military, and funding)
>will gain 10 IP after one year
I am, however, getting spammed with null reference exceptions. Still interesting to see its stats though. In lieu of being able to test it in game I charted it out and created the three graphs. And if anyone is wondering, after 30, 40, 50, 100, and 200 years it has 178, 203, 226, 313, and 438 investment points respectively.
>72 nukes
>3.6 military
oh my
I think that's what happens when you recreate Futurama and unite the entire world under the United States
21st century grug
With or without orgs /research that give economy boosts?
Literally nothing. I did that before the first month even ticked over. I could go do some more calculations for various levels of economy bonuses if you want. Maybe 10, 25, and 50% extra? Do you know what the highest bonus you can get is?
Quite a lot. I'm at +30% right now and I didn't take every org that boosts it.
I like the theory crafting, it helps make decisions, so thanks for sharing it.
Your model does not account for increasing GDP malus from pollution, does it?
>Your model does not account for increasing GDP malus from pollution, does it?
No, because it's assuming enough points dedicated to welfare to counteract pollution.
I should check the tech tree again, but from memory you can get like 10-25% bonus to economy from them (they're quite expensive techs even though some are early in the tree, like photonic computing or right after it).
To clarify, this was referring to bonuses just from the tech tree
Plus you can get +10% to economy from an early event, which seems like the best option. Perhaps +5% boost & +5% mission control is better.
How to form the caliphate? Who even forms it?
I've got the Maghreb then the United Arab League, but there are no countries left to unify with.
I basically only need the Greater Caliphate for that shitty Indian Ocean nation, but I think I need the Caliphate existing for that, not just the tech researched.
I believe you need to get countries to release regions to allow it to form. I recall reading someone suggest Saudi Arabia can release its region's to let it form.
Whew, I feel dumb, but the solution is so dumb.
Indeed, I can release the Caliphate.
If you unified Saudi Arabia into the United Arab League then you'll have to release it to be able to form the Caliphate from it.
No bonus
>1 year: 59.17
>2 years: 66.99
>3 years: 73.97
>4 years: 80.33
>5 years: 86.21
>10 years: 110.95
>20 years: 148.31
10% bonus
>1 year: 59.99
>2 years: 68.43
>3 years: 75.92
>4 years: 82.72
>5 years: 88.99
>10 years: 115.24
>20 years: 154.66
25% bonus
>1 year: 61.2
>2 years: 70.54
>3 years: 78.76
>4 years: 86.18
>5 years: 93
>10 years: 121.37
>20 years: 163.71
50% bonus
>1 year: 63.16
>2 years: 73.91
>3 years: 83.26
>4 years: 91.64
>5 years: 99.31
>10 years: 130.93
>20 years: 177.74
Dynamic bonus
>1 year (10%): 59.99
>2 years (10%): 68.43
>3 years (25%): 76.8
>4 years (25%): 84.4
>5 years (25%): 91.35
>10 years (50%): 125.71
>20 years (50%): 173.96
I think I might do some models for America and China later as those are actually practical examples. I should also note that these models don't account for anything that reduces IP like unrest or armies.
The bonuses to economy are actually a lot less effective than I had thought.
Although I suppose the bonuses are somewhat achievable. Especially for a big nation/union, because you can also get an advisor with 20+ admin to advise there and boost investment broad spectrum by 20%+, although that is also pretty costly in influence and opportunity cost of councillor usage.
----
Let's see what inferences can be drawn from this analysis.
1. With a 10% bonus, it takes 2 years for points into economy to pay themselves off.
Proof: from 59.99 to 75.92 took 2 years. 25% is paid towards economy. 60 * 1.25 = 75
Although an argument could be made that you're actually paying 50% of points towards economy (economy+welfare being 50% in this model). Which would mean the period to have an investment start making profit is rather 4 years (59.99-88.99).
Two unexamined results is that this also massively reduces inequality, so being a stabilizer for countries like India. And the other that a 0% investment in economy means reduction of economy (as a result of world pollution) and eventual removal of control points which leads to lesser influence generated.
Though that last bit might actually have the advantage of requiring less org to control more important countries, even if they do become weaker. Because this allows you to keep it out of other's hands.
2. Going from a 10% economy bonus to a 50% economy bonus reduces the period for an investment to pay off from 2 years to 1.5 years if you count 25% (economy), and from 4 years to 3 years if you count 50% (economy+welfare).
anyone else confused about the cost of some projects? Why is photonic computing for civs so expensive? its only a 5% bonus to economy.
For sure. I had 2 computer scientists as councillors and thought I'd rush some of the information technology techs. So the first satellite also boosted it and I ended up with a 40% boost (and +35% from engineering for personal projects). Still, photonic computing was so expensive in hindsight, that I'm sure it wasn't worth it. Getting one of the techs that gives extra orgs is much more likely to give you access to more admin orgs and orgs that give much better bonuses which are similarly global.
Is there any way to defeat a faction permanently? I've been chain assassinating servant councilors for several months now.
No, because there is always influence income.
But by continuously killing a factions agents, you continuously suppress a faction's power:
1) their agents dont have the chance to get too powerful.
2) their agents are not able to collect too many orgs - not enough admin, not enough influence income - and because of this, that faction becomes stunted.
3) having agents dead or arrested means the faction continuously has to spend influence to keep hiring agents, and while dead, going to ground or arrested, the agents are not doing anything useful
4) weaker/newer agents are easier to find, arrest, sabotage/steal from, interrogate, turn and kill. If you let them grow experienced, you will have a much harder time to find (high espionage level) and kill (security level).
However you can only do this heavy suppression against a single faction. As Resistance, I suggest you do it against Servants.
I just dread spending all this time in a run and losing everything because the game is still too buggy to play to finish - my current run will probably be my last until release (or early access - devs really need a wider test base to polish this). In the meantime, I am enjoying the hell out of it.
Probably not. You're not facing actual factions, you're facing ideologies.
I don't understand how to unify nations. I have Russia and Kazakstan and they are federated but I can't make them merge. Is there something else I need to have researched?
Click on Russia on the map, so the left side nation window becomes visible. In that window, there should be a little voting icon, like the one for the mission that enables you declare war. If you hover over it, it shows possible available decisions you can take with that mission, like "Federation" shows possible countries to invite to federation, "Unification" to merge countries. Note that if its not available, its usually because of a cooldown. If a country leaves a federation, there is like 1 year cooldown to join again, and another year to unify. If the country was already in the fedeartion, and it left just as you were about to take control, you should just remove al its allies, make it a rival of the federation parent, and declare war on it - it will be much faster - jsut be aware that you may need to cycle your armies in the territory (you should make the military you use at least 4.0 if you plan on taking over by force).
Also, note that if you declare wars on a country, you will not have it became part of the winning country/federation unless it has a claim. It just converts all the control points to you.
OK thanks. Turns out that its on a cool down because it had been part of the Ukrainian federation. Frick, everything in this game takes so long.
Just got a dev reply to a question many must be wondering about - if You need a high INV agent to run the "Surveil" mission. This was the devs reply:
>>The bonus from the surveillance mission is flat and independent of the councilor's investigation score. It's essentially a +12 to investigation in the councilor's region only.
, councilors with higher investigation scores contribute to a higher base chance of detecting enemy councilors in the region they are in. This is calculated before the mission bonus is added.
>>So, if you're looking for someone in a particular place, you can maximize your chances of succeeding by using someone with a high investigation score to run that mission.
So what's the farthest anyone has got so far? It feels like I've been playing for a while but I still haven't formed any Great Nations yet and have no ships still.
I managed to get the leaked build to early 2030s before alien attacks, null references, and general slowdown made me shelf that run. In that run I had a fleet of early-mid tier ships that never got to engage anything, stations around earth/Luna/mars that got all my enemy kills, bases on the same that all my enemies killed, and the ayys turning Africa into their own nation. I'm probably done with serious runs on this build; gonna see if I can get one of the debug factions enabled and just yeet ships at each other
>Do my best to supress the servants so they don't trigger the alien takeover in their storyline
>Protectocucks get storyline done and want to start building "peacekeeping" battlestations in earth orbit
2032, full control over great Europa and greater north America, so this is going to be the run to finally reach the end. Or end in yet another nullexception spam.
Does anyone have a new link to the leaked build? All the pastebin and anonfiles liks are dead
Check cs rin ru there’s a live link but it’s slow af
God damn this game needs a better UI, it's so fricking hard to tell what's going on. I thought I was crushing the game with full control of China Russia, Japan, the USA, Canada, Israel and others but the other factions were apparently still kicking and Project Exodus somehow has 10x the boost I do and tons of fleets. There are xenoflaura everywhere and I'm confused where to progress from here.
>I'm confused where to progress from here
Depends on your faction. Generally, once you dominate most major Earth nations you should already be finishing building up your space empire. Until you research proper fusion drives your ships won't do much besides guarding earth as any larger distance will take literal years.
https://files.catbox.moe/5rbuv4.ods
Did China and then decided I'd make a general-purpose one. The above is a spreadsheet for calculating the monthly investment points of a nation up to thirty years out. If you need spreadsheet software then LibreOffice is a good and easy choice.
why are the scales on the graphs set different? Even though you visually made the look different, the final numbers at the end are almost the same - did you wiener up the Y scale or is this a troll post?
It just automatically does that and I haven't figured out how to manually set it myself.
Google trends does that kind of shit too nowadays except its a dumbass 0-100 percentage rating that can only be used to do a relative comparison between charts or in the chart itself. This allows someone to basically lie with statistics because it doesn't give any numbers.
Seeing the numbers laid out like this makes me second guess putting any priority into economy at all. A decade of investment spent on economy to gain about 5 more investment points when that all could have been spent on getting a shitload of mission control and research.
It seems like it's much better to invest into economy after creating the megastates and stacking up some bonuses.
For example, with some rough ballparks (based on stats at the beginning of the game) of the stats of a Pan-Asian Combine ($40T GDP, 2.5B pop, $12.5 per economy point, 35% bonus to investment points in economy, and 25% investment point dedicated to economy) you go from 33.1 to 38.2 over 5 years and to 42.8 over 10 years. But again, maybe those points would be better invested into other things. For the five years that's about 99 points per year spent on economy to gain 60 investment points per year.
Ah I've misinterpreted, I assumed that was spending 100% priority on economy. That's not as bad and actually pretty good for bigger countries not just the PAC. But still maybe not worth the effort for countries that have less than 1b people. Nice testing.
Why? Whether you invest in economy in 5 countries or invest it to boost in those 5 countries (assuming they already have a space program), the reward is the same, isn't it?
What does it matter if they're unified or separate for this?
Because countries with larger populations get much better economic growth.
Every point in economy increases GDP per person by a small amount making it much more efficient in countries with a large population.
China (including Taiwan) gets ridiculous research from ecoing up. You can easily get 50-80% bonus to economy by 2030 via orgs and stations, I was over 80% by then. I could have gotten more eco if I wasn't building mission control on the ground and strengthening the army (since I was wrestling with Protectorate over US and wanted a backup army state).
With a max science advisor, easy 1.8K research on China alone.
Why do you even need interplanetary spaceships at all?
You can just ignore grid drives and build defence fleets to cover your bases. Build a shipyard above Mars for your Mars garrison until you get good fusion drives.
I was using the most efficient advanced rocketry drive with like 3 kps for my Earth fleet. Low kps is actually good since it lowers your effective strength so you can bring more ships to fight the aliens. I haven't worked out how to maneuver my ships, I simply leave them on their straight-ahead trajectory and let the aliens run straight into my missiles and lasers. They're shitty weapons but I outnumber them 5:1 and if I order them to always face the enemy, I can tank a lot of fire with heavy frontal armour. Combat AI wants to moronicly spin all over the place, always lock them in place.
where china or India get all resources needed for economic up?
considering whats going on right now they would need really strong global or at last regional presence to secure needed resource
There's only an energy crisis because morons decided to cripple energy production.
Guess what, if you suppress coal and oil production, output will fall! If you sanction your energy importers you'll experience higher energy costs!
The eco investment priority can be modeled as a political effort to babysit these drooling idiots that 'lead' our countries and prevent them from wrecking their economies. Sri Lanka decided to ban fertilizer - didn't work out well for them.
sure
>me control EU and Russia+stans
>Resistance control USA
>we all supply resources and energy to Servant chinks
anon pls
You control the Middle East as well?
Considering how GDP plummets when Servants are in charge, they probably aren't doing a great job with their countries. They just stack up armies and nukes uselessly, it'd be like living in 1984.
somebody else control it
thing is the global trade system in this game should fall
it should be bronze era collapse all over again, with trade flow disturbed, sanctions, piracy and shit
but it isn't
The devs won't picture that because they're genuine true believers in the globalised liberal world order
what a gays
alien arrival and fractured humanity is best scenario for economic collapse and rise of NWO
I'm glad they didn't simulate resource acquisition in a more complex way, tbh.
Transnational elites have an incentive to grow particularly china as the new world power, because the chinese are much more willing to do whatever draconian shit they're ordered to do.
A lot of economic problems in the west are engineered, like the ukranian war.
yeah i got you
but engineered or not shortage is real and you can see how west roll with that
no reason why if china get sanctioned it would not roll down in the same fashion as its export economy relaying on imports of food, energy and raw resources
and its geography make it vulnerable
>chinese are much more willing to do whatever draconian shit they're ordered to do.
Whites are buckbroken though
When you find an alien counciler don't kill them instantly, try to investigate them first. If you do that you will get info on the alien faction and it will show you were all the alien xenofauna and facility sites on the planet are. Every single one, Get burning lads!
>you will get info on the alien faction
>it will show you were all the alien xenofauna and facility sites on the planet are. Every single one
Another really useful piece of info.
Any idea how to permanently get rid of the xeno flora from a province?
No, its a % value, when it gets to a threshold (I am not sure what value the threshold is) you can detect it and then attack it reducing that value by 60-95% depending upon the roll you get. So you can never 100% get rid of it as far as I know.
Councillors can destroy it, actually. Armies can only slow it, because of course fricking hero units work better than literal entire armed forces.
Ah, I was looking at the files and when I tried there was still xenofauna in areas I had purged. It is rather annoying as it means you have to constantly do this hero unit clicker gameplay of setting them to do ten million purge missions thoughout a game.
If you get better techs (and possibly the xenoscience hab buildings help, I think?) you can one-shot the flora with councillors, but it's a late-game thing.
what the frick were they thinking
I honestly hate the councillor system so fricking much. They should have had orgs that you subvert, like gaining control of the FBI gives you power in the US and gives you "Agents" you can deploy on set missions. Or gaining control of a cartel lets you get criminal agents you can use. Don't give them faces or shit just stats and capabilities.
I still think that guy's idea of having resources of various types of people that you allocate to various tasks would be a much better system.
that would also be good I think, anything but the boring councillor system we have now.
unfortunately sunk cost fallacy is in full effect, you can't convince the colorado cucks to rewrite their entire game now
It's like the opposite of a sunk cost, people literally paid them to put their faces in the game.
Have councilors still exist but have them provide bonuses to the people resources and missions that they do.
Just imagine that each ops you spend is a guy with a gun. That's like 64 guns.
It would be nice if it was more practically represented rather then just having to imagine I am sending ops teams. And if they are ops teams why am I "Spending" them? Does every operation end with me killing everyone involved?
They expect one of us in the wreckage brother.
Presumably it's just an abstracted measure of the resources required to undertake a mission.
>Le Mana
It is bullet
They've also put family members in the game lmao
Even better, saving on next year's Christmas presents.
Anyone got a link to the dev build?
>still no release date
>leakBlack person got his access revoked
what's the point of living anymore?
I can only replay the demo for so long.
>winnie the pooh army
>poo vindaloo wipers
kek'd and chek'd, nice satan trips my guy
anyone figure out how to use the debug stuff to give yourself all tech and resources? I want to start testing my own ship designs but the whole way that is setup in campaign mode is jank
Type "help"
My biggest complaint about the game is that there is little difference in how each faction plays. Sure, you've got one unique org that each faction can unlock, but aside from that, there are no bonuses, maluses, etc. that make a faction feel unique. They're just carbon copies of each other with a different endgame.
Like, Project Exodus should get bonuses to shipbuilding, Humanity First should get bonuses to war, etc.
I haven't enjoyed a demo this much since SMAC. Lot of expectations for the full game anons.
Same here. There is a lot of wonkyness, lack of clarity, and clunky UI but I'm already loving it. A few months of polish could really make it a great game.
>worse than Beyond Earth
Agree unfortunately, and there is a real lack of inter-faction banter like you'd get in SMAC when they would compliment or shit talk your beliefs based on your relations.relationship.
It's a shame because the factions conceptually are all very interesting but their dialogue is either one-note (I love/hate aliens!) or painfully generic summary of tech reiterating what is obvious from the tech's title.
>faction banter
And here I just realized some factions are a literal copy-paste of SMAC. Morgan, Miriam and Santiago at least.
Where's the beef? Where's Deirdre casually commenting the slaughter of an entire Spartan city by mindworms? Where's Morgan calling the nerve stapling journalists "a PR disaster"? Those quotes are so epic I still remember them after decades. Here so far I heard the Servants' lady singing "let it shine" and my eyes rolled so hard they almost hurt.
Has anyone found a good way to gain research points beyond creating/stealing rich socialist utopias like the tooltip implies? How efficient is spamming research stations or engineering gear mana?
>How efficient is spamming research stations or engineering gear mana?
The problem is that those hab stations cost money to upkeep. A substantial amount of money that quickly adds up. THEORETICALLY you could make a lot of money from hab modules, with Geriatric facilities and Space Resorts, but the problem is that those money making habs cost a quite high amount of monthly BOOST to maintain, which you can ONLY get from nations.
You're better off working to build up those super-state nations, then aim to build tier 3 research bonus modules on habs, each giving a 25% bonus.
Nanoforges are also an option for income. 60 monthly at the cost of some metals. Space stations are overall still the better choice for income than grinding funding from nations since its easier to spam command centers and mines than nation building. Plus no danger of constantly getting control points flipped by aliens. On the off-chance of one of your earth orbit stations being flipped, just send in the marines.
Did some debug testing on early-game combat ships (3x Escorts + NERVA engine + Infared/1st Railgun/1st research Missiles) against alien destroyers; turns out any type of missile trumps absolutely everything and were in fact the only thing that could get a kill. Even facing it against a group of ayy corvettes that could theoretically out manuever them still ended up in everyone-killed draw. I also tried an equivalent destroyer with just the 2x nose cannons/lasers and only the laser one was able to damage the alien ship, though my side still lost. I may try some mid-game ships but it seems the devs were more concerned implementing literally every single type of engine autism that could ever be contrived into the game rather than actually balancing shit so I dunno
I've never had problems with funding beyond being somewhat limited on what I can dump back into nations so I'm not sure why everyone is so keen on optimizing it with spoils and such. Influence is what limits me most the the time
I think what is important is to make sure the missiles can be volley fired in spam mode to overwhelm point defense, cannot be evaded (enough Gs acceleration to never be outmaneuvered), and have multiple ships with the weapons.
It would be like real life torpedo boat swarm overwhelming battleships and wrecking everything at a much lower cost, even if all your ships get exploded.
From what I was able to test using the default ships in skirmish mode, the early tech lasers are just garbage and only varely work if you have enough numbers so ships can support eachother. In any case, I am more for the fast small ship with a swarm of shipkiller missiles.
Influence becomes a non-issue from mid-game onwards as both your persuassion specialized coucillor will shit out influence en mass as well as the massive populace of the superpowers you hopefully have under your control. What becomes an issue is keeping afloat with your space empire and trying to develop your nations with direct investments. The latter lets you reach 7+ military power easily by 2030, giving you armies capable of contesting alien forces and resilient enough to not die to a single nuke.
So direct investment is better to upgrade miltech than using IPs? How much to go from 4.0 to 5.0 and beyond?
3 IP give you roughly 0.005 at best and 0.00375 (USA) at worst depending on the country, so worst case would be 800 IP to get from 4.0 to 5.0. Using USA for numbers again, it costs 2.4k funds to raise 1 IP without any modifiers. Looking at my 2035 save you can get it down to at least 700.
Best case would be 560.7k, worst case 1922.4k. There's also a limit of 200 IP you can invest per year, so it would take you 4 years of pure investments to raise your miltech level by 1.
Comparing that to the economy output of the USA, we've got about 21 IP per month, so assuming we get it up to 24 due to decent management, spending all of your IP on miltech would take you about 2.8 years to raise miltech by 1 naturally.
The natural way is faster, but that is assuming you spend all of your natural IP gain on miltech.
ah ok, so probably you need to have a portion of it being natural and then using direct funding to make the gap - using only one is prohibitive
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY FRICKING ENGINES
SO MANY FRICKING POWER PLANTS
SO MANY FRICKING MISSILES
I just can't figure it the frick out. So many of these Engine types I have no fricking idea what they're supposed to do. I only care about three engine types:
1: I have high combat acceleration, use me to fight in a planetary system
2: I am very efficient and can get high Delta-V. Use me to travel to other planets.
3: I am an end-game option that can do both very well
I just don't fricking get it. I boosted with console commands to see how the game works, (I will not waste hundreds of hours to do this naturally and endure all the fricking interrupt pauses,) and it seems like a super viable option is to never attack alien ships, just kill alien agents, aiming to build up antimatter infrastructure. Maybe. I have no idea.
I really fricking wish the game explained all this shit so much more. There are like ten fricking nuclear missile options and I can't tell what the big fricking differences are. There are so many missile options but I have no idea what the specialties are. I'm not sure what good ship design is, I have NO FRICKING IDEA HOW MUCH FRICKING ARMOR I SHOULD HAVE. It seems like putting one slot highest damage laser weapons in every slot seems to work.
Also, access to Exotics comes waaaaay too late, players should get it from attacking ground assets, not just space assets. And uh, we should probably get Exotics from CAPTURING FRICKING ALIEN STATIONS AND BASES, not just space combat. All that loot just up in smoke.
like look at this shit, they literally have a fricking glorified electric kettle as a propulsion method. This shit is barely adequate for a cubesat's RCS, let alone the main drive on a fricking multiton warship. And you have to research it too, it's not even a "baby's first" engine
at least they put in the Orion drive, albeit requiring a bunch of future tech for an engine designed for the 1950s
I dont understand it myself. There is no use for any of this that I can imagine. Its almost like a trap technology that will never yield a useful project.
Okay, I did some tests with these drives, quick little optional choices. Using the smallest ship frame, the Gunship, with Solid Core Fission Reactor I (SCFR), (Fuel Cell I is about 20 tons smaller but you'll see I need more power for another option), Lithium-Ion Battery, Titanium Radiator, no weapons, just a Fission Platform in the utility slot, planned transfer mission is Extreme Earth Orbit to Extreme Jupiter Orbit.
Ship has 1 engine, 20 Propellant Tanks
Resistojet? 4.6 kps, can't go very far
Tungsten Resistojet? 15.4 kps, almost triple the delta V.
Arcjet Drive? 30.9 kps. The trip would take 108.79 weeks. It's possible, but very long.
Now, let's try some others.
Plasma Wave Drive? 123kps, but still 104 weeks. Going to 4 engines takes it down to 84.39 weeks.
Lorentz Drive? 160kps, 53.92 weeks! Can get that down to 40 weeks SCFR 4, 3 engines.
Helicon Drive? 53.92 weeks with SCFR 2, but can get it down to 22.61 weeks with SCFR 4 and 5 engines.
Hall Drive? 82 weeks with SCFR 1, 5 engines. SCFR 5, 6 engines only goes to 81.75. This seems to be a real stinker.
Ion Drive? 84.39 weeks with SCFR 1, 6 engines.
Grid Drive? THIS IS WHERE IT GETS GOOD. With SCFR 1 and 1 engine, time is 78.27 weeks. Not great. Buuuut.. Bump up to SCFR 3 and 6 engines, time to destination is 27.83 weeks!
Colloid Drive seems to be worse, SCFR 1 with 6 engines gives 61.71 weeks, but uses Volatiles instead of Water as fuel?
>continued
But let's look at those techs. (Minus the individual project for the drive itself) The, ">" symbols means moving onto another tier, the "+" symbol means everything on the same tier. Tier costs do not seem to make a lot of sense against techs on the same tier.
Resistojet needs: Mission to Space > Deep Space Propulsion Concepts + Advanced Magnetics > Electrothermal Propulsion
Tungsten Resistojet needs all Resistojet needed, along with High-Energy Electrothermal Propulsion
Arcjet Drive needs all Resistojet needed. Nothing else.
Plasma Wave Drive? All Resistojet needed + Advanced Superconductors
Lorentz Drive? This is quite deep in the mid-game needing: Mission to Space > Deep Space Propulsion Concepts + Advanced Magnetics + Advanced Superconductors + Advanced Carbon Manipulation + Photonic Computing> Advanced Heat Management Concepts + Electromagnetic Propulsion + Magnetic Force Manipulation + Advanced Atomic Manipulation > High-Temperature Superconductors > Magnetic Plasma Confinement > High-Energy Electromagnetic Propulsion
Helicon Drive? Same as Lorentz.
Hall Drive? Same as Resistojet.
Ion Drive? Same as Resistojet
Grid Drive? Same as Resistojet, just Electrostatic Propulsion > High-Energy Electrostatic Propulsion + Ion Drive > Grid Drive
Colloid Drive is the same as Grid Drive, but without Ion Drive researched.
So what does this mean? It means that you are pretty much cucking yourself if you research ANY of the above options except Ion Drive and Grid Drive. So much of this shit DOESN'T MAKE FRICKING SENSE!
Why is the Lorentz and Helicon Drives just between Plasma Wave and Helicon Drives on the ship builder UI, but totally different in the tech tree?
Why so many drives that compete for the same niche unlocked by the same tech?
Why so many techs that seem to have the same name but, "High-Energy," or, "Advanced," strapped onto them?
Why is the Grid Drive so much easier to access than Lortentz and Helicon, but nearly the same, if not better?
So as you can see, ignore every other single drive option, don't bother researching them, just get the Ion Drive and then the Grid Drive. Use this drive to set up all your colonies, bases, stations and shipyards throughout the solar system. Build up a stockpile of resources, aim for asteroids and stuff with radioactives and noble metals. Build up small fleets of ships with high combat thrust to defend planetary orbits, they don't need much delta V at all.
What you really want to aim for is the Orion Drive. The big nuke bomber thing. It has very high combat acceleration and pretty damn great delta V for travel. You WILL want to build up your Radioactive stockpile for this drive. For drives that use extremely valuable substances as fuel, you don't ever want more than 5 fuel loads.
Or just you know, cheat, and play with these toys before the devs fix them or something.
How do fission drives compare to fusion drives in terms of research time to reach them?
It gets pretty absurd. Not only do the technology requirements go in the tens of thousands, but so will the engineering projects themselves. And remember that you have to research other things and cant just focus on propulsion.
So you do this, and start the construction of an outpost - are you able to bootstrap an entire colony this way, since resources teleport?
May be viable to start an early swarming to kuiper belt, and by early i mean, a few years in - since it would take longer to build a proper ship to further out. Maybe this is nonsense since you cannot build outposts in the regions until the specific research was performed. I think the outposts you build from ships is to be used to bootstrap a support base for a takeover of a system (jupiter, saturn, etc)
I was reading the earlier devblogs, and the differences exist because a single playthrough is not guaranteed to have all of them. Sometimes only one will be discovered due to how the chance of prohject discovery happens. This means one playthrough may have one tech, and not be available in the next, but that next playthrough will have a different propulsion method. That is my theory on why there sometimes similar propulsion choices (and sometimes, intentionally to trick you or the AI to make bad choices).
>Sometimes only one will be discovered due to how the chance of prohject discovery happens.
Can you elaborate on this? Some playthroughs just have techs missing wholesale from the tech tree?
https:// www.pavonisinteractive.com/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=28950&sid=524007337cc7df6d4ce036a8894f59e0
>>But not every faction will get access to every project. Each project has a trigger percentage for each faction. For critical projects, it’s 100% -- so RNG won’t block your path to win -- but for others, only a few factions may have access to it, and it’s possible some interesting but non-vital techs may not appear in a particular campaign at all. An example is the Nuclear Salt Water Reactor project, which is necessary to power the powerful Neutron Flux Drive. Once the tech prerequisites of Advanced Fission Systems and Ultracapacitors are met, each faction has a 15% of unlocking the project in a given campaign, plus any bonuses they receive from contributing to its parent techs.
>>This is in part to simulate that it’s unclear whether some real-world ideas will actually work, and also to keep campaigns a bit different from one another.
If it isn't a grid drive or advanced pulsar, just pretend it doesn't exist. Late game drives obviously not included in this.
Extremely.
Like
said, using nanofactories and nanofacturing complexes is the way to go.
What is the best way to purge the servants out of China? Besides trying to grab it first.
China is waaaay too difficult to grab. You're better off spending your time and efforts building an EU superstate, and THEN grab the United States. The Servants seem to benefit from alien brainwashing, which is why they gain so much popularity in China, they're not using regular methods.
However...
The secret sauce to victory? Just orbital bombardment. BLOW EM UP! Spend a few months bombarding Beijing with an alright sized fleet of the earliest available weapons that can bombard through atmosphere, for me, it was green lasers.
All you have to do is kill maaaybe just a few million people and you can HALVE the entire national GDP. You can cut them down to size, and the smaller economy makes it much easier to use councillor agent actions on.
Also, you need more powerful, more numerous, and higher damage bombardment weapons to even make a tiny dent against armies and mission command nodes, but you can FRICKING DESTROY nodes of Boost power. I got all the Servants boost down to less than 0.1 monthly, across the entire world. Boost just fricking MELTS when bombarded.
Grab it first, AI is useless enough against USA that it can wait
until you've secured China, and no censorship + low cohesion makes it easy enough to bully out those that do make it in
Seems like the meta order is: Kazakhstan, EU, Russia if get get fricked on UK, something adjacent to US, China, and then US. Deteor to some resource rich 3rd country you can spoil to death if you get the opportunity. Large countries get developed, small developed countries get assimilated into large countires, slavic shitholes that refuse to assimilate get boost, and everything past the US's southern border gets looted
Is there any way to destroy space targets from the ground? Like anti-space station missiles or rail gun defense networks?
Making the jump to from figuring out Earth to dealing with the Solar System is fricking hard. I've got control of most of Earth and have basically neutered all other factions besides Project Exodus. But I don't know how to break out into space without waiting years for ships and stations.
you want to rush to mars, because those are the easiest and fastest high throughput mines to get. Once you have 1 mine that has all resources going, you can expand very easy because you do not need much Boost to build things. Without the mines, starting outposts is VERY boost expansive.
So I found something while looking through the files:
Inside TIGlobalConfig.json, the "strategyLayerSpeedSettings" not only can be modified but extended with more values. Doing so will turn the earth into seizure inducing strobe light, but will also make the turns pass much faster. Combined with abusing Permanent Assignment and the game actually starts feeling a whole more dynamic.
Also I just completed establishing the Initiatives' goal, and it's actually humorously based:
>We want to control & profit from the world
>Aliens taking over the world means we don't control the world
>As thus, we need to defeat the aliens
>Other random factions squabbling make it harder to defeat the aliens
>As thus we need to subvert and control the population, to get them to stop fighting each other, in order to defeat the aliens, so we can keep ruling
It's like if Humanity First was ruled by accountants
also forgot to add, but Defend Interests stacks. Instead of playing constant control point musical chairs, you can just spend a year leaving a guy on each important country until they are two decades out and then never worry about it again
>Defend Interests stacks.
Frick me no wonder there's a repeat mission button for it.
WHAT? IT STACKS?
>Defend Interests stacks.
It seems like every single day there's a new mind-blowing discovery of something extremely useful that absolutely no one knows about.
And, the public opinion of a country you own dictates the total influece generated, which shows you should have PO in each country set to 90% and above, probably through use of Unity.
This means that while growing your empire, having PO maxxes allows you to control more nations without going into negative influence.
Thought initiative was the weirdest faction in the beginning but in the end it seems like I really play like them. Creating one really powerful nation, constant wars with shitty third world countries to spoil, abandon and build cohesion at home. Subverting other major countries just to dismantle their armies and nukes so they can't defend themselves (thus rely on me). Generally stuff that doesn't really make sense if you're playing the resistance.
Might do an initiative playthrough when the game comes out funneling the world's resources into Israel.
yup, I was trying to look how far I can abuse repeat/permanent and since I had the extra influence I decided to experiment. Horribly communicated to you since I could only tell by the change in the tooltip but yup it does.
They really are the most fun faction to play straight as a remorseless videogame min-maxer since it fits their theme of "No nonsense efficiency" so well. All the other factions you have to RP and limit yourself a bit, but with Initiative it's just GO GO GO GO GO GO GO. Surprising too since all the tech quotes make it sound like it would just be some wacky corporate libertarian parody incapable of any sort of long-term planning. Unfortunately I may have to restart the run I did with them since it started as just a trial out of curiosity and thus never reset their nation priorities, meaning the US and EU were over-exploited and are now about to collapse from pollution and infighting
Speaking of quotes, they're all a bit weak. I wasn't expecting SMAC tier quality but some are seriously worse than Beyond Earth. Feels like wasted potential, along with milquetoast personalities of the faction leaders.
How do you know what priorities do? Like by the default its resist which i assume lowers alien influence but i don't have much of a clue for most other things
Hover over them you scrub
Hovering over them does nothing but after switching to something else i see the dots changing, i assume the dots just indicate priority.
Hover over the related things left of the dots and see what they do. Also go to nations and create your own presets. Now thank me and frick off.
I wonder if there will be a C&C mod when it comes out? Would love to fight against the Scrin as GDI or NOD
Anyone know what the Initiative ending entails?
The president of the USA waves the flags of Israel, BLM, LGBTQIABRAAP live from the ruins of Washington DC and asks the American people one last sacrifice in order to help their greatest ally get a shipment of alien xenoflora before the end of Israeli President Xgkangoipn's wedding to Eli Shekelberg.
Kek. I was simply curious in all seriousness between Initiative and Exodus
I was pretty far in an initiative run, but I felt like restarting. Doing an exodus run now. If I reach the end I'll make a post on the active terra invicta thread, if it's no longer this one.
were you forced to restart by the bugs?
Nah, so far when I run into them, a recent autosave gets me past them. I just want to put in the things I've learned into a new game rather than continue the old one sometimes.
You will own nothing and you'll be happy. Enjoy your insects and mind your CO2 balance.
Updated leak when
now since the nightly /misc/ buzzword circlejerk has died down and the productive discussion can start again, let me ask you a question: Which of the society arrival techs do you think should be focused on and which can be safely ignored? I know there is some good monthly organizational boosting stuff in there, but also a lot of fluff which is only useful to the servants
Go for domestic politics and economics in that order because they both unlock projects that give +5 available orgs each month and the former is cheaper. International relations can be good for diplomatic cooldown reduction. Same with arrival law on unlocking diplo cooldown. Sociology (in addition to domestic politics) can be good for independence movements since that unlocks global command structure for extra control point cap. International development can be good to get transnational investments for cheaper direct investments, but that shouldn't really matter until somewhat later into the game.
Arrival domestic politics and arrival economics for their +5 org techs. Arrival law in conjunction with the military science techs "terrestrial military science" and "arrival security" leads to a number of defensive bonus projects that protect you against terror and enthrall, which are always good.
Arrival international relations is the precursor for unity movements and great nations, or if you are so inclined, the independence movements tech.
>burger armored div
you're ok anon
Why the frick is every nation defending interests
>Why is every faction trying to maintain control over their nations
I wonder. Not like it matters once the ayys start doing their insta flipendo bullshit.
I can't imagine they have enough agents to protect every single nation on the planet while still being able to flip nations themselves, i'm still in the early game ffs.
Nevermind, i thought the defend mission only lasted for a few weeks while apparently it lasts for many months
I've discovered the best Organisation. Don't miss this picking up this one.
>spend 2 org capacity for the worst mission in the game
Does anyone have a list of the country and faction tags for the console?
aaaaaaaaa I pissed them off before I was ready aaaaa
According to people on the discord the gdp bonus to research is actually pretty substantial up to a max of $48750 per person. They used China in this example.
Didn't mean to quote there
Nice so it looks like combining the EU with the Eurasian union might be overall worse? You could keep EU as your science powerhouse and Eurasian union as a military/utility powerhouse. Likewise the same if you had the caliphate and you only had the higher GDP nations.
Also does anyone know how the stats of funding and science transfer over when you unify? Seems to me like funding doesn't even transfer to the parent country.
>Nice so it looks like combining the EU with the Eurasian union might be overall worse?
Combining nations in general is worse because unification tanks your total Investment Points.
Current game I'm even trying the opposite, splitting up nations to the maximum possible extent to go in the other direction
Are you burning through your influence cap that way?
Centralising seems to make sense for security reasons but I guess if they're all in a federation it shouldn't be too big a problem.
>Are you burning through your influence cap that way?
Quite the opposite. Big countries cost quadratically (rather than linearly) more to hold than small countries: the US takes 36 from the cap, not 6. So if (hypothetically) you split the US in two and got two 3-CP countries, that'd cost you 2(3^2)=18 influence cap rather than 1(6^2)=36 influence cap.
WTF ARE THEY THINKING
I see. Who would have guessed balkanizing would be the best way to play this game.
When it's releases hopefully they figure we that shit out.
I was scratching my head for weeks when the demo first came out as to wtf was the point of the independence movement techs, because you can only utilise them if you have the relevant parent country's executive point and if you already have that why would you want to frick over your influence cap by generating more CPs? But yeah, it turns out that balkanizing actually unfricks your influence cap AND your investment points through the quadratic effect
Don't know how I feel about having the world balkanizing in response to an alien invasion be the meta thing to do.
I wouldn't say it's the best way, smaller countries are more efficient at building mission control/boost building space defences, creating armies and maintaining them given you've got more IP overall and these investments don't scale with population. Plus they're much less painful to regain if you lose CP's. But bigger countries increase research, miltech, gdp, public opinion much more efficiently even with reduced IP count. It's also cheaper overall to direct invest in one large country than many small ones.
True, maybe I should leave the EU balkanized for a bit before making the big blue blob. Should get some early boost from that.
It's basically guerrilla warfare against an enemy that has methods for infiltrating and taking over institutions pretty easily.
>"aw shit aliens are here"
>earth immediately splinters into hundreds of made-up countries
That's the secret anon, all countries are made-up.
It's only Balkanization in name, every country is still coalescing into a unified world order under the control of whichever faction is winning; it's just the difference between the hierarchy being deep or broad.
I think its the meta thing to do to the countries you do not control, which you want to have in larger blobs for more efficient control. Think how impossible it would be to Defend 30 countries vs 8 or less. I think for the player, having NA, EU, China and a few other countries like Japan is enough. Then you can ensure that servants only have small garbage countries and leave the rest to the otehr factions. If you break up the leftover countries like Indonesia, Australia, india etc, the factions have a much harder time protecting them among themselves, and it also makes it easier for you to headshot servant countries (take over and dismantle nukes, armies, etc).
Given how IP works, the best nation layout is having one, massive nation GDP wise for research and military and several smaller, but still somewhat powerful satellite nations for funding or mission control only. For example, using China as your research powerhouse while using Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the SEA alliance as your funding/mission control nations.
On the other hand, when you independence Scotland (and hand Belfast to Ireland just for fun), at the end Great Britain is still 4CP and you've added independent Scotland as 2CP, so you actually increase your influence cap useage by 4, in the specific case of Britain at least
Funding and progress for armies carries over in newer dev builds
How should you start going out in space to mine? Like i went to the moon to mine but i lack the resources to build anything, do i have to trade for them?
You have to save up Boost, which is the critical resource in the earlygame after the scramble for countries.
There's also the problem that the moon doesn't actually provide much resources - often, the cost of running a Lunar mine exceeds the gains you get out of it. Really the first big motherlode is Mars mining - after that you never need Boost again, because your space resources skyrocket.
Good practice seems to be to basically not launch anything until you can save up the ~65 boost needed for a Mars mine, and then fire that off asap by investing your Earth countries' economies in Boost heavily
But to build a mines you need space resources and i have none.
Oh wait i just noticed that you can also build outposts and settlements, i thought you needed a platform first.
>But to build a mines you need space resources and i have none.
No, you can use space resources OR boost
It's always a better idea to use space resources, but for your first mine where you don't have any space resources, you gotta use boost
Alternatively just have your Persuasion guy stage a mutiny on someone else's mine lol
Better to build an outpost or a settlement? Also is there a limit to how many sites can be built?
If you're just using them for materials, go with outposts. The only limit is mission control capacity and the number of sites on a given planetary body. But that's why you want to use outposts, because mission control is a very valuable and limited resource.
>because mission control is a very valuable and limited resource
It is until you can build stations around Mercury where solar arrays pump out 267 energy each.
But you can only use boost on earth, don't tell you actually needed to mine on the Moon before being able to build everywhere else on the galaxy
I think you're stupid, anon.
It took me half an hour but i think i finally got it, didn't realize you can eventually build stuff in space without pulling resources from Earth.
"Build on Earth" means "Build on Earth and then ship it to the selected site elsewhere in the solar system using Boost"
>unified EU
>controll Muttmerica+Canada
Where do I go from here?
China.
Tempting, but I am more interested in setting up space mining and shit, how do I do that?
t. please be patient, I suffer from grugism in regards to this game
Build up boost, establish bases on the 2-4 best spots on Mars. Work towards mission to the inner planets. Once that's done build a base on Mercury and give it a construction module. And I mean the instant the tech finishes you need to get that base up. As soon as that finishes start spamming orbitals around Mercury and putting the modules that give extra mission control.
Also, always make sure your habitats have enough hydroponics to support their crew.
China is a means to getting space mining and shit.
All nations with space programs can add to your Boost resource, and your Boost resource is how you get space mining
An early lunar mine is absolutely worth it. The Moon has enough resources to kickstart your first martian bases, then you can just sell it off to other factions for a peace deal.
Other factions love shitty space infrastructure and I love feeding them with it to hamper them.
>then you can just sell it off to other factions for a peace deal
Is that the Non-Aggression Pact?
Is it normal that after India and Russia nuked each others the global GDP dropped by like 20%?
How many nukes did they throw?
I think they also cause some pollution and pollution = a negative modifier on GDP.
India used all their nukes, probably had around 4 or 5, Russia around 20 (?) hitting all the indian states
Each nuke really represents a wave of nukes so that 20 really represents Russia emptying 2/3s of their 5000 something arsenal
Holy shit, that's a lot of nukes.
I had the USA's GDP drop to around 30k per capita after a pretty sizable nuclear exchange (about 20 total) that didn't even touch the US. The countries that got nuked (Russia and the Aliens in control of China + India) actually fared better economically. Europe fell by just as much despite not being touched.
What the frick is this bullshit?
Global economy please understand.
Too cold to work, and the wind tastes spicy.
Its not bullshit, pretty sure its realistic that nukes could have a global effect on the environment if many of them went off, doesn't matter where the explosions did it.
Yeah but why were the countries that had a nuclear exchange less affected by it than the countries that didn't?
Didn't happen in my case, both India and Russia have a similiar GDP to Egypt (1000 billions but Russia also merged with Georgia and some other small nations) in 2035, what is probably not that realistic is how much population they lost, India is still around 1 billion.
>what is probably not that realistic is how much population they lost, India is still around 1 billion.
This is one thing that really irked me. Too few people die from nukes.
They would be too OP if they actually reduced the population by a lot, the drop in GDP and the damage they do to armies is already bad enough.
Why pussy out at the last moment? They already frick shit up, but for some reason they do very little to population.
Who are you gonna send to space if there is no one left in the entire planet?
You can't kill everyone. You probably wouldn't be able to get the world population below several hundred million people. But killing billions of people should absolutely be on the table.
It really depends on how many and what sort of bombs we're talking about.
Allegedly, some people within 2 miles of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survived; not many, but some.
Looking at the ones they listed, the US and Europe suffered greatly while China and India weren't as much.
It sounds like democratic, low population, high GDP per capita nations suffer greatly from nuclear winter while non democracy, high population, low GDP per capita nations are less effected.
Given how specifically Investment points are allotted (Japan is somehow the 3rd/4th strongest nation) it appears that nukes unfrick that weird discrepancy between the 1st and 3rd world.
Even if a billion Indians die, there might be enough to keep their government running, but if the American's get scared they immediately destroy their own economy by panic buying.
>Japan is somehow the 3rd/4th strongest nation
Just like in reality
You're right their GDP per capita is nuts and their population isn't as bad as I thought, I just need to read a book once in a while.
Will the game have nuke counter measures?
There is a technology that unlocks a secret funding priority called something like "space defense" that lets you build guns on earth that shoot down spaceships. These also work on nukes or so I have heard.
wtf there are planetary defenses? Frick space ships I'm turtling.
Nice. I was hoping for something at least like SMAC anti-missile orbital defenses.
I do believe that this man could in fact be /Our Guy/
>extorting trannies
bet he's going to by more ammo with that dough
I've survived long enough on earth and avoided nullpoint exceptions where I could to finally reach this stage. All of my bases are settlements with 2 layered defense arrays and arc green lasers. I'm am currently researching my first fusion drive to start building a fleet of cruisers to defend earth and eventually raid their asteroid belt bases. Time will tell if the errors or the aliens for once beat me this time.
Nice they really start to ramp up the ships they send out it looks like
>Game shits itself when ayys start bombing astroid settlements
I really, REALLY, want to play this game more and would be more than willing to pay for it, but charging 250 bucks for early access is something straight out of the scrolls of Zion.
You know what would be nice, immigration mechanics.
Below the scale of the simulation please understand
If the game ever becomes stable enough that late game becomes reachable, I imagine that arriving at Jupiter is going to feel less like D-Day and more like the entirety of World War II.
Any way to keep track how many bonuses you get from your habs? There are limits for every bonus but its hard to keep track of them.
Oh and also how do i remove unwanted modules?
>remove unwanted modules
Good joke.
Just build something new on top or power it down if you can't at the moment.
when you upgrade the research habs, you reach the limits faster. T1 research is 3%, T2 is 10%. I think the limit from research stations is 50% or so, requring only 5x T2 stations to max out. Its possible I am wrong, and the research bonus is unbound and only the interface orbit bonuses have a cap.
Then you have to use orgs to boost on top of that. Some orgs boost 10% or even 15% of a research type, and they stack, if you can find them.
On top of that, for engineering projects, you can also stack gears to improve their research speed. Right now i have enough ors and skunkworks (T2 module) that I boost those 95% on top of, for example 50% of a research type. This makes researching projects like Pan-Asian Combine (50000) much more viable.
I am not sure if there is a cap to engineering bonuses.
SO yeah, if you are coming up to a research/project wall, start hunting for those research booster orgs - you may need to steal or trade for them..
Research boost is uncapped, only the orbit bonus has a cap. Engineering boosts have diminishing returns around 150 boost onwards.
thanks
Since the game console is now crapping out here's the top 17 countries in investiment points, alien administration is Russia+some small countries
Forgot the year, 2035
Nevermind, i reloaded a save and the console stopped acting out
My first game will be as the Servants
I'd be interested in learning how bad things get from the colonialism, or if the Servant's end game is about finding a way to integrate with the aliens and get rights and shit.
But I'm probably gonna go Academy or Exodus first.
Wtf you can target your own country?
Yes. You can nuke your own territories to do extreme damage to hostile armies there. That's one of the threats of invading minor nuclear powers. If you rush their capital with all of your armies then they're very likely to just nuke all of them.
>extreme damage
Y-you mean it always insta-kills everything in one hit, r-right?
Is Tin Droplet the best radiator humans can build or is there something exotic I'm not seeing that also isn't called one?
BTFO an ayy ship and you can build an exotics-based radiator that weighs less than the tin drop ones
But anon, I won't build ships until I have the most efficient techs.
Climate change is moronic.
I control all of Earth and researched all climate techs bar the one that turns off oil and pollution is STILL INCREASING
Am I supposed to turn off the economy like a drooling libtard?
USE FRICKING WELFARE PRIORITY
I'm using it 2 to 3 econ/welfare ratio AND ITS STILL INCREASING
I used so much welfare I have literally 1 unequality everywhere. 68% bonus to welfare too
Its the aliens around the galaxy farting towards earth to increase pollution
Based on the tooltips, it should only take a few pips in welfare to completely offset pollution from economy/spoils even at modern tech levels.
Does the game have a feedback loop mechanism?
It might be that you've pushed the earth over the edge and can't save it.
How long were you polluting before you started funding welfare?
It'd be neat if the game has a Fate of the World-esque tipping point mechanism
I've NEVER used spoil and were gunning for minimal unequality FROM DAY 1.
It's 2045 and the annual GDP impact is -1,83%
Methane and Aerosols are under control, Nitrous Oxide seems to be stagnating, but CO2 just keeps increasing by 0.1-0.2 EVERY MONTH.
STUPID DEVS WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO CONTROL CLIMATE CHANGE EVEN BY CONTROLLING JUST 1/3 OF THIS DIRTBALL
FUNDING SHOULD HELP TOO
FRICK THIS GAY CAPTCHA TOO
I dunno, are you keeping the xenofauna trimmed?
Don't xenoflora feed off GHGs instead of making them?
srsly how do gibs reduce pollution irl
Black smiles increase solar reflection per square inch = less global heat retention
it's melanin you dumbass
strong Black women absorb sunlight
"Welfare" as it's used in the game is just a catch-all term for investments into things that don't directly contribute to the economy. This also includes stuff like recycling and pollution cleanup.
wellfare= public welfare ie clean air, trash pickup, other environmental shit plus gibs rolled into one thing
Time to destroy the global economy again
>letting the ayydmin form
>in fricking Russia
Yeah, you've fricked up.
I'm enjoying the ride, its probably impossible to win now unless the US and the aliums go at war with each other and i swoop in with my armies and try to liberate everything.
You can maybe, possibly, pump unrest in the Ayydmin so that it violently vomits out states.
I don't have any agent with high enough Command and even then i would bet the chances would be really low
I wonder how's the average life of a random slav in ayyRussia
Upload WHEN
Watching anons having autistic fun without me is killing me lads
Just wait for the actual release. Don't burn yourself out on a version that's in dire need of bugfixes and UX/balance improvements.
Listen to
I played plenty of it and I'm now just waiting for the release proper. The lategame is just too awkward to play with. The game also tends to have a continually increasing chance of just breaking the longer you go on, meaning that even if you do very well your run could just be killed at any moment due to unfinished jank.
You don't have to play the end-game if you just play the demo over and over again.
Holy shit look at the GDP lol
>GDP is reduced to third world levels
>yet only 20m people die
Multiple tactical nukes only hitting important industries
The UK, like the rest of the "First World" has basically no industry whatever lmao
you're gonna be nuking office cubicles
Those produce loadsa GDP
How tf do you build space mining? It says I lack the resources to build it but I need mining to get the resources ? How does that work? Why cant i shoot mining complex materials to my base?
But maaaaaybe there is still one bad-ass country left in the world
I had the same doubts too, you need boost+money to start building outside of earth, to build a mine you need like 50 boost which is a lot in the early game, after that you should just use space materials to build anything.
Thanks man, was really confused
>Pic
Wtf happened to the US? Where did all the research an GDP go?
Like 30 nukes going off twice and the US always having low unity, also China, Russia and India being controlled by aliens or servants.
Rip, kek. Is initiative any fun? Is their goal just hoarding money and orgs, or something like establishing trade with the aliums to israelite them on their home planet?
It would be hilarious if their endgame was just hoarding money
Their endgame is to Great Reset everything, but that doesn't work if the Ayys can just jump in and steal power from under their noses.
https://anonfiles
.com/D0a9a9w4ye /Terra_Invicta_rar
https://anonfiles
.com / B8c2afw2yf/Terra_Invicta_Part_2_rar
streamingassets from part 2 goes in part one's terrainvicta_data folder
Is that the 0.2 dev build or a newer one?
it's a newer one that's slightly more playable, that's all i can say
>Takes 8 hours to download each part due to shit server bandwidth
At least tell us which version this one is.
someone please torrent it ffs
I'll try to when I finish downloading it myself in... approximately eight to ten hours.
Frick me this site throttles hard.
https://anonfiles
.com/Ncmfbcw9yd/Terra_Invicta.rar_torrent
https://anonfiles
.com/v4n0bbw3y0/Terra_Invicta_Part_2.rar_torrent
Couldn't put both files in the same torrent, eh?
i'm lazy
do you have a crypto wallet/paypal?
If you're leeching, pls remember to also upload
>Win32X-Trojan
>Israel
Well shit. Also, two major changes I've already noticed:
Rushing EU unification is no longer an option as the diplomatic cooldown has been extended to September 23th 2023. You either have to hold on to a dozen nations which will annihilate your influence income or try to only gain major eco EU nations while eventually baiting the rest to leave the EU so you can annex them via war. It does make the Warsaw pact rather appealing to unite EU and Russia now though.
Also, Russia seems to no longer win the war against Ukraine all of the time. A rather peculiar change.
Minor changes so far are a rearranged tech tree to make it look at bit nicer, although the full tree is still laggy as frick to open. Also some of the fixes from the demo, which is neat.
With some of the suggestions other anons already made, new Meta would probably be: Kazakhstan, Canada/Mexico, USA, China, couple of satellite states if you have the capacity for funding and/or mission control only. Mexico and Canada seem good candidates for the latter since you can absorb them into USA eventually.
I kneel
This is version .2.0.6, compiled same date (June 11th) as .2.0.4 which was the previously leaked version most of us were playing.
What is the current live dev version, does anyone know?
What is the point of turning agents? They leave immediately
For a long time I thought turning agents meant you'd take those agents as your own and that was the only way to get seventh and eighth agents.
This shit is like a fricking Star Wars battle.
Try slapping multiple projectile weapons on medium-sized ships for the star wars experience. Pretty efficient too against slower targets.
Really fricking pissed to learn that combining countries fricks up your influence cap. I spent ages researching those techs just to frick myself over. AND IT DOES EVEN MAKE SENSE. MANAGING 100000 TINY COUNTRIES WOULD BE INFINITELY WORSE THAN 3 MASSIVE ONES.
For some reason, Taiwan, the Koreas, Japan, and India hate being absorbed by China.
We haven't figured out why.
I don't give a shit about their hissy fit. I want to form super nations, there better at least be some science or economic bonus.
Having an educated democracy with a large population produces absolutely insane amounts of science, which is clearly the most important resource in the game.
you are confused. Managing a combined country is better for influence, however, you must have above 90% public opinion, which is the factor that decides your influence generation (or how much you need to spend to control) from countries.
A 6-CP country contributes the same towards influence cap as four 3-CP countries.
Combining countries is a fool's errand for people who don't understand the quadratic influence-cap formula.
Countries start generating a lot of influence if they are at high public opinion. It doesn't matter that it costs twice as much cap if it's generating more influence than you're losing.
Besides, having one mega-state with a massive educated population is how you make the science go brrr.
Inheriting already existing massive countries like China is better than creating them though since cohesion tanks which both fricks your public opinion and forces you to spend IP on unity spam, which also wears away your democracy which is also important for research
Actually on that note what's best way to build democracy? Is spamming knowledge the only way?
yes, spamming knowledge and not having too much military/unity
Also, do NOT absorb everything you can into the combine - its better to try and have Greater India as a separate nation (cohesion gets tanked, since the pop is so large, but also, its better to have it yourself as a separate country). You should absorb north Korea, Mongolia and some of the SEA contries into it though.
Can you even absorb India into the PAC? I thought unification requires a claim on the capital
the pac gets claims on at least parts of things that would go to Greater India.
I asked about this topic on the discord. There are multiple factors at play that you need to take into account.
First, is that combined countries have less total Investment Points than if they remain independent. this means that many small countries are better for utility (mission control, boost) generation - IF YOU CAN HAVE THEM FOR YOURSELF.
Second, research output scales better with larger developed populations due to synergy/formula, so that a single combined country will output more research than the single nations.
Third, despite what the quadratic formula may be, IF you have high public opinion(90-95+ - use Unity to do this automatically, and leave around 5% once reached to sustain), the influence generation offsets the higher maintenance cost of the large/combined nation, that it will always be cheaper influence-wise to sustain control over the combined nations than if they were to remain independent.
Fourth, it is more efficient to control and protect less, but larger countries from being contested and messed with by the factions and aliens. This is because you can only have up to 6 councilors. It also costs 20 influence to "defend" a country. As part of this, it is always easier to crackdown or straight purge or destabilize a small nation. If you have many small nations, you will not be able to afford influence to protect them all and agent mission time to stabilize/defend/advise/protect/etc.
Based on the above, Ive come to the conclusion that you must find some balance. A "small" country like Japan is ideal to leave independent as your Research and Mission Control or Boost generator, because all its parameters are already so good, you can afford to focus. On the other hand, you probably want to unify the EU and EF because you can better protect them and keep them from the other factions.
Larger nations with high public opinion scores are harder to crackdown/purge and do any revolt or sabotage mission on. you cannot ensure same level of protection on smaller and more numerous nations.
It is also easier to upgrade miltech in certain countries like EU/USA/China because they can afford the IPs to do that, and they can also support more armies/navies.
You will want to strive to breakup enemy faction nations to keep them balkanized and easier to disrupt, while keeping a few powerhouse "small" nations like Japan and South Korea independent to farm utility resources, and unify the other blocks as possible. In the demo, the EU is a good option, but the devs are already patching the ability to unify it from the start of the game to at least late 2023 (ingame). Later research allows for other federations and large countries, put they are very expensive research and enginering projects, so you will need space assets to boost your engineering and research outputs with stations that do that. Diminishing returns for engieering becomes unsustainable at 150%, but there is no cap (there is a cap for effects on earth) for flat research bonuses on research stations, and T2 stations give you 10% bonus per.
>there is no cap (there is a cap for effects on earth) for flat research bonuses on research stations, and T2 stations give you 10% bonus per.
Really? So you could spam rings of a certain type to get +1000% research bonus to a specific type?
No, you can't. India is always on its own.
No, there is a pnushing cap above 50% in every category except xeno research which scales differently.
I was struggling to get more than 430 research/day by 2040 with controlling the whole Earth, since there are only so many research campuses I can afford on Mercury.
There is a diminishing returns cap, but you should be able to get 60% bonus from research stations alone without too much effort - then add on top ORG bonuses AND if you have a scienctist that gives a 15% bonus to that subject, that would be on top - not sure if the org/scientist bonuses get diminishing returns. Engineering projects start having a punishing diminishing returns at 150% (ie, thats 5% for first skunkworks/gears, but at 100% i think have almost 30).
This means that pure research should be easy to get 60% bonus, and for engineering projects 60% + 100% should also be trivial (so, 160% bonus).
Xenoresearch adds 1% per alien investigation, and flat additions per xeno lab. Currenty on my latest save i have 115% without gears.
>Fourth, it is more efficient to control and protect less,
This is the biggest thing. Getting rid of micromanaging and freeing up councilors is huge.
[Edward 1 intensifies]
Michael Bay would still be alive in 2028, right?
The discord is FILLED with socialist trannies. It's no wonder the devs put so much to do with climate change and welfare in the game.
My dev build save finally got nullexception explosion when I build an explorer cruiser to colonize the inner system.
Ran to 2032, 500 research p/ day, was snowballing.
Looking forward the final stable release, which by the volume of bugs, I dont believe will come for at least 6 months. Will gladly pay for it, and respect the devs for not falling on the ealry access train. They know the game is not ready, and are willing to wait to get it good to go.
Thank you for the dev build uploads, heroes! but, they are not stable enough to use more than experimentally.
Still love the game and see myself playing this for at least hundreds of hours - im sure Ive put in at least 50 already.
Try reloading the game, fixed it for me
>500 research p/ day
180k research per year by 2032?
>New dev build has proper tooltips in the diplo screen
Now that's an improvement.
Frick my life, no one is seeding and the fricking light went off midnight
I'm seeding but I only have about ~250 kb/s upload speed and I don't even have it all downloaded myself.
I'm doing my best, anon ;-;
thanks, please anons seed it, i have 1gb/s upload, i will seed it for a couple months at the very least
Once it's finished I'll try to make another torrent with all the files together & better compression. I'm no repacker, but I can try my best.
I'm seeding with 2,5-3 MB/s but you fricked up the torrent by making two separate parts.
I'm also blocking martsharters, nothing personal.
My download is almost done, I'll keep seeding this until a better torrent is out
I won't download it again as I don't have enough space, but good luck.
ITS OVER
Just nuke em bro. No one is going to miss Washington
That's what i did, didn't realize i could peace out in time and they stole many of my countries, i'll probably stop playing and consider this an ay lmao victory
9
9? Holy shit. How do you beat that?
With a nuke for each unit
zerg rush
What's the combat strength on the ays?
I used to almost quit in defeat the moment the Alien Administration formed, but now I realised it's kind of a paper tiger. As long as you have a councillor with 25 command - and that's trivial by 2030 - you just boost unrest every turn until the ayys shit 'emselves. Here they had China AND America, and I just bumped them to civil war only a year after they formed; adios.
(Idk if I should have done that as I'm Protectorate, but shitting on the Servants is a habit that's hard to kick)
You can also prevent the alien administration from forming to begin with. The servants at some point in their story line unlock the ability to turn over their nations to the aliens, but you can also just sabotage their research indefinitely for them to never reach that point.
Yeah, I managed that in my previous save: no Alien Admin even by the time the bugginess killed me in 2033.
This game I had a bad start and got bogged down in Europe pretty much indefinately, so they got China and America while I was otherwise engaged
So, everyone is playing the new dev build?
Yep
I'm waiting for the game to be finished before trying to play a longer session
> Q4 2025
The game feels quite complete already, it just lacks flavor and gets pretty repetitive, the AI should also play more aggressively.
Part 2 is stalled
i'm crying
pls seed
Does the game still start Oct 1st 2022 in the new version?
T-that must mean it's coming out then, r-right?
>New dev build heavily buffed the ayys, use heavy projectile nose weapons instead of a laser now
>Fleet power increased 10x times for most ayy ships
Oh shit oh frick. I guess the devs noticed how a single layered defense array could easily fend off destroyers so now they all just shit on anything not heavily armored or mobile.
Ayys were already stupidly OP at the early 2030s when they usually start attacking, did they at least give more buffer or improve science rates at all?
Actually wait, they swapped out lasers for nose cannons? That means they don't have any point defense at all encouraging cheapass disposable missile boats even more
Nevermind carry on
No, they still use hull-mounted lasers for point defense, they "just" have projectile nose canons now that annihilate everything. Pic related is a destroyer by the way.
Addendum, it seems small gunships still use only nose lasers, but all alien ships have absurd fleet power values as compared to before. While I don't quite believe those ships to be extremely powerful now, they definitely received a buff to an unknown degree, especially against stationary defense platforms. I have yet to test it though.
The aliens do feel more stronger earlier on, I'm actually seeing the aliens starting to use point defence and stronger frontal weapons, but missile spam will still win the day and a generic missile boat is relativity cheap and "quick" to build. Can't say how the aliens progress beyond the 2030s
Actually on that note has anyone seen the aliens field missile weaponry yet beyond maybe some token armament on their largest craft? I wonder if the disparity between missiles and direct weapons is intentional to demonstrate the aliens are using an "outdated" paradigm similar to battleships late-WWII while also punishing players who think it's a good idea to get in a direct slug-fest with an obviously technologically superior opponent instead of favoring guerilla tactics
Lasers are the predominate weapon I've seen the aliens use, occasionally they'll use some kind of slower projectile weapon. Never seen a missile on the alien ships. All the human AI ships use missiles though.
I live in a missile, it takes me where I want to go.
Inside that missile is an even tinier missile that goes where I don't want to go.
Aliens fielded missiles in one of my campaigns in the old rip, they absolutely obliterated my ships. Missile storm went like a school of fish picking off one after the other.
Lost five gunships to one of their (now well armoured) destroyers. AI does a good job of designing ships to counter you. They started fielding a few of those shortly after.
What triggers the aliens blowing up all your stations and bombing your armies from orbit?
You fricking their shit up, including their agents. If you leave them alone they won't do shit. Just focus on fricking with the servants so they don't trigger the alien invasion.
I've been imprisoning the aliens for the alien research boost, I guess after 10 of them captured they get butthurt about it. Should I let them capture all my executive points and create abduction sites?
I noticed that increasing unrest in the alien administration also triggers aliens attacking?
The AI in the game is very easy to upset.
The difference is that when a human faction decides they are now "In conflict" with you, they don't have giant robot spiders to wipe you off the earth.
Managed to compress things down to 10.6 GB for those that still haven't downloaded the new version.
anonfiles , com/ Ddgamcwcy0 / TI-2.0.6_torrent
Or magnet link: pastebin , com/ 5Zd1QBfb
Also contains an edited Assembly-Csharp that fixes the SetDisplayName having a space in front of it if a councilor only possessed a family name (why isn't this fixed yet the frick) and uses compressed/not-pretty serialization for save files so if your drive is slow it takes less time to save. If you're running an SSD or whatever it's basically useless beyond smaller save files though. Maybe a few dozen ms saved at best, basically nothing compared to the hundreds/thousand+ that serializing the current game instance takes by itself already with the disgustingly slow serializer the devs are using.
Typo'd i'm moronic, 11.6 GB
no seeds, no torrent.
Looks like it's slowly seeding. The upload to filchier is chugging along also.
> 0 seeds
Help... meeeeee...
I was uploading the other torrents just fine earlier, weird. Make sure your torrent client allows encrypted connections, it's up to date, etc. etc.
Alternatively, anyone got a good website to upload it to that doesn't throttle download speeds to 70 kb/s like anonfiles does?
The game is too huge. I guess mega.nz could work, but torrents are the best option. I'm big fan of yandex disk, but it only allows 10 gigs.
Just make sure you don't oust yourself as the leaker.
Actually on that note has anyone run a search yet inside the strings table on the exe between the demo and the two leaks for anything that could oust them? If it's a homebrew leak detector it may be doing something obvious like a plaintext username or ID
I did check. Didn't see anything like that changed in the changed .dll's but if the devs got especially craft I *suppose* it could be hiding in one of the packaged unity file assembly stuff which I didn't bother to open up.
If there's anything like a fingerprint, though, I mean... it's kinda too late for the leaker since it's already leaked now.
The game did want to access windows firewall rules, but I just told it to frick off. I think that's just the steam workshop code and other stuff laying around, though.
I have no idea how they could do it, however I know smaller devs sometimes give out individual copies through e-mail, which they could track.
If it's distributed through steam, they could be relying on some steam fingerprinting, but that would be normally illegal from steam.
They share the project through a private github - I dont think they are going through the effort to personalize each copy - think about it, they are probably going to be publishing a new version every week or 2 for the testers to try. It would be too much effort vs reward here.
Gross. Both mega and yandex want me to sign in. Something that doesn't require account creation. Too easily tracked.
1fichier com is good, almost too good. I'm always reluctant to hammer their servers out of respect.
I think the size limit is 2gb, although I don't see them mentioning anywhere.
I'll upload there. Will take a bit though, don't have the fastest upload speed and doing it through a VPN.
>doing it through a VPN.
I think that's unnecessary, especially if you have a dynamic IP.
'Hello, ISP? Who was using x.x.x.x at this date/time? Please send them this DMCA.'
Always use a VPN, anon. And a good one, not nordvpn or some other shill that advertises on youtube.
I'm sorry for you being a muttmerican with an NSA golem around, Thankfully 1fichier is based in the EU.
I'm sorry for me too.
W-why is nordvpn bad?
When has this ever happened?
Ahem
FRICK aliens
FRICK the appeasers
FRICK lasers
and most importantly
FRICK america
>when your spy in another faction reports to you that they have just completed an inspire mission
>Focus on Republic of China and USA as my main nations only
>Every other major nation gets the alien flipendo treatment
>Painstakingly purge them out of every single one of them
>Divide the territory as much as possible
>Let other factions back in since I can't administrate them all
>2 years later they get flipped again
>Repeat, same shit after 2 years, again
It's all so tiresome.
you have to focus on only supressing 1 faction, and letting the others exist - but, you can shuffle the ones you dont like to garbage coutries
What's the country tag for Eurasian Union? I've tried EurasianUnion, Eurasian_Union, Eurasian Union, etc. None seem to trigger the console
GreatRussia
Ahh, thanks! So they gave all the countries weird names that you can't guess from the UI. Is there somewhere to look all these up?
How do I protect against bombardment of my mars bases? The atmosphere nullifies my defense arrays and parking a fleet in orbit just causes the ayys to run forward a bit and start attacking again
Look in the install folder, inside one of the json files in TerraInvicta_DataStreamingAssetsTemplates. Don't remember specific file off the top of my head
Found it,
Terra InvictaTerra Invicta.part01Terra InvictaTerra InvictaTerraInvicta_DataStreamingAssetsTemplatesTINationTemplate.json
The console commands are based on international country codes, Russia is RUS, China is CHN, etc
you can install defense arrays in the ground bases as well... when they get attacked by fleets, they fire back. Just research weapons systems so they get enough power. Railguns and Lasers
So, does anyone know what is the exact process in which you can diplomatically annex countries into, for example, the pan-asian combine? I see the claims... do I have to ally the nation, wait for cooldown, invite to federation, wait for cooldown, then unify (after 2 years)? because if this is the way... i will have to just invade.
You got it right. The process of uniting two nations can be quite time consuming. Invading a nation is significantly quicker in uniting the nations at the cost of some damage to the regions that are affected by the war.
>because if this is the way... i will have to just invade
While it is faster, there are downsides to it. For one, you won't get their funding income, which will get important once you start expanding your space empire as those stations get really expensive really fast. Having to wait before peacefully annexing them also gives you time to properly prepare the country for annexation. Peacefully or forcefully, your annexed nation will affect the overall miltech, education, unity, inequality and per capita GDP. It can drag down your main nation by a lot if you just conquer shitholes that drive down your overall nation stats.
I have a plan to deal with the cost. It involves building nanofactories in Venus and Mercury orbit, fed by mercury mined metals. Since the solar panels are so efficient in mercury, I will be able to build 6 mission control per station (T2) to able to daisy chain. When I get get T3 Habs it will snowball with the nanofactories.
Also, absorbing small nations like north/south korea, mongolia and the small SEA countries is just for my control efficiency. Most of those are not even owned by me, and I doubt they will drag down china much.
For the Earth interface orbits, after the interface bonus maximums are reached, all you should have extra are nanofactories (as power allows).
How the frick do you take over a major, democratic country
As Humanity First, I'm basically the king of all Africa and most of the other third-world shitholes, but I haven't really found a good way in with a major power. But now I'm realizing I'm doing something very wrong, because the AI has taken most of Europe, Russia and India. The last two independent great powers are China and the US. Coups don't work, neither does just asserting control. I started working on my public opinion in the EU, which has grown between 30-40%, but the AI took them before I realized it.
Should I have gone into the popularity contest sooner, then go for a takeover? Or is there a third mechanic to take control I'm not aware of besides taking control and instigating coups?
>I'm basically the king of all Africa
You are the king of a shithole. Don't even bother with bumfricknowhere nations.
>Should I have gone into the popularity contest sooner
Yes, you have to. Ayy lmaos will flip uncontested points in favour of the servants 2 years in and even start instantly flipping taken points including executive points about 5 years in. You have to keep up and keep other nations in check, either with your councillors or via war. The latter can be devastating if its a nuclear power, but can be the only option if your councillors are too weak. Or if it's India or China, which are especially hard to break with councillors due to high population and unity.
A rather easy strat early on is taking over Canada and Mexico followed by the US. Gives you are nice powerboost early on and the military capacity to deal with non nuclear nations. EU unification rush was a strat that already got nerfed.
China is the hardest of the major world powers to get a hold into. USA is second followed by uniting the European Union. EU is "easier" since you just need to grab France and start uniting the nations, but you need to rush for the EU at the start of the game or else you'll be wasting five to ten years on the project.
Best way into China is to get a few decent levelled persuasion councillors (two to three) and spam public opinion in the country until you have good public support. Once you have reached the point where you have a ~20% chance to take a CP then just start going for it, once you've nabbed the first CP the rest will follow.
Honestly in all my games the only way the AI can nab China is with the Aliens helping the Servants, otherwise the AI just won't go for it.
>How the frick do you take over a major, democratic country?
Step 1: Get the highest persuasion councillor you can.
Make sure they do a mission every week that has 80%+ chance of succeeding so they can get an extra persuasion every 12 missions (+2xp per succesful mission if the mission has a roll).
Of course, strivers and quick learners need fewer missions.
Pay attention to how their abilities might boost or decrease their persuasion for the countries you want them to eventually start controlling.
Step 2: Take some, any, control points and set it to kleptocratic for maximum cash boost in short time. Smartest is to go to nation, sort by nations that have your faction opinion the highest and then pick some of those near the top, as you'll get the best chance/cash value.
Step 3: Pay 160 or 320 cash for public campaigns in the country you want to control. Ideally with another high persuasion councilor besides your first. I like tech magnates, because they also give good resources, which is helpful in early game. But anyone with public campaign works.
Step 4: Once you hit 50%+ popularity, you are able to start controlling points with your 7-12 persuasion councillor.
Also check the orgs and pick up every persuasion org, even if you can't equip it on your persuader yet. You might get an admin org later so that you can re-equip the persuasion org to them.
>I'm basically the king of all Africa
Enjoy your empire of dust, anon, and let us know how much good it does you.
So it's been made clear meganations aren't the mathematically effective way to go.
But if I want one because they're cool, what's the best route to form the biggest possible one?
>meganations aren't the mathematically effective way to go
Yes and no. Meganations are the best source of research which is arguably the most important resource in the game. However, smaller nations are much more efficient for mission control and funding.
>what's the best route to form the biggest possible one
Greater Europa lets you fuse the EU with Russia, so that's one of the better ones. Caliphate is a bit of a meme since all nations involved aren't that developed, Pan-Asian combine gives you the most populous nation possible, but involves a lot of underdeveloped nations that drag China down while also including developed nations that are better off staying independent, Greater North America is okay, but requires developing Mexico a bit to not drag down the US, African Union and South American Union is poverty central, and that's about it really.
Right. But what's the BIGGEST? Is there any cheese route? etc.
I think if you cheese the system then the Caliphate can make claims on huge swathes of territory. This is a slightly older picture of some guy ruining his economy to take a ton of territory.
The devs have stated they don't really want the game to devolve into map painting, you can already tell considering most of the unification techs come late into the game and are incredibly expensive to unlock.
Re-enacting the Finno-Korean Hyperwar here.
I've got Korea, Russia, and EU as the Protectorate, but the Servants (who are supposed to be my pro-ayy allies) keep fricking me over by Enthralling Elites and then withdrawing nations from the Federal EU.
So eventually I've decided to invade my own countries and bring them into the supernation by force.
Having to use the Korean armies becuase all the Russian and EU ones are tied up fighting Illuminati Iran
Something about this new dev build feels off. It is late 2032. There are 2 of those fleets in earth orbit. No escalation, just purging servants as the alien flipendo bullshit has been going into overdrive.
I've observed this behaviour as well. The aliens just sit there doing their "Earth Surveillance" objective.
I have to wonder if this was done by the devs so players have a target for their military ships in the early game? Since beforehand you were pretty much reduced to killing the occasional alien transport ship.
If nothing else its a good signal to the player they need to start building up a military force in space if the aliens have started parking large fleets in Earth's orbit.
Them just staying in orbit isn't the issue. Them having an absolute death fleet is. Before, you had like one or two destroyers at most with like 3k fleet power total, not this absolute hell squad, especially multiple ones like that. This entire dev version just seems really, really off. Almost intentionally.
The alien fleet is not as horrifying as you'd expect. Most of the threat is coming from the aliens massive fuel reserves.
Even a modest fleet of missile ships should be able to clear up the alien fleet, with some casualties.
The problem is that the aliens have enough speed/fuel to only engage when they want to, and unfortunately the AI is smart enough to be wary of a suspiciously small human fleet yeeting itself towards their ships
The same way ayys can outrun you, ayys should be disrupted for doing whatever mission they are doing for awhile
tbh the devs sound like those annoying masters in D&D that wants players to magically read their minds and do exactly the weird precision moves and thinking that the master wants otherwise rocks falls, everyone dies.
Thankfully mods will solve that but yeah, sucks
pastebin . com / dRX1Trdx
For those that aren't getting good DL speeds on the torrent, here's the fichier uploads.
Whoever uploaded at 50 Mbits? Please come back, I can only feed and sneed if someone with a high upload speed can fork over the data. ;_;
The devs surely fricked up the rolls with nuclear isotopes
Yeah, they are sometimes fricked.
I just edit the save to fix it.
they say this variance is good and to force different strategies for different playthroughs. looks like you are not going to be using Orion drives.
And, to be fair, that 4.6 radioactive site should be the one you upgrade first so you get higher yields from it (hopefully you dont get the depletion event on that site).
Great AI you got there devs
wait what
>You can actually check what techs other factions have and how far they've progressed with new ones
>You can check resources as well
I didn't know that. This makes sabotaging a lot easier.
i thought you needed to have some sort of interrogation or turned agent to get that info. is it given for free now?!
It's short-term relations, not long-term. I know because I rapidly have to keep yeeting non-aggression pacts at Humanity First only for them to forget and do something counter-productive 5 turns later
friendship is magic you know
MOTHERFRICKER
Everything is going just fine, 2032, almost 500 research effective on projects, 200 research/day. building habs in mercury and venus. Humanity First Saudi Arabia gets nuked invading Initiative Turkey, Nukes back. Suddenly massive global GDP loss, like 10%, including research... Better start these civil defense techs ASAP, its only going to get worse moving forward.
How the frick do I tell this ayy to frick off
I know messing with them is the Humanity First bigbrain moment to get them mad, but I need to do it to progress the event chain. Dumping every single Espionage org on my Kingpin, and doing a full hail-mary with my Ops only gets me to 30%
>but I need to do it to progress the event chain
You still do it. You can do one assassination and one detaining against them without an escalation against you. The next killing after those two actions will trigger raids against your bases.
Oh, you can detain them? It didn't let me do it. Maybe it requires a tech for capture?
No, its a skill that agents can have or gain through orgs.
you can't detain aliens until you've killed one.
i dont give a shit, i see an ayy, i kill him. i see also any enable, i kill them, simple as.
>Endless KeyNotFoundException always triggering in the same timeframe no matter which save I reload
Well, it was a nice run. Still has game-breaking bugs, albeit at a slightly lower rate. What a shame.
Can someone PLEASE explain how Construction Modules specifically work?
I'm literally to moronic to understand them
I only know the following from trial and error, I haven't read the game files or anything, but I believe it works like the following:
There's a hidden attribute on every settlement site / orbital spot which, for want of a better term, we will call "Do You Count As In-Situ". If you DO count as in-situ, then you're allowed to build things with space resources in 30 days instead of being forced to use Boost from Earth and wait ~2 years.
Taking Mars as an example: when you build your first surface settlement, you count as being in-situ on that exact spot, so you can build powerplants, etc with space resources in 30 days. However, you can't found NEW Mars bases (or orbitals) in 30 days, they still have to be boosted from Earth.
But, if you build a construction module, your "Do You Count As In-Situ" gets set to Yes everywhere in the Mars local system. Now you can not only upgrade your existing Mars bases in 30 days, but you can found new Mars bases (and, indeed, Phobos and Deimos bases) in 30 days.
Having more than one construction module per planetary system (i.e. a planet's surface sites, all its orbits, and all its moon's sites and orbits) is superfluous, you only ever need one.
Good places to build (ONE) construction module: Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Mercury.
Pointless places to build a construction module: asteroids (becuase they only have two locations, the surface site and one orbit), anywhere in Earth-Luna (because you automatically get "Do You Count As In-Situ" in Earth-Luna from gamestart).
>Good places to build (ONE) construction module: Ceres
Why Ceres?
Anywhere that has more than one good site, is a good place for a construction module, and Ceres usually has 4 good sites
Ceres usually has the best water deposits in the game. No reason to not ASAP nab all the mining spots
That makes sense, thank you
>Having more than one construction module per planetary system (i.e. a planet's surface sites, all its orbits, and all its moon's sites and orbits) is superfluous, you only ever need one.
They're not entirely superfluous, because (in addition to allowing space construction in the first place) each one also speeds up construction by 10%. So it's plausibly useful to spam them in cases e.g. when you first arrive at Mercury and want to set up 30 outposts / platforms at the same time.
Get owned moron
I suggest you only kill 1, because if you kill more, the aliens will come and frick your shit up - so you better be ready!
Not having EU on the new dev build is rough. I'm playing HF and just managed to get control of North America by 2025. Europe and Russia got swallowed near immediately (luckily by the resistance thank god), fricked dice rolls lost any chance at India, so now I'm grinding China with support from Japan & Taiwan. That's pretty much it other than Kazakhstan and Saudi Arabia; at least I finally have enough research to start steering global research again
Anyway while I was getting reamed by dice making me lose 83% rolls 3 times in a row I think I brainstormed a potential way to buyout all of a factions assets without ever angering them
>Get past early game to the point all your mines are active
>Start spamming probes to all nearby asteroids
>In addition to the usual claiming of the best ones, start settling subpar ones too
>Develop them enough they look sexy on paper but are expensive to run
>Trade them to other factions for all their money/boost/organizations
>Watch them go over their mission control and start rebeling back to you
>Rinse and repeat
Maybe they change their opinions later but early on factions value space assets to an insane degree. Trading luna outposts you don't need anymore let's you rob a faction of everything they own.
I wish I could actually finish a run for once and not "die" to some endless error spam.
You're playing a leaked in-development build instead of waiting for an actual release, in an era where even release builds tend to still be bug-ridden messes.
What were you honestly expecting?
Declaring war increases a countries cohesion by 1, but being declared war on increases cohesion by FOUR. You can just have your own countries declare war on each other and instantly peace out to immediately fix cohesion problems, like for instance declaring war on mexico at the start of the game with the US which will fix the unrest problems in Mexico and increase research in the US. The only downside to this is getting war crime events that increase atrocities and it's necessary to have an army capable of attacking a nation in order to declare war. Plus it hits research pretty hard if you push cohesion too high in a well developed nation.
On a similar topic there doesn't seem to be much of a downside to high inequality as it only effects the resting point of cohesion as far as I can tell which it only moves towards at a max of 0.05 per month. That's offset by investment in research or even just 1 IP in unity per month in every country I checked. Unless I'm missing something that would mean that it's a waste of time putting pips in welfare except if climate change is out of control, or you're roleplaying a nice guy faction.
redpill me on this game, what do you do in it?
I'm too lazy to look it up
It's half illuminati grand strategy, subverting or invading the nations of earth. Welded to half autistic space mining simulator, where you have to plan your launch window to Mars years in advance and balance acceleration Vs delta-v Vs payload like a literal rocket scientist.
It's breddy gud.
It's breddy gud but it also needs a lot of work. Mostly on bugfixes and filling in a few pieces of missing content (mostly VA work, I think they just never got someone for the Resistance lady yet? frick if I know but I only remember her voice lines being missing). It could also use balance changes, automation improvements, and better/more aggressive AI that can be a threat outside of the Servants which're only really that because they get OP ayy assistance.
Tonally, it's got some SMAC vibes but where SMAC was the shit, this is more lukewarm. It's decent, but it's lacking that certain je ne sais quoi.
The gameplay feels a little oddly torn between the Earth-focused illumina grand strategy and the mostly-hard-sci-fi space rts. If they had focused on just one, it'd likely be a lot better, but because of the split they've both suffered for it.
If you're a grand strategy autist like me you'll nonetheless enjoy it and get plenty of hours out of it, though, I'm sure. Just because it isn't perfect, or even excellent, doesn't mean it's BAD.
My recommendation, however, is wait for the actual release. Possibly a couple major patches after that too for extra work to be done on it. Especially if you don't see yourself doing lots of runs and mainly only see yourself as doing a couple before not touching it again.
Why yes I would like to be able to know when my resource probes will finish and yes I would like some sort of alert for things I choose to be important, such as alien events and enemy factions launching bases instead of having to sift through the left bar for it
also jaeger research to deal with megafauna when
The aliens just landed and I’m only in robotics age, how fricked am I v02GVJ
whats the year?
Not sure it's even feasible to face an alien army without at least 7.0 military age and overwhelming numbers.
Nuke em Rico. It's the only way to be sure
I've got access to the orion drive. Can someone experienced in combat tell me wtf I should research so I can frick up the ayys.
nothing
drive is your best weapon
They just parked two 130k fleets in orbit and started flipping my control points in china and Russia. Guess its GG.
Just saw my first Judgement Day: Ayys sent their armies into HF India, and fricking hell, HF takes no prisoners. 16 nuclear strikes in one day, Washington, Toronto, New Delhi, Vancouver, Hyderabad, Mumbai, NYC...
I wasn't involved at all, it'll be fun to see how much my economy tanks in nuclear winter