Hi everyone!
After many years of development, we are thrilled to share Terra Invicta with all of you!
Release Trailer
Learning to Play
If you'd like to see some materials to help learn some strategies for your own playthrough, you can check out our release stream at the store page of Perun's playthrough, where he goes through each aspect of how to handle both geopolitics on Earth and Solar System colonization, or take a look at the quick start guide on the wiki: https://hoodedhorse.com/wiki/Terra_Invicta/Beginner%27s_Guide
Early Access Plans
This is a rough roadmap for what we’ve got planned for Terra Invicta in EA and beyond. This is hugely subject to change based on player feedback and our own judgment, so don’t regard any of this as a promise, just a plan as it exists. We hope that during EA you’ll watch the game get better and better as we work toward a 1.0 release.
Scenario
We’re planning to work on what we’re calling a “2070” scenario during EA. This is essentially a start for players who want to play with a (smallish) space program up-and-running from the get-go. This will show up in a regular update of the game at some point. (See below for the status of the Cold War and Foothold scenarios.)
General UI
- 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.
Nations
- 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.
Nation Policies
Add major policies for nations.
- Close Borders. Massive hit to economy. Defense bonus. Severely limits which councilors can visit. Essentially how North Korea is now.
- Mobilization.
Army Warfare
- 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.
Space Combat
- 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.
Habs
- 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.
Modding
- 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.
Startup options
- Some control of your initial councilors professions, etc.
- Difficulty fine tuning
- Global research speed multiplier
Space Exploration / Navigation
- 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.
Councilors
- 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
AI
- 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.
Translations
Non-English translations of Terra Invicta are still being tested and improved. The game has a couple novels worth of text, and we know there will be some issues remaining – please be patient with us as we work on fixing problems and increasing translation quality.
Performance
- 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.
Content
- More event/mission/objective illustrations are on the way
- More strategy layer music tracks are in production
- Additional faction leader voice files
Probably post-EA: the Cold War and Foothold (far-future) scenarios
These may not be available during the EA period. We’d like to add some additional features to Terra Invicta to better support these, like wet-naval warfare and nation-like polities in space. These are quite a bit more complex to add than some of the things we’ve listed above, so we’ll need to assess what it will take to develop these. Stay tuned.
This is all in addition to the bugfixing and balancing we’ll be doing.
CORSAIR
We are also thrilled to announce that Terra Invicta is partnered with CORSAIR and has integrated the iCUE lighting system! CORSAIR users can check out all the lighting effects in-game.
Thank you!
You all have been so great in supporting us over these years of development. From the entire development team at Pavonis Interactive and the publishing team at Hooded Horse, thank you, we can't wait to see your reviews and feedback on the game!