Terra Invicta Early Access eXamination

I’ve been around the block when it comes to complex games, I played Eve Online for years, I’ve enjoyed losing at Dwarf Fortress, and I’m a veteran of X-COM old & new. Despite this gaming background, I still found Terra Invicta difficult to get to grips with at first – and I don’t mean that as a negative, only a warning. I’d advise reading up a little on how the game works before diving in. There is a tutorial, but with a game like this, it can barely scratch the surface (Unconquerable Land indeed). This is a side-effect of perhaps its most defining quality – ambition. 

Terra Invicta takes its X-COM connection and runs with it, dispensing with the tactical combat layer and replacing it with a vastly complex geo-political simulation. It’s rare for a game to have a genuinely fresh take on well-embedded gameplay concepts but Terra Invicta manages it, with its meticulously crafted resource/territory control and research systems.

Presentation-wise, It looks as good as it needs to, being essentially a geoscape (a 3D representation of the earth as viewed from space) covered in icons, and the UI is clean and readable. The music is atmospheric, moody, and vaguely reminiscent of X-COM, but also rather forgettable. The game has a narrator to provide player feedback, storyline exposition, and advancement, and is of good quality.

Unconquered Land

The premise is familiar and faithful: extra-terrestrial life has paid us a visit, but its motives are as yet unknown. In response, several factions are formed along ideological lines: some advocate for guerilla resistance to what they see as a hostile invasion, others seek diplomatic contact for mutual gain or see the new arrivals as divine, or advocate abandoning earth entirely, to name just a handful. After choosing your own allegiance, you’ll essentially be playing an Illuminati sim, heading up a shadowy organization vying for influence and control over the nations and governments of the world in order. 

The aim here is to direct their resources and agency towards goals that align with those of your faction. The player controls a small team of operatives, each with their own set of stats, skills, and background to gain a foothold in a target government and engage in covert operations there, such as promoting your own faction’s popularity or spying on rivals. While you are directly competing with these other organizations, you may trade and engage in diplomacy with them too.

Each nation has a large variety of stats measuring everything from its GDP to the current distribution of developmental priorities, foreign relations, and more. Alliances can be forged and broken, enemy control can be subverted and stolen, and research sabotaged. You can manipulate a nation’s priorities such that it spends more on welfare, militarisation, or a space program, or nukes…

Difficile Intellige

The first trouble comes from trying to understand  ‘what am I supposed to do with all this?’ You may know well enough that your faction seeks war with the aliens, for example, and everything is supported with detailed tooltips, but it’s not always clear what you’re achieving when you carry out missions with your Councillors to manipulate the governments of the world. The player spends a long time in this phase of the game, diverting national resources towards their own ends, manipulating policy, and starting or ending wars. This is the essence of my chief criticism: pacing. 

The dance of sabotaging enemy interests and defending your own can be engaging. They may spend one month launching public opinion campaigns and the next inciting civil unrest. The player might meddle in foreign relations to create or break apart coalitions. Enough work might even result in a coup d’etat and installation of a new government in a key nation. Unfortunately, this is a short gameplay loop stretched out over a long play period, and it eventually becomes repetitive. 

It will be several hours into a play-through before the player gets off the ground (literally and figuratively) and the experience before that point can sometimes be frustrating. For example, if you do not consistently run ‘Protect Interests’ missions on your key territories, they’ll get targeted and snagged. The player will have to remember to do this as the game will only tell you that control point X is protected until date Y. On the other end of this, the AI never seemed to fail at protecting its own control points, leading to a scenario where I saw no way to contest it (besides a military invasion) and felt like my Councillors with such specialization were useless.

I imagine that more optimal play will mean less time spent in phase one, but as I’ve alluded to already, learning to play Terra Invicta well is no small task. Repeatedly assigning missions to my Council and being unsure of what progress I was actually making was a little rough. 

Whether you’re being effective in your geo-politicking and subterfuge or not, the technology of humanity will gradually advance, and you’ll be able to think about expanding your operations into space: mining resources, building ships, and eventually fleets, and at this point, things felt more tangible to me. I understood the agency that I now had better than I understood the value of manipulating a nation’s internal policies. Prior knowledge of what’s required to get to this point will improve the early game experience by giving the player something to focus their efforts on, rather than acquiring territories, influence, and resources where they can in an opportunistic fashion.

Investigationis

The research system is well done. The research tree, aside from being vast (and I really mean vast, perhaps the largest I’ve seen), is also split between a series of ‘public’ disciplines, which all factions can contribute to and represent the general advancement of human technology, and private projects which you undertake as a faction, providing tangible benefits such as unlocking new structures or ship components. 

So why bother spending valuable research points on public campaigns if they’ll get unlocked, anyway? Because whichever faction contributes the most gets to choose the next direction the research heads in. If you’ve taken the time to study the tech tree and know the path to the unlocks you want, that is a valuable advantage.

The atmosphere is suitably tense, and I did find it deeply immersive. Receiving the occasional ominous message that an alien fleet has been detected in low orbit, or a base established on the moon, or even that aliens are subverting earth governments lends a sense of urgency and escalation. There’s nothing like being told that an alien xenoform is rampaging through Portugal when I’m still squabbling for control over Spain’s mass-media outlets to make it feel like the noose is tightening. It certainly helps to know your geography though: not all messages that pop up have a “take me there” button and so when one of my advisors tells me I should check what’s happening in Benelux, I have to start globe-spinning or tab out of the game and look it up on Google Maps.

Unlike ground wars, which play out a bit like Risk, with their comparative strength and tech levels contributing to the “dice rolls”, and with no intervention from the player besides choosing where the armies move to, space combat occurs in a fully 3D environment. It employs Newtonian physics, so it’s no RTS “click to move/attack” system. You’ll have to plot courses for your ships, bearing in mind that to change their heading they’ll need Thrust in the opposite direction and won’t turn on a dime. Battles become a contest of trying to keep your armor pointed at their guns, and your guns pointed at the weak spots on their own ships, with options to change fleet formation and rules of engagement available before combat starts. 

Shipbuilding is modular, with components becoming available as your research efforts unlock them, and you’ll need to balance each design around its intended purpose: you’ll take mobility and fuel efficiency hits for excess armour plating, for example, so don’t slap too much on a ship that’s only for ferrying cargo to orbit. 

Logistics play a huge role in this phase of the game: fuel & facilities are necessary (represented by the resource ’boost’) to get things into space, while ships use fuel and ammunition to operate. Councilors also undertake missions off-world once moon bases and such are in play, which helps keep happenings on earth and events elsewhere in the solar system from feeling like two separate games. I found I unlocked ship modules well before I could build or launch any, but this is likely because of a failure to navigate the enormous tech tree, or properly prioritise my earthbound acquisitions.

Pertinacia

Terra Invicta certainly will have legs once you get to grips with it, and should be worth the price for those who persist through what may be a rough first few hours. The varied factions and strategies on offer should provide replay value too: I’m already planning on ignoring the space race in favor of earthbound military power next time around and forming a mega-alliance of nations through conquest. I do not know if it will work but the game has made me want to try, a testament to how compelling it can be once you get over the initial hurdles.

There is quite a lot going on with this title, and I’m sure it has a depth I’m yet to encounter and understand. The keywords that kept arising in my mind as I was playing and thinking about the game were Ambition, Pacing, and Complexity.

Terra Invicta has the former in spades and has successfully realized most of it. As a simulation of earth’s response to an alien invasion, it works well and in a much grander scope than the X-COMs we know and love so well.

Even with making allowances for a new player exploring a rather complex game, Terra Invicta has a sluggish pace and the cycle of ‘assign missions, await results, repeat’ carries on for far too long. Even running at the maximum game speed, I found myself repeating actions many times, for lack of anything else to do. The game would benefit from a better tutorial experience, which would hopefully impart enough understanding to progress beyond this phase in a reasonable time.

The complexity lands it firmly in ‘sim’ territory – I found the enormous amount of information to consider at times almost paralyzing, but it’s a potential gold mine for those who revel in such micro-management and minutiae.

As an early access title, Terra Invicta is more than promising, and two (free?) DLCs are already planned (these will allow alternative starting conditions; cold-war and far future, with a pre-colonised solar system) If the continued development irons out the few issues it has (or maybe I just need to ‘git gud’) then we’ll be looking at a 4X/Grand Strategy must-have.

Now, I’ve got to capitalize on the growing Resistance support in Benelux – I wonder if they’d still like me if they knew I couldn’t find it on a map…

Matt

I’m a 30-something long-time fan of all things Sci-Fi and Fantasy and have been playing games of both the video and table-top variety for 20-something of those years. I always found myself interested in the systems/mechanics that games are built from and have designed a few myself for homebrew DnD style groups. My other main interests include reading (a mix of SF, classics, and occultism), guitar, painting miniatures, and occasionally a spot of writing.