Terra Invicta News

The first thing to know about Terra Invicta, the ambitious space strategy game from the creators of The Long War mod for XCOM, is that it's very big. It's probably bigger than you think it is. Following a delay announced last year, Terra Invicta is out today on Steam Early Access and on GOG, and there's already enough of it for two full games.

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• Camera operation will get a look. Right now the UI tries to helpfully focus/zoom/pop an information panel when you click something. Sometimes that’s not desired. We’ll look at making mouse-camera interactions consistent so you can, say, get the information panel without moving your camera.
  
• Notification controls. There are a few of these already, but the game generally is coded for notifications pop an alert, add info to the top-center horizontal feed, or just add something to the left-side vertical newsfeed. We remain hopeful we can reach player consensus on what specific events belong where but we’ll look at adding specific controls for alert priority if we can’t.
  
• We will look at scaling UIs for greater accessibility and better Deck support. This may not be trivial to pull off; there’s a lot of information to present.
  

• Numeric breakdowns of what’s changing certain nation values. Along the lines of “In the last month, GDP in Mexico went up due to the Economy priority by $20M, went down due to environmental damage by $3M, and down by $5M due to warfare.”
  
• Longer term, if we can keep it performant, we’ll record interesting national data for long term performance reviews.
  
• Also this kind of feedback for climate change values.
  

• Close Borders. Massive hit to economy. Defense bonus. Severely limits which councilors can visit. Essentially how North Korea is now.
  
• Mobilization.
  

• Army manual pathing and/or destination selection that allows for multiple steps.
  
• A UI breakdown for army combat about all the modifiers going to a battle.
  
• We’ll test an “annex region” option during warfare. This will be a long-duration operation by an army to transfer a claimed and occupied region to its home nation. Right now armies capture a capital and claimed territory transfers as a part of a regime change. This is an alternative mechanism to slowly transfer territory in what is otherwise a stalemate.
  

• AI that works better towards flanks and protects its own flanks better. AI that uses standoff tactics on stations. Greater preference for self-preservation.
  
• Controls for ships to stay in formation with other ships.
  
• Group commands.
  
• A “Pincer” pre-combat option (or some other name like that). Right now, the way to engage fleets that have more Delta-V than you do, and don’t want to fight, is to send two fleets at once so they are forced to engage the second one. We’ll simplify that by letting you split your fleet as the combat starts; the enemy will be forced to fight the weaker of your two fleets.

• A “duplicate hab design” button. This will be limited in some ways because habs in different locations have different power production and requirements.
  
• Shipyards need some work; the higher-tier shipyards aren’t helpful enough.
  
• Need to review antimatter mining. It will never be that much – there is very very little natural antimatter created in the Solar System.
  

• Our current modding setup doesn’t allow you to add or substitute new text in easily. We’re planning to fix this.
  
• Down the road we’ll start conversing with modders about how we can open up aspects of TI better for modding – like exposing a constant in code to config.
  

• Some control of your initial councilors professions, etc.
  
• Difficulty fine tuning
  
• Global research speed multiplier
  

• Aerocapture
  
• Gravity-assist trajectories
  
• Allow fleets to abort planned trajectories while waiting for their launch window (this is in progress.)
  
• Ship propellant-sharing, so they can refuel each other. This should enable tanker-type ship designs.
  
• Large comets. Need VFX.
  
• 2 Hab Site space bodies, like Vesta and a few others.
  

• We’re going to explore hard stat caps for various councilor classes (below 25) as a balancing mechanism and to make you think a little harder about who you recruit.
  
• Invest in your orgs to upgrade them
  
• Traits or other mechanisms that can lower loyalty of councilors
  

• The late-game human AI needs to get better at building and utilizing fleets and pursuing its victory conditions.
  
• AI peacemaking will get a look. Interstate wars tend to persist longer than they need to.
  
• Human hab AI building still needs some work, particularly with regard to non-required modules. We’ve also seen successful players fill low earth orbits with stations to gain the Earth bonuses. The AI doesn’t do this nearly as much as we’d like.
  

• The main remaining problem is that the late-game AI has a lot to do and sometimes the game can get pretty choppy while it is considering its options. This includes designing and building ships, organizing fleets and managing orgs.
  
• We made a lot of progress with combat and Earth-UI-related performance issues shortly before release. There might be some UI improvements we can still manage.
  
• There are some large summary UIs (research and nations in particular) that are slow to load.
  

• More event/mission/objective illustrations are on the way
  
• More strategy layer music tracks are in production
  
• Additional faction leader voice files