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Friday Fun Thread for October 14, 2022
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Terra Invicta Review
This was initially going to be a shorter post but it turned into an unedited, error filled rant about all the things that annoy me about a game that the vast majority of you haven’t and won’t play. But maybe you’ll enjoy it away.
Overview
Terra Invicta is a 4X grand strategy game that was recently released into early access recently, and I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time playing recently. The game is the first original release from Pavonis Interactive, the team who made the Long War mods for the modern XCOM games. The premise of the game is that you take control of one of seven factions/organisations/ideologies following the discovery of a crashed UFO, the beginning of an arrival/invasion of aliens in the Sol System. Each of the factions responds to the aliens in their own way and have their own win condition, with some factions even being ‘pro-alien’. The gameplay of Terra Invicta is hard to explain. It’s kind of two game separate games stitched together, the first being a escape/grand strategy (Paradox) like game where you fight with other factions (and aliens) for control of Earth’s nations, which provide you resources, and the second being control of space that plays like more a traditional space 4X, where you have to build space stations (‘habs’), mine resources and build ships, and fight in real time space battles.
Thematically, Terra Invicta is most directly inspired by XCOM (duh!) in the setting of the game (but not that much in gameplay). Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (and Civilization) is also a heavy influence, particularly in the writing. There are also similarities to Paradox-style grand strategy and the Total War franchises. Yes, I’m aware that sounds confusing! Terra Invictia is a very ambitious strategy game that attempts to really capture the grand scope of how humans might respond to an alien invasion. In this ambition, it mostly succeeds, however, it is quite rough around the edges, and not just a way that can be fixed in early access. The writing in the game is pretty mediocre, some of the Earth grand strategy elements are shallow, and the space combat is pretty horrible that a significant rework looks likely. Despite all this, I strongly recommend Terra Invicta if you enjoy the above games, and it a great first release for a development studio. Even though it is early access, the game is feature complete and mostly bug free.
Gameplay
I won’t spend too long describing gameplay, it’s easy enough to search for footage online, it’s time better spent on specific critique but a brief summary: You take the role of one seven factions with their own goals. You play as the omnipotent disembodied leader of one of seven factions each with their own ideologies. The seven factions are:
The Resistance – default ‘XCOM’ defend the Earth from aliens faction
Humanity First – a violent militaristic xenophobic faction willing to use extreme methods to kill the aliens
The Academy – a idealistic faction that wishes to prove humanity the alien’s equal and enter peaceful relations
Project Exodus – a faction that wants to GTFO and abandon Earth and escape to a new star system
The Initiative – a kleptocratic faction only concerned with using chaos to increase their own wealth and power
The Protectorate – a faction who wishes to appease the aliens to avoid bloodshed and preserve some degree human autonomy
The Servants – a religious cult faction that sees the aliens as humanity’s saviours and will outright support the aliens (and the aliens them)
I will discuss the factions, their leaders, and how they are written later on (it’s not good).
Each faction has up to 6 ‘councillors’ which is your primary way of interacting with Earth and the nations of the world. These councillors all have a range of different missions which interact with the nations of Earth and other factions in different ways, ranging from taking control of a nation and its armies, raising or reducing civil unrest in those nations, assassinating enemy councillors, or steal enemy research. This all takes place on a Paradox-style globe. Each nation has stats like population, GDP, education level, unrest etc. Control over a nation is dictated by control of a nation’s ‘control points’, which allow you to control how it invests its ‘economy’ (investment points), and its foreign policy and armies. The primary reason to control nations is that they are the primary source of money, research (to unlock new technologies like any 4X), and ‘boost’ (abstracted resource representing ability to send thing into space). All these are needed to launch build space stations to mine resources (metal, gases) to design and build spaceships which constitutes the second ‘half’ of the game. Space combat is a 3D real time with pause – think Homeworld without the base management or spaceship Total War (there’s probably better comparisons). It also uses Newtonian mechanics for movement, and pretty fleshed out orbital mechanics to move around the Solar system. To win the game you need to complete a specific victory condition for your chosen faction that will be discovered as you play, which often but not always involves blowing up a lot of the alien’s shit.
Now to the more interesting ‘critique’ (read: rant filled criticism about stuff that annoys me about the game):
The spaceship combat is quite bad in its current state. There are two primary issues – first, the waypoint system. You control all your ships in combat via ‘waypoints’, a line that shows your ship’s current trajectory (Newtonian mechanics), which has several points on it which represents points on which your ship can adjust its course (orientation and thrust). This sounds good on paper, but quickly becomes micromanagement hell. It’s actually pretty fun for like 2v2 skirmishes, but when you’re trying to manage 20+ ships it’s just tedious. The alternative is almost as bad though - setting the ships to AI control. The AI control is both hilariously bad and lacking in options. You have no control how the AI ship actually acts. You can’t for example, assign your smaller corvettes only defend and screen for your capital ships. It’s either AI or it isn’t. And the preferred strategy of the AI seems to be rushing full speed ahead into the enemy and getting itself killed. So your choice in ship combat is either tedious micromanagement, or braindead AI. Fortunately, the developers are aware of this problem and there’s probably going to be a substantial overhaul of space combat at some point.
Bad AI also extends to the enemy factions too. The humanity faction AI mismanages the nations it controls really badly, and this results in them stagnating in the midgame, causing the player the surpass them very quickly and leave only the aliens as the real opposition.
The game is incredibly long. Some people might think this is a positive, but even as a veteran of Paradox grand strategy who is used to hundred-hour campaigns, Terra Invicta is just too long. I’ve got over a hundred hours in the game and have not come close to actually finishing a campaign. A big culprit of this is the bloated and overly engineered and complicated technology system (much of the early ship technology is useless anyway), which has hundreds of technologies and engineering projects. There are significant stretches of time where you’ll be nothing but waiting for tech to complete. But can’t just completely zone out and go full speed, because the requires you to micro your councillors constantly. There’s also a significant bottleneck for research in the midgame and if you don’t go down certain paths before than others you can waste a lot of time, despite the apparent gameplay freedom that is the design intent of the developers.
The grand strategy/geoscape parts are surprisingly shallow and feel very boardgamey. A major reason for this is that there is nothing really unique about any given country. They are all just the same pile of numbers that happen to start at different points of a scale. There’s actually no mechanical difference between China and the USA, China just happens to have lower education and democracy score but more population than the USA. If you democratize and education China using the same relatively shallow mechanics available to all countries, then you just end up with bigger USA. Things like migration, religion, sectarian or ethnic divides in a country aren’t modelled at all. And things that are modelled like democracy/government score or education are just simply points on a scale. You can pretty easily make Israel and Iran allies for example. It’s all just completely abstracted game mechanics that are the almost exactly same for all countries. It’s a board game where there’s a square that happens to be called India, but there’s nothing uniquely Indian about it, only abstracted gamified statistics of India. This is part of both the strength and weakness of Terra Invicta – it is an ambitious game with enormous scope, but any given specific mechanics is poorly developed.
I think a major problem with the game design as it stands, is despite the freedom in how you approach the game’s many mechanics, you’re ultimately pigeonholed into a rough playstyle and a predetermined victory condition. Many of the games I mentioned in the summary either are sandbox oriented and don’t have true win conditions (Paradox), or have multiple win conditions (Alpha Centauri/Civilization). In Terra Invicta, this means you can’t adjust adapt your plan to win based on the circumstances of the game or what you find the most enjoyable. In Civilization, sure you might be incentivised to go for a certain win condition based on which civilization you pick, but you always have the freedom to change. This I think really hurts the enjoyment of the game through limiting player options.
Continued below....
I wrote maybe half a post about TI last week and never sent it because it seemed kind of unfair to criticize a game I've played and (mostly!) enjoyed for a hundred hours. It's deeply flawed and I can't in good conscience recommend it to anyone unless you're already so deep down the GSG rabbit hole you know what you're getting into. Yet it does so many truly novel, interesting things, in a setting that may be poorly written and poorly explored (although, as far as video games go, I don't think it's that bad, it's just not even close to the greats) but still compelling -- I think it's worth playing.
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